With close to 400 FinTech and InsurTech startups in Singapore, the country has become a brew pot for innovation. Spearheading this wave of innovation are some very inspirational women. In this article from Let’s Talk Payments, our very own CEO and co-founder Charis Liau was selected as one of Singapore’s female leaders who are leading promising tech startups or are helping in promoting the ecosystem. This list was curated by Let’s Talk Payments, Varun Mittal, and inputs from the local ecosystem.
Below is the full list.
Adelina Peltea
Company: Argomi
Focus Area: Capital Markets/Investments Platform
Designation/Role at Company: COO
About Argomi: Argomi is a brand of AMaaS. It offers an integrated investment management platform for institutional asset and fund managers. It provides asset management solutions like listing, searching and aggregating positions by different categories like book/trader/asset class or fund, automatically calculating positions in the market and notification about upcoming investment activities. It also enables clients to record and reconcile their trades by automating various processes like monitoring for exceptions, audit trails and backups. It offers a multi-asset platform comprising of equities, FX and futures, across countries like Japan, Singapore, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Hong Kong, etc.
Adrianna Tan
Company: Wobe
Focus Area: Payments/Remittance
Designation/Role at Company: Founder & CEO
About Wobe: Wobe is a mobile application that enables people to start a small business with the help of their Android smartphone. Users can start their own business by selling prepaid phone credit and other digital products like electricity and water vouchers on a later stage. Wobe enables millions of unbanked Southeast Asians to perform micro-payments with the help of an e-wallet on their smartphones. The users are able to generate income by processing person-person bills and utilities through this application.
Ai Meun Lim
Company: Percipient
Focus Area: Big Data & Analytics
Designation/Role at Company: Chief Product Officer
About Percipient: Percipient is a data technology and analytics company which enables organizations to drive scalable, efficient and cost-effective growth in data by using its Big Data technology and advanced analytics platform. Its flagship product, UniConnect, is built to hyper-accelerate connectivity between data sources that currently don’t talk to each other or cost too much to integrate. Percipients other solutions include SparkPlus, ScalETF, and Unified APIs.
Alice Chen
Company: InvestaCrowd
Focus Area: Online Funding
Designation/Role at Company: Co-founder & General Counsel
About InvestaCrowd: InvestaCrowd is a real estate crowdfunding platform that brings exclusive investment opportunities to its members. It is a members-only platform for commodities debt and equity investments in private real estate projects. It breaks down share price per investor which enables the investors to co-invest alongside reputable institutional grade real estate developers.
Anna Gong
Company: Perx Technologies
Focus Area: AI
Designation/Role at Company: CEO & Board Member
About Perx: Perx Technologies is a mobile customer engagement solutions provider that enables businesses to acquire, engage and reward their customers, intelligently and contextually via real-time, actionable insights. Perx offers a mobile loyalty app that makes it an easy and convenient way for its users to earn rewards through points, chops or stamps from different merchants across Singapore. Perx also enables users to discover and locate the best rewards around them ranging from everyday purchases, overseas adventures or beauty therapy.
Anna Vanessa Haotanto
Company: The New Savvy
Focus Area: Personal Finance Management
Designation/Role at Company: CEO at The New Savvy
About The New Savvy: The New Savvy is an online financial guide and career tips platform for women based out of Singapore. The portal publishes content for women related to their finances and careers.
Ayesha Khanna
Company: Addo.AI
Focus Area: AI
Designation/Role at Company: Co-founder & CEO
About Addo.AI: Addo.ai is an intelligence advisory and incubator platform that enables governments, corporations, and startups to build data-driven platforms by analyzing a massive amount of data and provide data-driven services and products to the users. With the help of these AI-driven solutions, companies are able to reach new markets and optimize their operations. The various services offered by Addo.ai are statistical analyzing, deep learning, code engineering, machine learning, user predictions, and cloud-based architecture.
Chandrima Das
Company: Bento
Focus Area: Investments Platform
Designation/Role at Company: Co-founder & CEO
About Bento: Bento is an algorithm-powered robotic investment advisor that provides sophisticated investment tools and customized portfolios. Bento’s investment platform aggregates clients’ holdings data across multiple banks and offers discretionary portfolio management & advisory services at competitive rates.
Charis Liau
Company: Minterest
Focus Area: Lending
Designation/Role at Company: Co-founder & CEO
About Minterest: Minterest is a peer-to-peer lending platform that offers a value proposition for both borrowers and investors. It provides tailor-made financing solutions to the borrowers as per their business requirements. It also provides advice to investors by identifying the suitable Singapore companies for investment.
Cindy Nguyen
Company: Regit
Focus Area: RegTech, Big Data & Analytics
Designation/Role at Company: CEO & Founder at Regit
About Regit: Regit is a compliant, formless-forever customer platform that simplifies how business and customers exchange information in one click.
Elena Lonenko
Company: Turnkey Lender
Focus Area: Lending
Designation/Role at Company: Co-founder & Business Development
About Turnkey Lender: Turnkey Lender is an online lending software with credit application processing & loan management for payday lenders, microfinance, and online lending businesses. It helps lenders with a credit scoring systems. It is an all-in-one platform and uses automation to filter out unnecessary or risky propositions.
Gina Heng
Company: Miss Kaya
Focus Area: Personal Finance Management
Designation/Role at Company: Co-founder & CEO
About Miss Kaya: Miss Kaya is a digital financial services provider for women in Asia focused on financial budgeting and portfolio management. It aims to provide women with the resources and information on ways to best grow their incomes, enabling them to be financially responsible and in control of their budget, allowing them to mold their future plans without any monetary hindrance.
Ginnie Chin
Company: Culum Capital
Focus Area: Business Lending
Designation/Role at Company: Co-founder & MD
About Culum Capital: Culum Capital enables businesses to grow by providing them with funding options. The different funding solutions offered by them are receivables purchase or invoice financing for small companies and supply chain finance or supplier finance for large companies. The investment platform also enables accredited investors to invest in short-term invoices with an expected return up to 25% per annum.
Goh Yiping
Company: Element
Focus Area: AI, Security – Fraud & Authentication
Designation/Role at Company: President
About Element Inc.: Element develops and distributes an AI-based mobile software solution to enable digital identity for health services and financial inclusion. It utilizes mobile deep learning technology to build high-performing mobile platforms for digital identification.
Jennifer Leger
Company: Quber
Focus Area: Personal Financial Management
Designation/Role at Company: Co-founder
About Quber: Quber helps FIs increase customer lifetime value and acquire new customers by leveraging AI & big data within an engaging mobile platform.
Joyce Woo
Company: Jachin Capital
Focus Area: Wealth Management/Investments Platform
Designation/Role at Company: Founder & CEO
About Jachin Capital: iAdvisor, a brand of Jachin Capital, is a digital investing platform that provides personalized dynamic portfolios to the accredited investors. These portfolios are carefully administered as per the client’s requirements. It offers 28 curated stock portfolios with themes ranging from robotics to cybersecurity to driverless cars. The portfolios are developed by referring to the stocks listed in five different countries.
Ketki Sen
Company: Spinta
Focus Area: Startup Accelerator
Designation/Role at Company: Co–Founder & Director at Spinta Global Accelerator
About Spinta Global Accelerator: Spinta Accelerator helps aspiring entrepreneurs to enhance their business ideas and transform them into successful businesses. It employs a three-step Katalyst process that includes an array of services in order to develop the minimal viable product or solution.
Khai Lin
Company: Fundnel
Focus Area: Online Funding
Designation/Role at Company: Co-founder & CFO
About Fundnel: Fundnel is a private investment platform that offers unlisted securities in growth and pre-IPO stage companies across industries to a qualified network of investors, comprising of both professional – corporate venture, private equity, venture capital funds, family offices, angel investor networks – and individually accredited investors actively looking to diversify their current portfolio. Fundnel screens all investment opportunities to ensure businesses meet the minimum requirements defined by the Fundnel Factor – a proprietary data-driven due-diligence process analyzing over 130 quantitative data points per company – before reaching its investor network.
Michelle Katics
Company: BankersLab®
Focus Area: Training-Tech
Designation/Role at Company: Co-founder, Non- Executive Director &Innovation Advisor
About BankersLab®: BankersLab has developed SaaS ‘virtual world’ training simulations for bankers and FinTech lenders. Its flagship product, PortfolioQuest, is a single player Saas simulation product where participants compete against each other to manage the most profitable portfolios. BankersLab delivers innovative and strategic learning to the bankers and financial professionals. It offers training to the participants on both secured and unsecured retail products and covers all parts of credit life cycle like product design, account management, portfolio monitoring, etc.
Nalinee Chinowuthichai
Company: InvoiceInterchange
Focus Area: Business Lending
Designation/Role at Company: COO
About InvoiceInterchange: InvoiceInterchange is an invoice-trading marketplace, providing working capital solutions to fund business growth. InvoiceInterchange offers a fast & flexible way to finance businesses and allows companies to grow, pay bills or overcome seasonal cash flow fluctuations by freeing up cash locked up in invoices due 30, 60, or even 90 days.
Nicki Ramsay
Company: CardUp
Focus Area: Payments
Designation/Role at Company: Founder & CEO
About CardUp: CardUp’s customers (consumers and small businesses) choose to use their favorite credit card where they couldn’t before, specifically for big ticket items such as paying rent, taxes, suppliers or payroll. By shifting payments that were previously made by check, cash or bank transfer to card, they unlock up to 60 days instant credit, improve cashflow, and earn rewards, miles and cashback on all their big payments
Nyha Shree
Company: Jumper.ai
Focus Area: AI
Designation/Role at Company: Co-founder
About Jumper.ai: jumper.ai has built AI-powered omnichannel commerce platform that enables buy, sell and collect payments on social media platforms. Sellers generate actionable #hashtags and/or super-powered short links using jumper’s tech which converts their post into a direct point-of-sale. Buyers can show intent by commenting on the post with the #producthashtag and confirm via their AI channel (FB Messenger/SMS currently). For posts with super-powered short links, users click the link and purchase using their web-bot in < 1 minute; and if they’ve previously purchased using jumper.ai, their preferred AI channel will kick in (messenger/SMS).
Rekha Hari
Company: SoCash
Focus Area: BankingTech
Designation/Role at Company: Co-founder, Director & Head of Program Management
About SoCash: SoCash develops an application to withdraw and deposit cash. The company allows users to place an order, select a merchant or a neighborhood shop, and get cash. It also allows neighborhood shop owners to earn extra cash and bring more customers to their shop. The startup uses your bank’s mobile app to let users transfer an amount to the merchant’s bank account. Users can then pick up the cash at that outlet.
Rosaline Chow Koo
Company: CXA Group
Focus Area: InsurTech
Designation/Role at Company: Founder & CEO of CXA Group
About CXA Group: Connexions Asia is an insurance and wellness marketplace that helps companies transform their current healthcare spends into personalized benefits and wellness programs. The company administers, tracks, and analyzes data from health screenings, lifestyle risks, and hospitals & clinics to improve workforce health, reduce claims costs and absenteeism.
Sarah Tin
Company: Bamboo
Focus Area: B2B FinTech
Designation/Role at Company: Co-founder & CEO
About Bamboo: Bamboo enables small businesses in Asia to manage their company’s expenses with the help of a digital expense management platform. They provide a web-based or handheld app that has an integrated online payments and expense system for managing business expenses.
Dr. Shonali Krishnaswamy
Company: AIDA Technologies
Focus Area: AI
Designation/Role at Company: CTO
About AIDA Technologies: AIDA Technologies focuses on AI-based predictive analytics and intelligent systems. Through its AI-driven analytics, AIDA provides solutions that solve the key challenge of augmenting human experts the ability to make decisions based on large amounts of heterogeneous information.
Silvana Carpanelli-Hayes
Company: Waave
Focus Area: Payments
Designation/Role at Company: Founder at WAAVE
About WAAVE: WAAVE is a social mobile wallet that enables the fastest way to order and pay for drinks, food, store items and tickets in Singapore.
Val (Valenzia) Ji-hsuan Yap
Company: Policy Pal
Focus Area: InsurTech
Designation/Role at Company: Founder & CEO
About PolicyPal: PolicyPal is a digital insurance manager which aims to make the process of buying and managing insurance simple. The portal allows consumers to manage their insurance policies online.
Yuhan Hu
Company: Singapore Receivables Exchange (SGRecX)
Focus Area: Business Lending
Designation/Role at Company: General Counsel & Co-founder
About Singapore Receivables Exchange (SGRecX): Singapore Receivables Exchange is an online platform that provides account receivables financing to SMEs. The SMEs can simply upload their invoices and get the money in as quick as three days and even at a faster rate for repeating customers. Once approved on SGRecx, the business will receive a unique account number and a physical PO address in the company’s name. Since the SGRecx account is in the company’s name, the customers of the company can directly pay to SGRex either by electronic transfer to the bank account or by physical checks sent to the post office.
While the above list showcases some of the female entrepreneurs in the FinTech and InsurTech space there are other notable entrepreneurs in Singapore that we would like to highlight:
Cherry Khoo
Company: AOI
Focus Area: Health/MedTech
Designation/Role at Company: Co-Founder, Director-CEO at AOI
About AOI: AOI (Advanced Ophthalmic Innovations) conducts research to develop long-term and effective solutions in order to prevent glaucoma patients from losing eyesight. The company’s flagship product Paul Glaucoma Implant is a drainage device that will prevent further progression of glaucoma in the eyes.
Caroline Bowler
Company: Bowlah
Focus Area: FinTech PR
Designation/Role at Company: Founder
About Bowlah: Bowlah is a specialist financial technology public relations agency.
Eileen Chan
Company: Content.co
Focus Area: MarTech
Designation/Role at Company: Co-founder
About Content.co: Content.co is an end-to-end marketing platform that enables brands to create and deploy content marketing programs. The platform enables the clients to discover new ideas, handle payments and review results. Content.co offers a wide range of solutions like creating content, engaging target audience by distributing contents, developing content strategy for brands & customers, and editorial management of content.
Mouna Aouri
Company: Woomentum
Focus Area: Women-focused advisory and mentorship
Designation/Role at Company: Founder & CEO
About Woomentum: Woomentum is an online community platform for entrepreneurs and business leaders to connect with experts, mentors, and investors. Woomentum focuses on gender diverse teams and promoting women to participate in the engine of growth and innovation.
Sumedha Khoche
Company: Social Weaver
Focus Area: Parent-Tech
Designation/Role at Company: Founder & CEO
About Social Weaver: Social Weaver caters to parents and parents-to-be by providing a list of Singapore’s service providers and resources for kids, with ratings and reviews. Users can discover, compare and book services on the website and service providers can list their businesses in social weaver.
Yi Wen Chan
Company: Content.co
Focus Area: MarTech
Designation/Role at Company: Co-founder
About Content.co: Content.co is an end-to-end marketing platform that enables brands to create and deploy content marketing programs. The platform enables the clients to discover new ideas, handle payments and review results. Content.co offers a wide range of solutions like creating content, engaging target audience by distributing content, developing content strategy for brands & customers, and editorial management of content.
This article was contributed by Medici
