More than 30,000 participants from over 100 countries participated in the week-long Singapore Fintech Festival. A whopping USD2 billion was made available for the Fintech startups on the ‘Deal Day’ or ‘Investor Summit’ today on the last day of the festival. About 17 per cent of the startups came from India. Arun Jaitley, Indian Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs also addressed the Singapore Fintech conference.
Over 1,000 attendees, comprising investors and fintech start-ups, turned up for the ‘Investor Summit’. It was the finale of a four-month long matchmaking programme to provide opportunities for fintech start-ups to access funding from local and global investors.
More than 1,000 fintech start-ups and 400 investors indicated interest to participate in the process and 525 connections were made among interested parties. The matchmaking programme provided a perspective on the funding and Fintech landscape in Singapore and ASEAN.
On the Deal Day, most of the investors came from Singapore (59 per cent), followed by China (9 per cent) and Indonesia (6 per cent). As far as fintech startups were concerned, about 36 per cent participated in the event followed by India (17 per cent) and US (8 per cent). From the pool of participating investors, the key areas of interest were on data analytics (70 per cent), blockchain (65 per cent), lending applications (64 per cent), payment solutions (61 per cent) and regulatory technology (RegTech) (56 per cent).
The top solutions offered by participating fintech start-ups largely aligned with investors’ interests as they are similarly in the areas of payments (20 per cent), lending (14 per cent) and regulatory technology (RegTech) (10 per cent), with added product focuses on robo-advisory (14 per cent), and trading and fund management (12 per cent).
said, “Deal Day aims to provide a platform for FinTech start-ups to connect to investors. We want to enhance access to funding for start-ups and improve the quality and quantity of FinTech investment deals in Singapore. I am delighted that we have managed to facilitate a considerable number of matches, and kickstarted promising conversations. I am hopeful that concrete deals will emerge from these connections.”
He added, “The fundraising process for start-ups can be a long and arduous process. On the other side of the table, the challenge for investors is to generate quality prospects aligned to their investment objectives.”