Questions for Singapore Fintech Festival 2022

The best recent year for international conferences was in 2019. Let me use the Singapore Festival (SFF) as a benchmark to prove this “best” description. I attended SFF for the first time in November 2018. The following year was more significant, with more industry experts, ideas and budgets. There was no international travel in November 2020 and this year’s event was canceled due to the pandemic. In 2021, the meeting conference was virtual, but this year will include a personal conference. This conference will enable us to pose challenging questions to the world’s best solution seekers.

Questions to participants and organizers will include:

How far from the 2019 level is the global sentiment about running a business, expanding and scaling up?

How have sentiments changed since 2019 regarding operations and business expansion?

Questions to companies like Google/Microsoft/Amazon on machine learning related to digital assets:

When will an AI virtual assistant in a digital bank or investment platform be able to answer investors’ questions with sufficient security and convenience? Is this feature available now? Can we already test it? Investors may also have questions about these topics:

• When is my next capital call?

• When is the next annual meeting for a fund?

• What are my bank details?

• How much of the funds in cash do I have left to invest?

• Did I reach last year’s investment goal?

What would be the best way to communicate with such a virtual assistant? Should it be a voice-based, web-based application? Or should it be a pure mobile native solution? The conference is an excellent place to see the current situation in order to solve these challenges.

The question for blockchain promoters is the following:

How do we adapt a bearer instrument, such as a digital crypto-asset, in a financial ecosystem that regulates securities, a non-bearer instrument?

Questions about the mass introduction of original digital assets is the following:

Strong security is essential for a bearer instrument, such as bitcoin, so if a user (investor in our case) loses a private key to the digital asset, then the digital asset is lost forever.

Would multi-signature solutions be allowed – that is, two digital signatures out of three or any combination of required and total signatures?

Does this also mean that we never want to be in a situation where losing a car key means we lose access to a car? Similarly, security in the financial terminology of a specific asset will always require processes, institutions and regulators.

Questions about raising capital for a start-up to VC is the following:

If a Software as a Service model is readily available, where is the consumer’s benefit in using it? If everyone has access to the service, how do I differentiate myself in the competitive fintech market?

These are the questions I hope to find clues about at SFF, which starts on November 2, 2022, in Singapore.