As of 2010, more than fiftybillion was invested in nearly 2500 fintech startups globally. Fintech is theintersection of financial services and new technology.

Fintech activities canbe classified into the following:- Payment, lending, deposit, capital raising,market support, investment management, clearing and settlement. Many Singapore’sfintech companies have already engaged  consumers online and are trying to replace traditionalservices offered by banks. They focused mostly on 2 areas ie.

broadly paymentand lending eg. Dash for payment and Moolahsense for lending.To ride the fintechwave, OCBC’s aggressively adopt many new strategies into the payment area and exploreways to improve the efficiency of internal operations by using fintech.In Feb 2017, OCBCstarted “The Open Vault” to bring in fintech startups to use it’s database andinterfaces to develop and test new ideas into solutions. It focuses on creditand financing insurance, wealth management, cyber security and artificialintelligence.

Any new solutions emerged from The Open Vault will be owned byOCBC. This gives OCBC a higher chance to spot potential startups and newtechnologies which will greatly increase its profits.   In 30 May 2017, OCBClaunched its standalone mobile payment application “PAY ANYONE”. With the app,customers can easily scan QR code at participating merchant’s NETS terminal topay for their items directly from their OCBC Bank account. The transaction willbe securely authenticated with a fingerprint and the payment is immediatelydeducted from the customer’s OCBC bank account and paid to the merchant throughNETS.

Unlike Mobile wallets, it is inconvenient as the customer still needs to topup using a bank account.The QR code cashlesspayment is a part of OCBC Pay Anyone e-payment services. It was launched in2014 and customers can send money directly to any bank account in Singapore by usingthe recipients’ mobile number, email address or Facebook account without usingtoken or add the recipient as a payee. In October 2017, InfocommMedia Development Authority (IMDA) together with OCBC, HSBC and Mitsubishi UFJGroup has become the first consortium in South East Asia to develop a prototypefor a Know Your Customer (KYC) blockchain. The KYC blockchain is the processfor financial institutions to identify and verify clients’ credentials eg. Openingan account or application for credit facility or insurance policy.

The KYCblockchain will record, assess structured information and share it among theparticipating institutions. With the customers’ approval, banks will be able tocollect, validate and share customers’ information efficiently and securely.This will help banks to detect any potential money laundering activities.InNov 2017, OCBC announced that it will partner AI Fintech firm – ThetaRay todetect any suspicious fund flows. OCBC is the first bank to tap AI and machine tofight financial crime. Initial tests showed fintech’s technology was able toreduce the number of alerts that did not need further review by 35%.

It is ableto categorize the flag transactions into risk levels and increase the accuracyof identifying suspicious transactions by up to 4 times. Once implementedsuccessfully,