Another bank has launched an innovation lab as the fintech buzz gets ever louder.

The trend of banks creating innovation labs in a bid to stay ahead of the fintech challenge continues. The latest example is that of Standard Chartered with a lab in Singapore.

The UK-listed bank has opened its eXellerator facility in the Asian city-state, which the lender said builds on its existing technology outpost in California’s Silicon Valley, SC Studios. The lab is based in the bank’s main office building at Marina Bay Financial Centre.

Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Aviva are just some of the finance companies involved in creating such labs to ensure they are out front of upstart fintech challengers. The labs are designed to spawn ideas in areas such as security, client reporting, apps, use of big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and other fields.

"Singapore's strategic location at the heart of the ASEAN region and its vibrant fintech ecosystem makes it the logical location for the bank to base our new global innovation lab,” said Anju Patwardhan, global chief innovation officer.

Setting out examples of innovation it has developed, Standard Chartered cited work done with DBS Bank and Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority to complete a proof of concept delivering the first application of distributed ledger technology (this makes trade finance invoices more secure). It has also signed an agreement with A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research, which is Singapore’s national information and communications technology research institute, to jointly work on data science research and experimentation.

Standard Chartered has also worked with a Silicon Valley data analytics start-up to create a new economic index for Nigeria using crowdsourcing. 

Investment channelled into the global fintech sector shot up 75 per cent to $22.3 billion last year, according to figures from Accenture, as reported recently. (See here.) 

In Asia-Pacific, investments more than quadrupled to $4.3 billion, with the lion’s share occurring in China ($1.97 billion) and India ($1.65 billion).  

In Europe, it more than doubled (120 per cent), while the number of deals rose by 51 per cent and investments in German ventures alone swelled 843 per cent.

Investments in the North American fintech sector (the world's largest) grew more modestly, by 44 per cent to $14.8 billion; the US continued to dominate the sector with 667 fintech deals - a 16 per cent increase.

The report also identified a growing number of “big ticket” deals in the global fintech sector “as it begins to mature”: there were 94 fintech deals valued at over $50 million in 2015, compared to 52 in 2014 and 15 in 2013.