The Singapore Fintech Festival, for all its aircraft hangers full of booths and demonstrations and keynotes and hackathons and huddles, tends to come down to a handful of fundamental ideas. For years it was blockchain; now, it is all about generative AI.
But the real meat of the conference has always been the practical, real things happening that are sometimes lost beneath the buzzwords and the hullabaloo – the “new pandemic”, as one banker put it, “of the NSNT: the Next Shiny New Thing.”
A good place to start is always the address by the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s managing director, Ravi Menon, which is usually articulated further by the MAS’s chief technology officer, Sopnendu Mohanty.
The MAS, which used to run the conference before carving out a conference business called Elevandi to run it, uses the event to guide the industry on where it wants to get to in fintech and to update the world on who’s helping them do it.
As Menon put it on November 16: “Our goal is nothing short of audacious: to collaborate with the financial industry and international partners to shape the financial ecosystem of the future.”
Specifically,