Primed for the next leap: The growing promise of Singapore’s fintechs

Detailed summary

The question is which of these firms will make it onto the local bourse, and how long they will take

The question is which of these firms will make it onto the local bourse, and how long they will take

[SINGAPORE] When iFast listed on the Singapore Exchange (SGX) mainboard in December 2014, few people would have called it a fintech.

It was an online fund platform with about S$5.6 billion in assets under administration (AUA) a year later, at a time when “fintech” was still a word heard mostly at conferences.

Today, its AUA stands at S$36.76 billion, up 20 per cent from a year ago, and the company runs a licensed bank in Britain. Since Oct 22, it also issues its own exchange-traded funds on the same bourse where its shares trade.

Singapore now has five digital banks, a pack of robo-advisers, lenders and payments firms that have spent years raising private money, and a government that has put money and rule changes behind getting growth companies to list at home.

The question for investors is which of these firms will make it onto the local bourse, and how long they will take.

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The way iFast group CEO Lim Chung Chun sees it, the money is the least of what a listing brings. “Being a publicly listed company has brought us benefits beyond access to capital,” he said.

In finance, where trust and regulatory oversight count for so much, the governance and disclosure demanded of a listed company have helped iFast win regulators’ confidence as it applied for licences in new markets and new lines of business.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Business Times. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.