New MAS programme to help financial institutions fast-track AI adoption, minimise guesswork
The programme features a curated library of AI use cases, industry validated solutions and best practices shared by industry peers, cutting down the time and effort needed to search, select and implement AI solutions.
The initiative aims to support financial institutions in the earlier stages of their AI adoption journey, said Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) managing director Chia Der Jiun on Tuesday (Jul 15), at the release of the central bank's annual report.
Pathfin.ai also connects participating firms with established training providers offering skills programmes aligned with their chosen AI tools and platforms.
Twenty financial institutions have already joined the programme. These include Green Link Digital Bank, MUFG, Standard Chartered, Trust Bank, Ant International, Liquid Group, BoltTech, FWD, and Funding Societies.
'We welcome more financial institutions to join the programme,' said Chia. As financial institutions expand the scale and scope of AI adoption, they must also strengthen governance and risk management to ensure responsible use, he added.
BT in your inbox
Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign Up
Sign Up
To support this, MAS is developing supervisory guidance for financial institutions. This includes a set of guidelines on managing AI-related risks, which is currently in progress.
'There are key risks around model, data, technology and third-party risks,' said Chia. 'Poor management of these risks can result in wrong or even harmful information used in internal decision-making or advice given to customers and investors.'
Completion of QKD sandbox
On Tuesday, Chia also announced that MAS has successfully completed its sandbox trial for quantum key distribution (QKD) – a secure method for exchanging cryptographic keys.
The sandbox, launched in August 2024, tested how QKD can be used to protect sensitive financial data against future cybersecurity threats posed by quantum computing.
A technical report detailing the results and key findings will be published soon.
'The report will also highlight challenges for future work,' said Chia. 'We are confident that further work by the industry can address these challenges and enable wider adoption of QKD in time to come.'
MAS has also begun working with financial institutions to prepare for a 'quantum-safe' transition, as future advances in quantum computing could render today's encryption standards obsolete.
The central bank will review how financial institutions manage their cryptographic inventory and identify critical assets that should be prioritised for quantum-safe migration, said Chia.
They 'should kick-start their preparation early', he added. 'Given the complexity and scale, a full transition is expected to take time and significant effort.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Straits Times
3 hours ago
- Straits Times
Crypto exchange Tokenize Xchange to shut down Singapore operations
Find out what's new on ST website and app. Tokenize Xchange founder and chief executive Hong Qi Yu declined to comment on why the firm was denied a licence by the MAS. SINGAPORE – Cryptocurrency exchange Tokenize Xchange will cease its operations here from September 30, just over a year after raising US$11.5 million (S$14.9 million) in funding and announcing plans to ramp up hiring. The Singapore-headquartered firm said on July 20 that it will shut down the business following the Monetary Authority of Singapore's (MAS) decision not to grant it a licence to offer digital payment token services here. Tokenize was previously operating under an exemption. The firm said it will shift its operations to Labuan, a federal territory in Malaysia, where it is in the process of acquiring a company that holds a Digital Financial Services License issued by the Labuan Financial Services Authority. The deal is expected to close by September 30. It will also seek regulatory approval from the Abu Dhabi Global Market, an international financial centre and free economic zone located in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. Tokenize said all 15 of its employees in Singapore have been given notice and will leave the company by September 30. When contacted, Tokenize founder and chief executive Hong Qi Yu declined to comment on why the firm was denied a licence by the MAS. But he told The Straits Times on July 20 that Labuan will allow Tokenize to operate under a 'recognised regulatory framework tailored for cross-border digital asset services'. '(Labuan) also offers greater flexibility, tax efficiency, and access to international markets, supporting the platform's global growth ambitions,' he said. Tokenize said its Singapore customers can no longer buy or sell cryptocurrencies on its platform, and may only transfer their cryptocurrency holdings to other exchanges, where they can convert them to cash and make withdrawals. But users can continue to withdraw cash directly from the exchange based on the Singapore dollar value of each user's portfolio, which includes both fiat and cryptocurrency holdings This value, viewable in users' wallets, determines the withdrawal tier they are placed in under a phased schedule. Users with portfolios below $10,000 have been able to withdraw the cash portion of their holdings and transfer their cryptocurrencies to other exchanges since July 17. Those with portfolios between $10,000 and $99,999 may do so from August 1, while users with $100,000 and above can start from September 1. All withdrawals and transfers must be completed by September 30. ST has reached out to the MAS for comment. While Tokenize serves retail and institutional investors in Singapore and overseas - including Malaysia and Vietnam - its exit from the Republic comes after the MAS said on June 6 that digital token service providers targeting only overseas customers must be licensed by June 30 or cease operations . ST understands that the move has triggered an exodus of unlicensed cryptocurrency exchanges from Singapore. More than 500 staff - from management to junior levels across firms supporting the Republic's fintech ecosystem - are expected to relocate to the United Arab Emirates or Hong Kong, where regulators are seen to take a softer stance on digital assets.
Business Times
4 days ago
- Business Times
MAS may want to nudge banks to standardise fintechs' access to API for the benefit of SMEs
[SINGAPORE] A recent report by think tank Fintech Nation on the lack of API access possibly stifling small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) lending points to a dysfunction in the financial sector. API refers to application programming interface, a protocol that allows for two different software programs to talk and exchange data. At the moment, the major banks in Singapore grant API access to only certain platforms, making it difficult for fintechs to get credit information on their customers. Thus, despite the Singapore financial sector's advanced digitalisation, SMEs that are seeking loans from fintech SME lenders are forced to download and send PDFs of financial statements of bank accounts. This results in the fintechs having to invest in manpower to tackle the manual process of reformatting these statements just to assess if the SME can be extended a loan. If they had API access, they could have pulled the data digitally from local banks. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) could thus find itself in a quandary. Despite the regulator having laid out guidelines for a more open financial services sector, traditional banks are gatekeeping digital access to their customers' data even though consent has been sought and given for these fintechs. While Fintech Nation's report was a way to highlight the dysfunction, there are a number of concerns from traditional banks over providing API access, ranging from security and privacy to costs and competition. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up It is thus clear that prerequisites are needed to determine if a fintech can qualify for API access to the traditional banks in Singapore. These include determining the critical mass of SME customers needed, choosing the security and data-privacy prerequisites for API access, and even deciding the cost of doing an API call. Without any compliance checklists, fintechs are in the dark on what can be done to negotiate API access. This is certainly an area where MAS can step in to nudge the industry to decide what is the best model that would satisfy the banks' concerns and allow for more SME financing. The regulator has done this before, in nudging the buy-now-pay-later industry to self-regulate with a code of conduct and a separate credit bureau. The financial services sector has not been averse to sharing customer information with one another. For example, there is the Singapore Financial Data Exchange, where retail customers can give consent and see their entire investments and savings in one dashboard in any banking app they frequent. When it comes to industry inertia, the regulator is the only one that can push incumbents to move and take action. In most David-and-Goliath situations, the smaller player has little leverage to make the incumbents move. Traditional banks say that there are competition concerns over opening up API access to fintechs, as SME customers could potentially get a loan from these lenders instead of the bank. While these concerns are valid, the onus is on the sector to work out a win-win situation. This could be anything from charging fintechs for API calls on a bank's SME customers to working out a partnership that would allow customers, who might not be as credit-worthy to a bank, to be funnelled into these fintechs. It is now up to the regulator to be the one to draw all these parties to the discussion table to figure out a palatable solution that both banks and fintechs can live with.
Business Times
4 days ago
- Business Times
Singapore startup BeeX takes the sting out of maritime inspection costs with underwater drones
[SINGAPORE] Being a small fish in a big pond is paying off for BeeX, as the startup's underwater drones prove cheaper and greener than their larger competitors. The company designs, builds and operates submarine drones – also known as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) – that provide maritime inspection services. Named after the Malay term for anchovies, its drone cuts the cost and time of underwater inspections by as much as 50 per cent and slashes emissions by up to 95 per cent compared to larger remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs). The fundamental 'innovation dilemma' with AUVs, said BeeX co-founder and CEO Grace Chia, is that they 'disrupt the profits of the best-performing subsea companies'. Large subsea companies 'can charge their customers millions to use vessels with ROVs', she said. With simpler AUVs, companies cannot charge such high rates – and thus do not have an incentive to develop them. After the success of its first drone, BeeX is developing an AUV that is larger and therefore can perform a wider range of inspection jobs – while still retaining an edge over ROVs. A NEWSLETTER FOR YOU Friday, 8.30 am SGSME Get updates on Singapore's SME community, along with profiles, news and tips. Sign Up Sign Up Sea change BeeX has its origins in Bumblebee, a National University of Singapore (NUS) autonomous robotics club that Chia started as a student in 2012. There, she met schoolmate Goh Eng Wei, who would later become the company's co-founder and chief technical officer. In 2013, Chia and Goh's team won the Best New Entry award in RoboSub, an international student AUV competition in San Diego, US. The next year, she graduated and started working for a Singapore-based company that specialised in conventional maritime inspections – where she realised the role that AUVs could play. Maritime inspections involve examining structures that are on or under water, which can include oil rigs, offshore wind and solar farms, ship hulls, foundations or construction piles. Chia realised that while AUVs cannot do repairs or additions, they can perform inspection jobs faster and cheaper than ROVs. 'ROVs can do anything and everything, but need a lot of resources,' said Chia. 'You need to have big ships and well-trained personnel.' ROVs are tethered to a mothership, where human pilots operate them. These motherships are purpose-built and tend to be large, as they need to provide piloting facilities, power and communications to the ROVs. 'If you want the cost of subsea inspection and data collection to drop, the only way is if you drop all these other things – but it goes against the business model of the conventional incumbents.' That is where a startup could come in. Chia and Goh founded BeeX in 2018 with their own money and initial funding from the NUS Graduate Research Innovation Programme. Bee agile BeeX's autonomous underwater drone, uses numerous sensors including sonar to map its environment in two and three dimensions in real time. PHOTO: DERRYN WONG, BT In 2020, BeeX got a boost when it won first prize in Port Innovation Ecosystem Reimagined at Block71's (Pier71) Smart Port Challenge for the application of AUVs to maritime inspections. Pier71 is a joint startup incubator and accelerator by NUS Enterprise and the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore. The win helped the company gain exposure to maritime corporates and investors, said Chia. 'Being plugged into the ecosystem enabled us to explore new opportunities for growth. We gained attention from diving companies who were more open to using robots to support their work.' After receiving Enterprise Singapore's Startup SG Tech grant of S$500,000 in 2019, BeeX began developing in 2020, with the drone's first operations in 2023. While ROVs can be as large as a minivan and weigh more than 3 tonnes, is less than a metre long and weighs 70 kg. It has various sensors, including a camera, sonar, lasers and an electromagnetic probe that detects the thickness of materials. Without the need for a tether or pilot, it can be launched from a wide range of smaller vessels or from the infrastructure it is inspecting. also reduces manpower costs. There is no need for a specialised mothership, and training a drone supervisor takes just six months, compared to five to seven years for an ROV pilot. Furthermore, the drone can navigate more quickly than an ROV, as it uses sonar and other sensors to 'see' beyond human sight. Unlike ROVs, performance is not dependent on pilot skill. 'With real-time sensors, the drone knows exactly where it is at all times, while the computer calculates the exact path to take. On average, an AUV can be 50 per cent faster than human-controlled flight,' said Chia. 'Our 'brain' is more intelligent and tested across more locations compared to ROVs, and our system is a lot more scalable,' she added, referring to the drones' autonomous navigation and surveying capabilities. BeeX's drones will get smarter as more data is gathered. 'Our core advantage is that we have 14 years of underwater data to help our vehicles to learn.' Sink to swim The drone inspecting a pile at sea. PHOTO: BEEX BeeX has now grown to a team of 28 people. It last raised funds in a bridging round in 2023, with S$2 million from investors co-led by Earth Venture Capital and ShipsFocus Ventures. 'We're currently in pre-Series A, so we are building the groundwork for scaling,' said Chia. The company has served 20 clients so far this year, up from 11 in all of 2024, in locations ranging from Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan to the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom. With its operating model established, BeeX will expand its fleet – doubling from four drones to eight by year-end – and develop a bigger drone that can operate in more challenging environments. Clients who adopted are demanding more, said Chia. 'Now they start to ask us: 'Can your vehicle work for longer? Can it go deeper?' So that gave birth to the second variant, Betta.' Betta is 1.5 m long and weighs 300 kg – much heavier than but still smaller than most ROVs. Scheduled to begin operations later this year, Betta can work longer and deal with harsher weather and higher currents than its predecessor. Its development is supported by the Enterprise Singapore-Innovate UK grant, which was awarded in 2023 to a consortium formed by BeeX, offshore survey services contractor Sulmara and the University of Strathclyde. Without Betta's development costs, BeeX would be profit-making, said Chia. But to go further in the AUV field, developing a more capable model was essential, she said. 'I think it's important to invest in development to ensure that the company has an up-sized chance of success in the long-term future.'
