To unlock advanced technologies in financial industry, Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has joined hands with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. This will give the opportunity to Singapore-based financial institutions and FinTech players to participate in pilots and experiments in a wide range of financial-services project.
Making the announcement today, Ravi Menon, Managing Director, MAS said, “We are pleased to announce that MAS and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have agreed to enter an R&D collaboration in FinTech.”
He added, “This will enable our local FinTech talents to work alongside world-class researchers at the MIT Media Lab to come up with technology solutions to real-world use cases. They will run pilots using distributed ledger technology, cryptography, quantum computing and big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.”
MAS collaboration with MIT signals the growing role that cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are beginning to play in the financial industry.
“Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology pose a dramatic change to the existing regulatory landscape; they have the potential to reform the global financial system around peer-to-peer transactions, without traditional financial intermediation,” said Neha Narula, Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab.
Speaking about the collaboration, she said, “We are excited to work with an organization like the MAS which shares our thinking around the impact of opensource, layered architectures and permission less systems.”
Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief FinTech Officer, MAS, said, “We are pleased to be working with leading experts with a diverse range of expertise from the MIT Media Lab. The intersection of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and other related technology areas such as quantum computing and new methods of cryptography will help to bring about the next wave of innovation.”
Notably, the financial industry in Singapore has been actively engaged in experimentation on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and has developed prototypes on interbank payments, securities settlement, insurance claims processing, trade, and trade finance.