Microsoft Singapore’s Commitment to Building Sustainable Financial Services for Web 3.0

SINGAPORE – Media OutReach – 19 November 2021 – We are at the forefront of
technological innovation, which has been further accelerated by the COVID‑19
pandemic. Fundamental disruption arising from decentralized data networks,
artificial intelligence, and edge computing has created a Web 3.0 era,
presenting the next wave of the internet. This change has shaped business models
and presented new opportunities for building a sustainable, resilient, and digitally
inclusive future.

Singapore’s tenacity for technological
transformation presents a multitude of opportunities for financial institutions to innovate
and ramp up their digital agendas to remain relevant and achieve sustainable
growth locally and regionally. An increasing number of financial institutions are
tapping into cloud technologies and services to execute their digital transformation
programs and instill a stronger culture of innovation as they reimagine the future
of financial services.

However, this highly
regulated industry with its robust regulatory requirements entailing outsourced
technology use, risk management, and governance, may present its own set of challenges.
Financial institutions cannot achieve all these on their own. They need trusted partners that can
provide technologies, products, and solutions that also adhere to privacy, security,
and compliance obligations

As a trusted
ally to the nation, Microsoft is committed to being a trusted strategic partner
in building a resilient and digitally inclusive Singapore.

Here are three takeaways from the Singapore Fintech Festival 2021
that the financial services industry, ecosystem, and partners must consider as
they leverage tech capabilities and innovate to enhance customer engagement,
drive security and compliance, and foster open innovation for the next wave of
progress.

Enhancing Customer
Engagement

The pandemic has
changed customer behaviors and expectations. Financial institutions now need to
re‑think their client engagement and take it to levels that are at par, if not
exceeding, those set by non‑financial institutions in other sectors including e-commerce
and ride-hailing. To successfully compete means investing in new business
models, products, and solutions that are built around customer needs and create
long-term loyalty.

In 2020, Standard Chartered Bank embarked on a three-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to accelerate their digital
transformation through a cloud-first mindset. By leveraging Microsoft Azure, Standard
Chartered Bank was successful in meeting the demand for seamless banking
virtually anytime and anywhere, making banking more accessible to people across
its network.

Our
partnership with HolyWally, a white-label digital wallet solution built on
Microsoft Azure, has democratized the ability of its customers, including
EastWest Bank in the Philippines, the first tap-to-pay wallet in the country,
to create digital wallets with more services and greater control over data.
This collaboration has accelerated HolyWally’s growth in the FinTech space and provided
the business greater access to products, sales, and technical support, and
co-selling opportunities.

Alpha Fintech has made merchant acquiring easier for banks, payment
gateways, and acquirers like Grab, by integrating the entire payment lifecycle solution
provider ecosystem all on the Azure platform. Users can now onboard merchants
quicker, sell more products via tailored solutions for each vertical, monetize
new data intelligence – all while benefiting from massive IT savings. Alpha
Fintech’s partnership with Microsoft to develop this one-stop solution has
enabled acquirers to compete with digital unicorns quickly and easily.  

Driving
Security and Compliance

Financial
institutions that know how to manage their regulatory and compliance data will
be on an accelerated path to stronger risk management and improved operational
efficiency. Ensuring that financial services operate within appropriate
compliance constructs is key to maintaining their application security posture.

Chainstack, a blockchain service platform that
graduated from Microsoft Azure’s Startup program in 2020, works closely with
Microsoft to provide developers and independent software vendors with the
Application Programming Interface (API) to build, run, and scale blockchain
applications. Chainstack has successfully delivered complete solutions for
partners like bloXroute Labs,
HOPR, and the hugely popular Polygon
Network, by leveraging
Microsoft Azure to provide enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure and
network gateways that are extremely secure and dependable.

Our
collaboration with letsbloom, a venture by SC Ventures, the
innovation, fintech investment and ventures arm of Standard Charted Bank, has
allowed them to streamline security and compliance cloud processes for organizations
operating in highly regulated industries. Organizations in financial services,
healthcare, and the government can now securely build, deploy, and run
business applications on the cloud quickly and cost-efficiently with letsbloom Platform-as-a-Service
(PaaS) and letsbloom Marketplace.

Fostering
an Environment for Open Platforms

We are also
seeing the shift towards open and interconnected ecosystems through the
modernization of core platforms including payments and banking systems. With
open banking becoming a reality in many markets, including Singapore, there is
an urgent need for financial institutions to develop, test, and validate value
propositions faster and more effectively to foster innovation, as well as to
enhance customer service.

By working
with Accenture and Avanade we have created a unique API management accelerator that
is hosted on Microsoft Azure. This accelerator enables financial services firms
to fast-track innovation with open APIs and provides them with the ability to
market-test value propositions and engage with partners in a marketplace model.

We have also
collaborated with industry partners to develop a Common Data Model to
provide consistent metadata definitions for common banking and financial
industry data elements, including loans and mortgages, to simplify application
development and data integration. This unified data model allows partners and
customers to share data more easily across applications and business processes
as they build interoperable open banking solutions.