Overview

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is Singapore’s central bank and financial regulatory authority. It administers the various statutes about money, banking, insurance, securities, the financial sector in general, and currency issuance. It was established in 1971 to act as the Singapore Government’s banker. Intellect Design Arena provides financial technology for banking, insurance, and other financial services. It has a predominantly financial services focused products business with intellectual property and robust platforms & products across Global Consumer Banking (iGCB), Central Banking, Risk & Treasury Management (iRTM), Global Transaction Banking (iGTB) and Insurance (Intellect SEEC). It caters to more than 250 financial institutions in 90+ countries.

Implementation Process

Project Scope

The client, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, wanted cloud-native Wealth APIs to enable quick and easy adoption of wealth functionalities for banks and financial institutions across the spectrum. This would help address the two forces at play in the wealth segment currently, the rise of mass affluents and digital banks, neo-banks, and aggregators tapping into the wealth segment. A much larger and growing base of mass affluents being added to the wealthy clientele leads to a need for all wealth businesses to have a future-ready open system that can easily collaborate and expand their offerings quickly. With the evolving set of new-age providers, with simple wealth products for mass affluents and Millennials, to complex financial solutions for UHNWIs, there was a fast-emerging need for technology providers to meet the entire spectrum of the wealth value chain.

Project Details

To enable this, Intellect Design Arena implemented Intellect Wealth Cinnamon at the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s API Exchange (APIX). The Intellect Cinnamon solution is built on APIs created around the wealth management life cycle. APIs are microservices-based and containerised, with open API specification 3.0 standards, comprising of APIs that support both lifecycle-based and event-based architecture formats for transactional APIs. The APIs went live

on the portal in September 2020. The project team from Intellect which worked on placing the end-end wealth journey on the APIX marketplace comprised of a 5-member technical and business team certified by the Singapore Fintech Association.

Key Considerations

There were four key considerations for the solution. The first was making available the spectrum of wealth functionalities on an open yet secure platform. The second consideration was fast adoption, with the solution possessing a quick implementation and adoption time. The next consideration, and the bank’s utmost priority, was data security, with the solution coming from a trusted sandbox environment. The last consideration was that the service provider should be approachable with minimal resistance.

Benefits Achieved

The Cinnamon wealth solution has a multi-level impact on the entire wealth ecosystem. For banks/wealth firms it helps in accelerating innovation projects that deliver tangible business results. It allows easier access to advanced functionalities to meet evolving market needs, delivered with much shorter implementation timelines. It helps in scaling their products and services in a secure environment, hence expanding access to financial and wealth solutions to a traditionally underserved population, helping firms in expanding their customer base and incomes. It also lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) along with lowering the capex and hence reduces margin pressures. For other FinTech players, it provides opportunities to co-create and collaborate to quickly solve complex business problems for the ecosystem, lower costs for smaller FinTechs concerned with product development, manpower and marketing, and faster go-to-market. For end-customers, wealth clients benefit with greater financial inclusion with wealth solutions to invest in. Greater convenience is provided through new services made available by wealth firms such as digital advisory, DIY capabilities, etc. Advanced analytics and recommendations based on AI/ML, allow more accurate and quicker investment decisions.

Conclusion

Intellect Cinnamon implementation is a significant solution helping MAS, especially in its wealth management segment. The API-fiction of the end-end wealth journey with a solid security framework for an open networking architecture allows it to provide services and collaborate with all stakeholders across the wealth value chain, thus promoting innovation and collaboration with traditional firms as well as FinTechs.

Key Facts

• Bank Name: APIX (Monetary Authority of Singapore)
• Bank HQ: Singapore
• Vendor: Intellect Design Arena
• Solution Implemented: Intellect Wealth Cinnamon