STACS — FinTech Start-Up of the Year in The Asset Triple A Digital Awards 2021 — Thinking outside the box amid the new normal
In March, we were thrilled to be awarded FinTech Start-Up of the Year representing Singapore in The Asset Triple A Digital Awards 2021, on top of Best Blockchain Project for our Project Harbour collaboration with Malaysia’s National Stock Exchange Bursa Malaysia.
The global award is testament to our work in empowering the capital markets ecosystem and sustainability, as well as the nimbleness, vibrancy, and resilience of our team.
In the words of The Asset:
“Several institutions have taken a proactive approach to financial technology, opting to reshape decades-old practices with concepts such as API connectivity and distributed ledger technology (DLT) in a bid to create additional efficiencies.
While the pandemic has disrupted our lives in ways we could never have imagined, it has also forced those in the financial services industry to disrupt themselves and adopt a more agile approach to improve the overall customer experience.”
This industry award propels all of us at STACS to further our ecosystem expansion in the capital markets as well as the ESG and Green FinTech space — a big thank you to the team at The Asset for the recognition!
We feel there are two important themes that have served as tailwinds for us over the past 12 months:
1. Our ability to consistently think outside the box, and;
2. The post-COVID ‘new normal’ that has forced companies everywhere to re-examine their digital transformation agendas.
Thinking outside the box
This is one of the mindsets our team at STACS has tried to embrace from day one.
As Bob Iger, the former CEO of The Walt Disney Company, says: “The riskiest thing we can do is just maintain the status quo.”
We know the status quo is not working — in fact it’s arguably broken in financial markets — which is why we’ve seen the fall out from trade settlement challenges around Robinhood-GameStop.
With the industry still on T+2 and billions in capital having to be posted by banks and brokers with clearing houses, the system that was built for a paper-based era is no longer serving a fast modern world with tech-savvy consumers.
At STACS, we’ve spent the past few years really thinking outside the box on how to fix these trade settlement problems for financial markets — and it’s led up to our patent-pending blockchain technology.
Indeed, we think it’s these next-generation of DLT technologies that represent today’s “outside the box thinking” in financial markets, and we’re excited to be at the forefront of that innovation.
The new normal
We’ve all heard time and again from business leaders around the world that COVID has acted as a catalyst for digital transformations at companies big and small.
Digital projects that were once expected to be delivered over a period of years have instead been achieved — out of necessity — in a period of less than 12 months.
Working hand in hand with our wonderful partners and clients such as PwC Singapore, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Eastspring Investments, Bursa Malaysia, and others, we’ve seen tremendous appetite from financial institutions to transition to the blockchain.
The best thing about this is that it doesn’t have to be done all at once, but rather can start with small pilot projects before being rolled out across more commercial operations.
We’ve worked with multiple partners on bond issuance delivered seamlessly on the blockchain, including in the area of green bonds.
We’re excited that this new normal is driving the adoption of more sustainability, ESG, and Green Fintech technology at large traditional financial institutions.
There is a keen awareness that now is the right moment to think outside the box, embrace the new normal, and leverage cutting edge technologies to really drive sustainable change.
Of course, it’s also fixing very real day-to-day challenges that are impacting financial institutions and their customers (i.e. trade settlement, which we’ve already mentioned, represents an $800 billion challenge we are helping to fix by moving to real-time T+0 settlements on the blockchain).
A note on teamwork
Before we end, earlier in the month, our Co-founder and Managing Director Benjamin Soh shared some internal comments on the importance of teamwork.
We’d like to re-share that here as an inspiring way to sign off this month’s blog post:
“The biggest lesson for me is around synergy, that success can belong to normal people who are able to work together and achieve more.
The greatest sense of achievement is when a group of normal people are able to come together and work as a team, where it takes every person playing his/her role in order to be able to overachieve by doing something that none of us would be able to accomplish individually.
That is the true meaning of synergy, where the sum is more than its parts.
I am most heartened by this coming together of a team, as it takes everyone having the same vision and purpose to be able to start from not knowing each other very well to committing to the challenge of working together in a startup for an extended period of time with no guarantees of success.
To me, the greatest achievement has always been from leading this team with such an esprit de corps and seeing every single member growing in various aspects of personal development.
Like a space rocket that requires millions of parts to work together, a successful company requires every member of the team to work well together in their various roles and specialised skills.
And in the same way, every member succeeds in a much greater way than he/she can ever hope to do alone.”
Onwards and upwards!
All of us at STACS would like to thank you for your ongoing support, and we look forward to another busy and fulfilling month ahead as we kick off April!
About STACS
STACS is an award-winning Singapore FinTech development company with a Vision to provide Transformative Technology for the Financial Industry, with our complete infrastructure of live institutional platforms that make global markets simpler. Our clients and partners include global investment banks, national stock exchanges, custodian banks, asset managers, and private banks. STACS provides a Green Finance and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)-enabling infrastructure that leads the way forward by digitalizing assets and processes. STACS is the FinTech Start-Up of the Year representing Singapore for The Asset Triple A Digital Awards 2021, Award Winner of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Global FinTech Innovation Challenge Awards 2020, technology partner of Project Ubin led by MAS, and also a two-times awardee of the Financial Sector Technology and Innovation (FSTI) grant, under the Financial Sector Development Fund administered by MAS. STACS aims to empower financial institutions to unlock massive value and discover new opportunities through our technology.
