Saturday, 20 April 2024
MatchMove confirms bid for digital full bank licence in Singapore
MatchMove submitted its application for a digital full bank licence (DFBL) to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to continue to provide full digital banking.
Currently, MatchMove utilises the wallet-as-a-service platform and full Spend.Send.Lend suite, managing an end-to-end process for millions of customer transactions across multiple countries in Asia.
Shailesh Naik, founder and group CEO of MatchMove, commented, “At its core, MatchMove aims to improve the quality of people’s digital life by extending essential and safe banking services to them anytime, anywhere.”
“Our proposed digital banking-as-a-service will accelerate this objective by leveraging our existing and already available capabilities to address current pent up demand and reach digitally underserved segments like small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and gig workers, among others. As a pure play fintech, we believe we are well positioned to graduate to become the digital bank of choice for enterprises, employees and consumers of the future, in Singapore and the region,” Naik added.
The MatchMove-led application brings together a consortium, comprising Singapura Finance Ltd, Lightnet Pte Ltd and OpenPayd Holdings Ltd, all premiere regulated financial institutions in their respective markets, with deep capabilities and experience across the spectrum of digital financial services. These partners bring along regional and global connectivity to enhance the proposed digital bank’s value proposition.
Singapura Finance leverages MatchMove’s banking-as-a-service platform to power its Vivid Card solution. Jamie Teo, CEO of Singapura Finance, said, “This strategy complements our existing business and steps up our digitisation efforts as well as enables us to diversify into new digital native segments and products.”
Commenting on the partnership, Tridbodi Arunanondchai, co-founder of Lightnet, said, “We are excited to partner with MatchMove, which is aligned to our regional banking aspirations. Furthermore, there are many synergies between our organisations beyond Singapore that we intend to explore, and I believe we can develop a compelling proposition for the underbanked segment across the region.”
Speaking on behalf of OpenPayd, Iana Dimitrova, chief executive, said “We’re delighted to partner with MatchMove and expand our global footprint into Asia. This partnership cornered around next-generation digital banking complements perfectly our enterprise banking-as-a- service strategy.”
On the other hand, commenting on the viability of a pure play digital banking-as-a-service, Naik said, “Additionally, as a key element of the proposed digital bank’s go-to-market strategy, MatchMove assembled an ecosystem of fintechs and businesses with ready access to large networks of retail customers and SMEs.”
“The proposed digital bank will provide tailored and relevant banking products and services to these organisations and their employees, to SME clients and the partners’ own retail customers,” Naik added.
MatchMove’s group CEO also shared that discussions are underway with potential partners.
Re-disseminated by The Asian Banker
