NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

The Monetary Authority of Singapore, the country’s central bank, has entered an agreement with the government of the Indian state of Maharashtra to jointly explore FinTech initiatives in areas including blockchain technology.

Signed on Monday in India, the new cooperative pact sees a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the two government entities to explore joint innovation projects that will see the application of financial technologies including blockchain, digital and mobile payments and big data. The MoU’s terms will also enable the exchange of information and data in FinTech-related trends as well as regulatory discussions to encourage the development of the sector.

Singapore is commonly seen among the world’s leading FinTech hubs for a country known for its technology-forward agenda. The MAS is notably among the earliest central banks to foray into researching and developing its own cryptocurrency. Its ongoing endeavor to place a tokenized form of the Singapore Dollar on a distributed ledger platform, dubbed ‘Project Ubin’, saw the central bank issue a digital Singaporean dollar on an Ethereum blockchain in mid-2017.

Today’s agreement will also foster engagements between FinTech startups in Singapore and Maharashtra, which sees Mumbai as its state capital. A FinTech-based curriculum developed for educational programs in the Indian state are also being considered.

Photo courtesy of Christian Ditaputratama.