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MAS working with government on project for credit assessment of SMEs

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Singapore government’s GovTech are now working with the industry to facilitate financial institutions’ credit assessment of SMEs using trusted government data. Stating this, Ravi Menon, MD, MAS, said young SMEs that wish to obtain bank financing may face difficulties due to the lack of credit history, but this will go away as MAS will help pool trusted data from government sources on the business and key individuals associated with the SMEs to facilitate a more informed credit assessment, he added.

MAS is proposing to run a pilot with 3 banks in the first half of next year, he said making a presentation at the Singapore FinTech Festival 2018 in Singapore.

Menon said MAS has substantially completed Singapore’s national ePayment infrastructure and today FAST is a 24×7 real-time funds transfer infrastructure and there is PayNow, which rides on FAST to enable instant money transfer to an individual or business, using their personal ID number, mobile phone number, or unique entity number.

He also mentioned about UPOS, or unified point-of-sale terminal, that can accept all major credit card brands, whether using a smart chip, NFC, or QR code, and SGQR, a single, standardized QR code that can represent multiple payment schemes, which is the first of its kind in the world.

Menon said Singapore FinTech Festival has become the biggest annual gathering of the global fintech community and this year, there are close to 40,000 participants from more than 100 countries attending the event.

He said MAS is making efforts to increase efficiency, manage risks better, create new opportunities and improve people lives and the concept of a Smart Financial Center in 2015 was a step in this direction. He visualized a world where financial services are built around people and their lives and needs, where identity is human, where payments are invisible, where insurance is intuitive and where financial advice is integrated. The idea, he said is to create a financial sector customized to the people’s needs, invisible to the eyes and an absolute delight.

He pointed out to three efforts of Singapore banks’ in this direction – Right by You by UOB, Simply Spon On by OCBC Bank and Live More, Bank Less by DBS as the result of this concept.

Menon also touched on six components of fintech ecosystem – people, identity, payments, data governance, applied research and platforms for innovation – on which MAS is working. He specifically mentioned about the project of National Digital Identity sponsored by the Singapore government, where every resident of Singapore can use NDI to establish his or her legal identity in a secure manner. A powerful component of NDI, he said is MyInfo, which is a digital service that enables citizens to authorize third parties to access their personal data sitting across many different government agencies. With consent, third parties can use MyInfo APIs to access data that is government-verified to authenticate their customers and make business decisions relating to that customer, he added.

Menon said MAS is involved in Project Ubin, which aims to make cross-border payments and settlements cheaper and faster at no compromise in security or privacy, using blockchain technology.

Project Ubin has successfully achieved decentralized netting of payments while preserving transactional privacy, he said adding Project Ubin team has successfully harnessed blockchain technology for the settlement of tokenized assets.

He added MAS, Singapore Exchange and various industry partners worked together to tokenize digital currencies and securities assets so that they can be simultaneously exchanged thus achieving final settlement.

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