Fintech

Finance 6 min Pay-to-Play Is Not a Funding Round. It Is a Choice With a Penalty. Reported as a funding round, it is a mechanism: investors who decline to put in more money have their preferre... DA Daniel Koh 1 Sep Finance 6 min SBI Buys Access to 20 Million Indonesian Investors. Do They Want Yen? Indonesians earn, spend and save in rupiah, and hold dollars when they hold a stablecoin at all. The question... DA Daniel Koh 31 Aug Finance 7 min One Deal Was Two Thirds of Singapore's Fintech Funding This Half The report says investment moderated. Money fell by two thirds while global fintech funding rose 43 per cent,... DA Daniel Koh 31 Aug ASEAN Tech 8 min The Project Linking ASEAN's Payment Systems Has A Company, A Tender And Two Go-Live Dates Nexus would connect India's UPI, Singapore's PayNow and Thailand's PromptPay through one hub. Governance sits... SA Sarah Chew 22 Aug Finance 8 min MAS Wants a 21-Day Path for Complex Funds. In May It Dropped the Advice Requirement. MAS has proposed an Alternative Funds Appendix that would let a derivative-heavy or undiversified retail fund... DA Daniel Koh 8 Aug Business 9 min Indonesia Halved GoTo's Ride Commission. Its Two Profit Guidance Ranges Simply Swapped A presidential regulation cut the two-wheeler commission cap from 20 per cent to 8. GoTo kept its group profit... EV Eva Chin 7 Aug Business 8 min Grab's Profit Rose 54%. Its Biggest Profit Engine Got Slightly Worse Grab reported record second-quarter results. On its own measure, the segment carrying most of the profit saw i... EV Eva Chin 5 Aug Finance 9 min In February the BSP Said 70% Was Not Doable. In July It Said It Was Likely The Philippine central bank's outlook on its 2028 digital payments target reversed in five months. The measure... DA Daniel Koh 4 Aug Finance 9 min Indonesia's Crypto Market Now Answers to the Regulator That Supervises Banks On 1 July the governance and reporting duties of a financial-sector business took effect for Indonesian crypto... SA Sarah Chew 4 Aug ASEAN Tech 5 min ASEAN Tech Summit Convenes in Manila as the Region's Digital Trade Pact Heads for a November Signing Organisers expected more than 4,000 delegates in Pasay City on 28–29 July, under the Philippine chairship. Neg... SA Sarah Chew 2 Aug Finance 6 min Klarna Applies to Become a US Bank — Not Act Like One — With a Utah Charter Bid Klarna filed on 6 July for a Utah industrial bank charter to bring its US banking in-house and reduce its reli... SA Sarah Chew 11 Jul ASEAN Tech 6 min MAS's SAFR Framework Puts the Safeguard Where the Money Moves — At the Point an AI Agent Acts Singapore's MAS and industry partners published SAFR on 3 July, a voluntary framework that governs AI agents i... PR Priya Nair 11 Jul ASEAN Tech 6 min MAS Is Building an Institute to End the Pilot Era — Singapore's Bet That the Hard Part of Fintech Is Deployment MAS announced on 25 June it will establish a Future of Finance Institute to move AI and tokenisation from expe... SA Sarah Chew 11 Jul ASEAN Tech 7 min Igloo Buys Eazy Digital in Its Second Thailand Move in a Year — a Bet on Insurtech Consolidation Singapore insurtech Igloo has acquired Eazy Digital, a Singapore-headquartered insurtech with operations acros... SA Sarah Chew 9 Jul ASEAN Tech 6 min MAS Opens an AI-Themed 2026 Global FinTech Hackcelerator and SFF Excellence Awards On 29 June 2026, the Monetary Authority of Singapore opened applications for the 2026 Global FinTech Hackceler... SA Sarah Chew 2 Jul ASEAN Tech 7 min Vietnam Calls for a Connected ASEAN Fintech Ecosystem at the AFF 2026 — but the Standards Are the Hard Part At an ASEAN Future Forum 2026 seminar in Hanoi, Vietnam's Deputy PM Nguyen Van Thang urged the region to conne... SA Sarah Chew 11 Jun Finance 6 min Stablecoins Are Becoming Settlement Plumbing — and Singapore's Rulebook Is About to Matter Early-June moves by Mastercard and Visa show stablecoins shifting from speculative asset to back-end settlemen... DA Daniel Koh 8 Jun Finance 5 min SoFi Coach Shows Where Fintech AI Is Really Heading SoFi Coach brings AI financial guidance directly into a consumer fintech app. The bigger signal is not chat it... DA Daniel Koh 6 Jun ASEAN Tech 5 min Mastercard Switches On AI-Agent Payments in Singapore and Malaysia Mastercard has taken agentic commerce live in its first two ASEAN markets, letting verified AI agents pay on a... DA Daniel Koh 6 Jun ASEAN Tech 6 min Sea's three engines fire at once: Shopee, Monee and Garena drive a 47 per cent revenue jump Singapore's Sea Limited posted first-quarter revenue of US$7.1 billion, up 47 per cent, as its e-commerce, fin... SA Sarah Chew 1 Jun Finance 7 min Nubank Posts $5 Billion Quarterly Revenue and 135 Million Customers as NuFormer AI Goes Live in Credit Decisioning Nu Holdings crossed $5 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time in Q1 2026, reported 135 million custom... DA Daniel Koh 1 Jun ASEAN Tech 8 min MAS Issues Binding GenAI Banking Guidelines — Five-Bank Sandbox, Cross-Border Implications for ASEAN Finance The Monetary Authority of Singapore published its long-awaited binding guidelines on generative AI use by bank... SA Sarah Chew 20 May Finance 7 min Western Union Picks Fireblocks for USDPT — Stablecoin Settlement Hits Remittance Rails First in Philippines and Bolivia On 4 May 2026 Western Union announced Fireblocks will power USDPT, the company's first U.S. dollar-backed stab... DA Daniel Koh 18 May Finance 6 min Malaysia Fintech 2030 Launches Talent-Pipeline MoU at Money20/20 Asia in Bangkok The Fintech Association of Malaysia signed a memorandum with Manaf Gardner Associates at Money20/20 Asia on 2... DA Daniel Koh 18 May