Commentary

Alternative Finance vs Bank Loan: What Singaporean businesses should choose

Singapore is the country of business opportunities. Opportunity to buy at a lower price, opportunity arising out of a new contract, opportunity to enter a new market and many others. They arise instantly and if unused – they fade away shortly.

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Alternative Finance vs Bank Loan: What Singaporean businesses should choose

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Building brands with smart packaging

Singapore’s food and beverage market is currently estimated at US$108 million1, with major beverage companies expanding their product portfolios to cater to the growing popularity of fruit juices, ready-to-drink teas, energy drinks and beer. Increased local competition is also prompting these brands to explore novel ways to customise products.

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Harnessing data to unlock new customer segments in the telecom sector

Mobile data usage in Singapore has seen a steady increase in the last three years - from 7.91 petabytes in 2014 to over 13.31 petabytes in 2017. Whilst Singapore has always has had a high mobile penetration rate (151%), the main driving factor behind this staggering growth in data usage has been the increase in usage per subscriber, from 0.9 GB to approximately 1.6 GB in March, 2017.

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Forget the past as Singapore escapes the economic trough in 2017

It can be difficult to let go of the past and look forward to the future.

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Blockchain: The buzzword in Singapore Fintech

Blockchain is becoming an increasingly common buzzword locally, particularly within Singapore’s Fintech industry. As Singapore banks positively support the rise of blockchain, what are the applications and will the trend last to attract more investors to our shores?

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Singapore: Smart Nation and smarter events

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has become the latest buzzword in Singapore.

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Why Singapore should pilot an algorithmic Data Exchange

Singaporeans, like many others, are concerned that emerging technologies could lead to widespread unemployment and social unrest as humans are replaced in the workforce by automation, artificial intelligence and robots.

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The retail saviour: “New Retail"---succeeding with Big Data and an omnichannel approach

As Singapore continues to embrace the mobile-centric economy, the way consumers interact with retailers is rapidly changing from traditionally shopping at storefronts, to e-commerce, and now to New Retail - retail experience brought alive by the integration of offline, online, logistics, and data across a single value chain.

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Singapore's competitive advantage

Singapore has long recognised the importance of developing its strongest natural resource: talent. Our city-state ranked highest in attracting and retaining talent in Asia in the 2017 Global Talent Competitive Index compiled by INSEAD. The report focused on talent and technology, and the findings show that countries which are mindful of how technology transforms society and organisations are able to best compete for talent.

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China-Singapore mediation initiative - what's in it for businesses?

Law suits can prove to be the worst means to settle a legal dispute. Court rooms have produced decisions unsatisfactory to all parties. Mediation on the other hand preserves a relationship, nudges feuding parties towards a middle ground and acquire a peaceful resolution. This is especially crucial when corporations do business across international borders.

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How Singapore investors can profit from unstructured data

Data that is collected in the business environment can be structured or unstructured. In general, structured data refers to information which is highly organised and which can easily be stored in rows and columns within database systems. On the other hand, unstructured data does not have a strict data structure, and is also not organised in a pre-defined manner.

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Are ICOs the High Yield Bond of the 21st Century?

Last month, Vitalik Buterin held a keynote presentation in Singapore, resulting in nostalgia taking over for me. For those who are not familiar with the cryptocurrency industry, Buterin is the 23 year old inventor of the blockchain-based Ethereum smart contract platform, and this event was part of his announced relocation to Singapore as a gateway to promoting it in Asia.

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DBS Bank: Transformation through strategy implementation

It was February 2010, four months after Piyush Gupta joined DBS Bank (DBS) in Singapore as its CEO. During the first 100 days of his tenure as CEO, Gupta had started to formulate a new direction for the bank which would focus on three areas: determining a new strategy and areas of focus; improving processes and technology; and creating a stronger culture.

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Let's move the AI discussion away from how it's going to steal all our jobs

Whilst reading two reports from The White House on artificial intelligence (AI) - Preparing for the future of artificial intelligence and Artificial intelligence, automation and the economy - I found that there are common perspectives and attitudes towards AI.

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Singapore Proptech: challenging the status quo

Real estate is the largest asset class in the world, worth over US$200 trillion. It is an industry that is traditionally conservative, old fashioned and largely dominated by wealthy corporations or individuals who are often older in age.

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Surely Singapore will be Southeast Asia's first cashless society

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is right to push for a cashless society in Singapore as a top national priority.

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Banking on FinTech: How Singapore banks are embracing FinTech today

It wasn’t too long ago when there was a rallying cry of how banks were not doing enough to try and beat smaller FinTech start-ups. Turns out that the banks were right. There’s no point in trying to “beat” them because financial institutions are bigger and have more resources at their disposal. So instead of going on the defensive, banks have now approached a more adoptive nature towards technology. Below is a look at how some big local banks are embracing FinTech within their organisations, from implementing bots to iBanking and other best practices.

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