Singapore's Development of Financial Technology: Reference and Inspiration for Chinese Enterprises

In the past decade, Singapore has continuously implemented policies and measures to encourage innovative development in fintech, gradually making it an attractive international fintech center. The development of financial technology in Singapore and surrounding countries and regions is mainly based on "China's exports". China's exports include capital, talent, technology, products, and business models.

In Liu Xiaochun's view, the overseas expansion of fintech companies is a microcosm of this wave of Chinese companies going abroad, an extension of the industrial chain rather than a transfer of the industrial chain. Most local fintech companies in Singapore, including those registered with locals and local capital, have their technology research and development personnel generally based in China, with a focus on business operations and market expansion. The "going global" of Chinese fintech companies has greatly increased the popularity of the local internet and fintech in Singapore, but technology companies are still in a naive stage of adapting to local laws, culture, customs, and so on. In order to maintain the good momentum of "going global" for enterprises, they should shift from spontaneous to conscious, carefully research local laws, culture, customs, etc., and make localized and adaptive adjustments to their own business strategies and models.

At the same time, financial technology applications in Singapore and other surrounding countries are mainly concentrated in the fields of payment settlement, infrastructure, and small loans, and their application level is several years behind that of China. Liu Xiaochun believes that China should not be satisfied with its leading position in these fields. On the one hand, China needs to continue to innovate in these areas. In the fields of payment settlement, digital infrastructure construction, and small and micro loans, the current digital transformation is still preliminary, and there is still a lot of room for innovation. On the other hand, the wider digital transformation in the financial field has just begun, and the gap between China and the top international level in some aspects may be widening. It is necessary to increase research and development investment in these areas and create new advantages in financial technology. In this regard, a series of measures taken by Singapore and Hong Kong since 2022 in the development of virtual asset business are worth learning from. At present, in the field of financial technology in China, in addition to applications in payment settlement, infrastructure construction, small and micro loans, more emphasis is placed on the field of data assets, and less attention is paid to the innovation of digital financial products, digital financial instruments, digital financial product trading models, and digital financial product trading platforms that meet the needs of the digital economy. In the field of virtual assets, excluding the issuance and trading of virtual currencies without substantial asset support, its technology can be applied to innovation in financial products, financial instruments, financial trading models, and financial trading platforms.

"Through communicating with fintech companies and financial institutions in Singapore, I have found that fintech companies face difficulties and obstacles in serving financial institutions." Liu Xiaochun said that due to the insufficient service provided to financial institutions to sustain their survival, fintech companies have the impulse to directly handle financial business on their own, but this will also encounter regulatory difficulties. In the process of digital transformation, financial institutions, from the perspective of efficiency and efficiency, hope to outsource many businesses, including hardware, software development and operation, cloud storage, etc. But in the process of cooperating with technology companies, it often encounters situations where technology companies are disconnected. Helplessly, financial institutions have to take an independent path, which is similar to the situation in China. The main reason is that most technology companies are startups with small scale, limited capital, and low cash flow, resulting in a relatively fast pace of bankruptcy; If its strength is not strong enough, it lacks the patience to do basic research and pure technical services, which makes financial institutions have doubts about data security and business security in cooperation.

Liu Xiaochun believes that China and the United States are pioneers in financial technology, but they may not necessarily be leading in all aspects. The governments of Singapore and Southeast Asian countries observe the different development models of fintech in China and the United States, and observe the role of regulation in this process. They have been continuously adjusted from almost no regulation in the early stages to changes in regulatory policies in China and the United States in the later stages. So, when observing Singapore's policies, China needs to have a clear understanding of this underlying logic. If our country wants to introduce some breakthrough policies and business models, we can first try them in areas with a certain degree of openness to the outside world and relatively closed to the inside. Due to the particularity of finance, the financial technology regulatory sandbox can be expanded in space, and the regulatory sandbox can be opened to the public, allowing foreign institutions to participate in the pilot or investment of projects within the regulatory sandbox.