SINGAPORE (March 30): Singapore’s financial regulator the Monetary Authority of Singapore is walking the talk in using technology to make the industry more relevant and useful.

The regulator will be moving towards an open source Application Programming Interfaces (API) architecture, which will make it easier for the numerous FinTech firms to extract public data from MAS quickly and organise them more effectively towards the various products or applications that they are developing.

This move makes MAS the first central bank in the world to do so, and is a signal that it is eager to support the development of FinTech. 

“There’s no compliance issue here and there’s no data leakage issues here. The data is already in the public domain,” says Lawrence Ang, MAS’ executive director and head of its IT department on March 30.

“Who will benefit? I don’t know. Somebody will make good use of the data,” says Ang, at the end of a conference organised by the Association of Banks in Singapore and MAS to explore how the emerging FinTech community can grow with existing financial institutions.

APIs refer to sets of requirements that decide how one application can talk to another. In the banking context, it can refer to the way new technologies from the FinTech firms can be connected to the mass of data that traditional banks already have, so that new products can be created. The data and products are not confined to one specific asset class.

MAS runs the Masnet, which collates all manners of financial data across various asset classes and industries ranging from stocks to bonds. It is also used by other government agencies to transact between themselves and their users. For example, road tax renewal, a responsibility of the Land Transport Authority, is run through MAS’ platform, as is top-ups made into the CPF accounts, says Ang.

Beyond the data that MAS has already made available, Ang sees plenty of potential down the road. For example, banks issue statements in their own different formats. Someone might develop an API to collect and manage the data in a standardized format and thereby make better use of it.

In another possibility, when companies here file taxes and involve foreign exchange earnings, they need to check the conversion rate with MAS. Someone might be able to come up with an application that can make the process simpler.

Ang calls for greater collaboration among all interested parties. He describes the road ahead underpinned by three As: assemble the team, agree on what are the problems, and last but not least, to act upon them. “We want to facilitate, rather than to stop,” he says.