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 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.

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, 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 (W) 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 format 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.

Originality and Potency of Solution:

Intellect Cinnamon was built as an end-end wealth APIs and placed on one of the world’s most stringent regulatory markets supported marketplace – APIX – and in the process became a certified FinTech company. As part of the project, Intellect Cinnamon has listed 35 different APIs with 150+ endpoints across all key stages of the wealth journey.  APIs are crafted and aligned to the end-end wealth management lifecycle. The solution enables innovation and financial inclusion globally, with MAS’ regulations being considered among the world’s most advanced. It helps in the easy deployment of new digital solutions to cater to evolving client needs. Architecture is built on the principle of open collaboration, allowing the co-creation of new financial solutions easily, within a cloud-based and secure sandbox.

Adaptability of Concept

The end-end containerisation of the wealth platform of iCinnamon makes the solution easy to be adopted by the entire spectrum of wealth service providers, allows them to have configurable solutions, and allow for innovation and advanced functionalities. iCinnamon Wealth is also a future-ready solution with comprehensive API organisation around the entire lifecycle, which has been defined into 5 key steps from entity setup, acquire, profile and plan, manage/ execute, and monitor.

The solution provides enhancement and enrichment of relationship manager (RM) and client journeys with advanced APIs built on AI/ML technology, enabling hyper-personalisation for both the wealth firms and their clients. Additionally, there are APIs around deep analytics with predictions and simulation insights for RMs and clients. Among these are goal planning simulator, customer churn predictor, and buy/sell recommender. The APIs are also equipped to manage advanced capabilities like predictive analytics and suggest the next best actions using AI and ML.

Speed to Market

Being API-based and cloud-native in a secure sandbox environment allows quick and easy adoption, collaboration, and innovation. Easy subscription to new functionalities using these APIs for banks, wealth firms, IFAs, digital banks, and neo-banks in a secure environment and ready to use APIs on the cloud reduces implementation time to 30-90 days go-live depending on the underlying functionality and external integrations.

It provides seamless integration by integrating quickly with wealth firms’ existing legacy systems allowing FinTechs to co-create and build advanced capabilities to solve complex business problems together.

Customer and Project Impact

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.

IBSI View

Intellect Cinnamon implementation is a significant solution helping MAS, especially in its wealth management segment. The API-fication 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:

Financial Institution: APIX (Monetary Authority of Singapore)
Headquarters: Singapore
Solution Provider: Intellect Design Arena
Solution: Intellect Wealth Cinnamon