SINGAPORE (THE BUSINESS TIMES) - DBS Bank and homegrown finance and technology firm Neo & Partners Global clinched awards at the WatersTechnology Asia Awards 2020 last Thursday (July 9).
DBS Bank won three awards in the end-user categories of best cloud migration project; best use of alternative data; and best use of machine learning (for the bank's Natural Language Processing or NLP Asset Hub).
Neo & Partners Global, a six-year-old small and medium-sized enterprise (SME), was named the best infrastructure provider (in the vendor categories) for its Trading-Atrium facility platform.
The WatersTechnology Asia Awards recognise excellence in the deployment and management of financial information and technology within Asia's capital market community. WatersTechnology is an online financial technology news portal.
For DBS, the best cloud migration project award was for developing a first-in-finance, market data distribution system utilising cloud architecture (as opposed to traditional or legacy market data distribution systems that are deployed from on-site servers at physical data centres).
The bank won the best use of alternative data award for leveraging palm-vein technology to authorise PayLah! payments as opposed to other forms of biometric authentication.
DBS's NLP Asset Hub houses an ever-growing storage bank of reusable artificial intelligence/machine-learning (AI/ML) assets that can be tapped into by any unit within the bank. This helps to expedite time to market for AI/ML-based solutions.
DBS Bank chief information officer Jimmy Ng said: "As early as 2014, DBS recognised the competitive advantage that technology brings to accelerate our journey towards becoming the Digital Bank of Singapore, and we began leveraging technology to reimagine the way our customers bank.
"DBS is now in the unique position of being a technology company that does banking, instead of a traditional bank looking to digitalise."
Neo & Partners Global serves the capital markets sector buy-side community of commodity trading advisers, family offices, fund management companies and proprietary trading firms.
Using the Trading-Atrium facility platform, these firms can trade any asset classes such as equities, currencies and derivatives in a broker-neutral environment with advanced, purpose-built trading technology infrastructure.
Neo & Partners Global founder and chairman Eric Neo Say Wei said: "As a young Singapore home-grown SME serving the capital markets sector buy-side community, we are honoured that the Trading-Atrium and its ecosystem have been recognised by industry leaders in this year's WatersTechnology Asia Awards."
He added: "The Trading-Atrium has positioned Singapore squarely at the centre of an electronic trading revolution. It is a prime example of how the Trading-Atrium and its ecosystem all add up to an effective and efficient trading business environment."
