SINGAPORE, 13 November 2019 – The Investment Management Association of Singapore’s (IMAS) Digital Accelerator Programme (DAP) participated in Infocomm Media Development Authority’s (IMDA) Open Innovation Platform (OIP) 5^th Innovation Call as the sector lead trade association for asset management.

OIP is a crowdsourcing platform that connects and matches business challenges of Problem Owners to a pool of Problem Solvers. For the first time, OIP introduced challenges to address issues across whole industry sectors. The challenges are focused on supporting wider digitalisation efforts and propagating digital solutions within entire industry ecosystems.  

As the lead trade association for asset management, IMAS will champion the problem statements with the sector members to host 10 problem statements through the DAP. This is supported by IMAS, Allianz Global Investors, Aberdeen Standard Investments, DWS Investments, Eastspring Investments, Nikko Asset Management, UOB Asset Management, Schroder Investment Management and FIL Investment Management. Up to $50,000 per problem statement can be won.

Jessica Shearer, Chairperson of the Digital Innovation Committee, IMAS, said: “It is vital to be integrated into the wider fintech community and to have the backing of a statutory board of the Government to encourage even more innovation in the financial industry in Singapore. With this round of the DAP kicking off, we see the increased support from IMDA through OIP as a huge boon to the program and the asset management and fintech ecosystems in Singapore.”

“Through OIP, the DAP will have an outreach of more than 5,000 Problem Solvers and will be able to tap into resources such as innovation facilities, customer-centricity capabilities workshop and be part of IMDA’s multi-disciplinaries community,” she added.

The DAP is an accelerator programme that aims to identify, showcase and advance cutting-edge solutions that will help galvanise transformation of the asset management industry. By taking part in this program, asset managers have the opportunity to discover and partner with leading global fintechs and proactively embrace disruption.

The inaugural edition of the DAP was held at the start of this year, attracting close to a hundred applications from around the world. Ten finalists were shortlisted and given the opportunity to work with accelerator partners – most of which are leading fund houses – over the course of four weeks to accelerate their ideas and shape real-world solutions for the industry.

Blue Fire AI, Capital Preferences, Value3 Advisory were selected as winners following a round of pitching at the IMAS-Bloomberg Investment Conference 2019 and were awarded funding. The solutions that were developed range from risk profiling, data analytics, digital due diligence and integrated workflow systems. Some of these solutions are currently in the commercialisation phase and will be rolled out in due course.