Singapore skyline and Marina Bay at dusk

The next national advantage is under construction

Singapore's next advantage.

Now FSTI 4.0 puts S$220M behind the next three yearsSignal ACT brings banks together against frontier-AI riskOn the ground Digital banking enters its profitability testNow FSTI 4.0 puts S$220M behind the next three yearsSignal ACT brings banks together against frontier-AI risk

01 / The policy file

A three-year signal
from the MAS.

People moving through a Singapore fintech event — Singapore FinTech Festival

The brief / S$220M

Capital is moving from the lab into the ledger.

Announced for the next three years, the fourth Financial Sector Technology and Innovation scheme puts artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and distributed systems at the centre of Singapore's financial competitiveness play.

There is a second signal in the package: at least 1,000 fintech internships. The ambition is not only to bring frontier tools into banks, but to make the local talent loop visible to the next generation of builders.

“The experiment is no longer whether AI can work in finance. It is whether finance can scale AI with trust.”

Inside the allocation

Four ways the
money travels.

Tap through the themes behind the headline and follow the policy from research infrastructure to people.

Responsible AI, at a scale the market can feel.

AI Pathfinder is built around deployment rather than spectacle: governance, privacy, model risk and the hard work of making a system useful inside a regulated institution.

3 yrsProgramme horizon

AICore frontier

1k+Internships targeted

Preparing today's financial rails for tomorrow's cryptography.

Quantum technology is still early, but the policy vocabulary is already here: research partnerships, resilient encryption and a financial sector that can migrate before the threat becomes urgent.

QResearch frontier

0→1Readiness window

TrustDesign principle

New rails, with Singapore-level supervision.

Distributed technologies bring new ways to move value across borders. The strategic question is not speed alone, but how interoperability and safeguards can become a competitive advantage.

SEARegional lens

24/7Network promise

SafeTrust layer

The most valuable infrastructure may be human.

With 1,000 fintech internship opportunities in view, the programme turns the talent pipeline into a national technology asset, connecting young people to the rooms where the next operating model is being written.

1,000Places supported

NextGeneration focus

LocalTalent loop

02 / The macro pulse

When the data centre
becomes an economy.

The AI build-out is showing up in trade, infrastructure and confidence. The numbers tell a more textured story than a single growth headline.

2026 growth outlook / official range

4.5–5.5%

Singapore's revised outlook reflects a year in which technology-related sectors carry an outsized share of the growth story.

14–16%

Revised non-oil domestic exports outlook, lifted by electronics and precision engineering.

10%

Share of global chips made in Singapore, anchoring the AI hardware supply chain.

70+

AI centres of excellence and applied research nodes across the island's ecosystem.

85%

Of local AI users reporting a meaningful improvement in work productivity.

03 / The policy upside

The incentives
are on the table.

Budget / EIS / IRAS

Make the AI bill part of the growth plan.

Singapore's latest enterprise innovation support turns adoption, compliance and applied research into a financial decision with a clearer upside.

EIS
2026

01 / TAX RELIEF

400%

Enhanced deduction

Eligible AI purchases, leases, deployments and AI-related compliance R&D can receive up to a 400% tax deduction, capped at S$50,000 per year of assessment.

02 / ENTERPRISE

40%

Corporate tax rebate

Combined with the latest corporate income tax rebate, the package lowers the cost of bringing a serious AI workflow into a small or scaling business.

03 / ECI

S$150M

Compute that meets the builder

The Enterprise Compute Initiative pairs cloud credits with development tools and official advisors, helping teams move from an idea to an AI MVP faster.

04 / FSTI 4.0

S$220M

Six lanes into finance

AI Pathfinder, talent, infrastructure and platforms, centres of excellence and related tracks give financial innovators more than one route to support.

Singapore skyline near a technology district — **Kampong AI**One-North / Singapore

04 / The cluster effect

A new address for the AI economy.

One-North is being shaped into a denser AI ecosystem: a place where work, living, incubation and applied research sit close enough for ideas, capital and compute to move between them.

WorkApplied teams, labs and enterprise builders in one district.

ScaleShared compute and platform access for the next generation of products.

CapitalVenture funds and corporate partners within the same physical network.

TalentResearchers, founders and operators crossing paths every day.

05 / Digital trust

The security layer
gets an upgrade.

Visa / Singapore roadmap

Make every transaction harder to fake.

As digital commerce scales, the security story is moving beyond a single fraud alert. It is becoming an architecture across identity, tokens, merchants and the payment network.

AI-led ecosystem defence

Signals across the payment chain are combined to identify new patterns of account abuse, synthetic identity and automated fraud.

Tokenisation by default

Replace exposed payment credentials with safer tokens, reducing the value of the data stolen from a checkout or merchant system.

A calmer checkout

Authentication can become more adaptive: stronger when risk rises, quieter when a trusted customer is moving through a familiar flow.

SME resilience

Security tools and clearer digital identity rails give smaller merchants a better chance to participate in borderless commerce without carrying enterprise-level complexity.

06 / The regional bridge

Trust now travels
across the border.

Singapore × Thailand

A safer digital corridor for Southeast Asia.

MAS and the Bank of Thailand are putting a formal cooperation layer around cyber threat intelligence, digital fraud protection and coordinated response. The agreement gives regional finance a shared vocabulary for the incidents that do not stop at a border.

Threat intelligence / shared response

Real-time signals, shared securely.

Financial authorities can exchange threat intelligence and coordinate on major cyber incidents, shortening the distance between a signal detected in one market and a response in another.

A launchpad into Thailand.

RegTech and anti-fraud companies established in Singapore gain a clearer route into Thailand's growing digital economy, with regional trust infrastructure behind the product.

Resilience becomes a market.

Cross-border cooperation creates demand for fraud analytics, identity verification, secure payment rails and incident response built for the realities of Southeast Asian commerce.

07 / The adoption curve

AI is already
in the operating budget.

Enterprise pulse / 2026

51%

of Singapore enterprises report that autonomous AI agents are already running in real business workflows, moving the conversation from pilot projects to operating discipline.

15.4%

of IT budgets

Allocated to AI, close to the global high-water mark. The investment is shifting from experimentation into measurable workflow change.

108%

year-on-year growth

AI allocation has more than doubled, while companies expect another 83% increase in pure AI technology spending next year.

35%

less workflow drag

Standard Chartered's AI-led employee onboarding work removed a substantial share of repetitive HR and manager processes.

94.6%

SME digital adoption

A dense local buyer base gives SaaS, AI productivity and cloud security companies a real commercial surface to build against.

08 / The sovereign research bet

Build the science
behind the systems.

S$1 billion for public AI research.

Singapore's 2025–2030 public AI research fund doubles the previous cycle and stretches the national strategy beyond adoption. The focus runs from fundamental AI to applied systems, with the state acting as patient capital for work that may take years to reach a product.

The visiting professor programme adds a global layer: leading scientists and research teams are invited to work with local institutes and companies, turning Singapore into a place where research questions can move quickly into regulated, real-world environments.

5 yrsResearch horizon

2×Previous cycle

AIFundamental + applied

Talent / institutions / industry

Research becomes infrastructure when people can stay for the hard part.

That is the quiet advantage behind the headline number: continuity, collaboration and a route from the lab to the city.

Fundamental AIModels, methods and the technical foundations that expand what is possible.

Applied AISystems tested in finance, health, security, industry and public services.

Global talentScientists, founders and local operators working inside the same national loop.

09 / Applied intelligence

From chatbot
to co-pilot.

In Singapore's financial sector, AI is beginning to make decisions, route risk and move money. The new question is who gets to set the boundaries.

Agentic finance / 01

MO AI reads the balance sheet.

Finmo's autonomous finance agent monitors liquidity, spots exposure and orchestrates cross-border cash movement before the question reaches a human desk.

Small business / 02

A 360° credit lens for SMEs.

AI banking models turn fragmented business signals into a faster view of working capital, making the smallest companies legible to the financial system.

Singapore city lights reflected at night

Borderless commerce / 03

Every QR code is a bridge.

Cloud AI helps merchants translate menus, route payments and welcome the next customer across languages and borders in one continuous flow.

04 / Cyber dossier

Trust is now
a live system.

As AI accelerates the attack surface, Singapore is building collective defences across banks, regulators and the payment habits of everyday people.

Defending the financial city.

The policy shift is clear: use AI to detect AI. From the ACT working group to privacy-preserving anti-money-laundering experiments, the new perimeter is shared.

For households and companies, the most powerful safeguards can look deliberately physical: locked funds, dual approval and a pause before a new payee becomes trusted.

ACT / frontier AI defence

MAS and the Association of Banks in Singapore bring DBS, UOB and OCBC into one response layer for automated, high-scale threats.

AML / privacy by design

Hashed account data lets banks explore shared machine learning signals without placing raw customer records in one central pool.

Money Lock / slow is safe

Funds can be locked from digital transfer, while maker-checker approval and cooling periods create time to notice a scam.

05 / The SFF timeline

The SFF shift.

The Singapore FinTech Festival is a useful barometer: watch the nouns change and you can see where the industry is heading next.

Web3, with a purpose.

Blockchain, green finance and new cross-border rails set the opening frame.

AI enters the service.

Fraud detection, risk management and customer care become live use cases.

The AI bank arrives.

Concept becomes practice as AI-led credit and defence move onto the stage.

Five forces, one reset.

Agentic AI and quantum technology meet policy and geopolitics.

2022 set the foundation: decentralised architecture, cross-border payments and sustainable finance gave the next cycle its first vocabulary.

06 / Market board

The capital map.

The Singapore story is not only about more money. It is about where conviction is becoming concentrated.

Digital banking

Profitability and distribution are the new tests for the country's digital banks.

GLDBS$16.1M profitFirst full-year profit

MariBank~S$2B depositsEcosystem lift

TrustDigital-firstScale watch

Capital map

Funding has tightened, but the largest bets are getting larger and more focused.

Fintech Q2US$544M3.4× quarter on quarter

Average ticketUS$49.5M+82%

Hot lanesAI / paymentsHeaded up

07 / The human layer

Build the talent
before the hype.

The next wave of advantage will belong to places that make technical careers visible, portable and worth staying for.

1,000+

fintech internships

Supported opportunities designed to put young talent closer to the real operating edge.

400%

AI incentive headline

Expanded innovation support is lowering the cost of building, testing and deploying AI locally.

AI ×

the new career grammar

Cloud, model risk, cyber engineering and policy fluency are converging into high-value roles.

The reader's desk

What will define Singapore's next decade?

Cast a view. See how the room is thinking.