Hello, Singapore!
I am delighted to share that we have opened our new office in Singapore. This third location, along with our London and New York offices, expands our coverage in the world’s largest financial centres. From a personal perspective, it is an honour to be leading our efforts here in the region, and particularly in Singapore which has always held a place close to my heart.
As a team, we’re no strangers to Asia Pacific. Mark Whitcroft, Founding Partner at Illuminate, spent his early career on the trading floors of Deutsche Bank and HSBC in both Hong Kong and Singapore. Katherine Wilson is Australian and started her career with Citi in Sydney. I worked for Murex in Singapore which allowed me to engage with financial institutions all over the region. With Illuminate, we’ve participated at the Singapore FinTech Festival for 3 years running and led Singapore-based Tookitaki’s Series A in 2018. We appreciate the differences between each country but have also seen many common problems. We look forward to meeting great entrepreneurs in the region who are helping to solve the big challenges in financial services.
So why now? Surely expanding to a new geography during a pandemic isn’t on the top of anyone’s agenda. I see three main drivers that make 2020 the right time for us to be here:
1. The FinTech ecosystem in Asia-Pacific has matured significantly over the last 3 years and the focus is now on B2B and enterprise solutions
When we first started tracking early stage companies in the region, most were focused on retail propositions in payments, remittances & peer-to-peer lending. This is understandable given the massive and largely underserved markets these firms were going after. More recently, we’ve seen growth of B2B and enterprise offerings in the region — with more developed markets now having more B2B offerings than B2C. The first FinTech in ASEAN report published by UOB, EY and the Singapore FinTech Association in 2017 looked only at the three subsegments I mention above. In their latest 2019 report, the focus has shifted to Banking Tech, Investment Tech and RegTech — all areas of focus for us.
2. Financial institutions globally are accelerating their digital agendas and need emerging technology firms to provide solutions
Much like their counterparts in the West, financial institutions in Asia-Pacific are facing changing client expectations when it comes to digital engagement. Many of the existing legacy systems have struggled to offer the pace of innovation and execution required to keep up with these changing demands. While it used to be standard procedure to look up vendors in Gartner research, this is no longer possible with the rapidly developing early stage vendor ecosystem.
Our presence in London and New York allows us to source the best early stage vendors globally and provide relevant solutions to financial institutions in the region.
3. Our portfolio companies are growing their presence in the region
Being a financial technology vendor is a global business, and as our mostly Europe and North America headquartered businesses start to look East it is important for us to be able to support them in their expansion plans. Five of our companies already have a presence in either Singapore, Hong Kong or Sydney (as of writing!) and we expect many others will be expanding in the region in the next two to three years.
To the many familiar faces that I have crossed paths with over the years, I look forward to catching up in the near future. To all the connections yet to be made — please reach out if you work in financial services and have problems that are keeping you up at night or if you are an entrepreneur building new solutions in our space!
