Lattice80 – Largest Fintech Space

The world’s largest fintech hub opened in Singapore on 10 November and I was honoured to be at the launch.

Singapore’s deputy prime minister and chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, was the guest of honour at the opening ceremony. His speech was full of insights regarding the stance of the Singaporean government and the regulator towards fintechs.

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The Singapore government fully supports the fintech industry and sees fintech as complementary to the banks in the financial industry, rather than a direct competitor.

Besides that, the Singapore government fully acknowledges that there will be a lot of fintech startups going bust, but it is vital to create the right ecosystem to create a fintech unicorn from Singapore.

Lattice80 is located at the centre of the central business district of Singapore and occupies two floors at the moment and plans to host 350 people in the coming week/months.

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Compared with its peers The Floor in Israel and Level 39 in the UK, it is now officially the largest fintech startup space.

Singapore Fintech Association and Finlab are already in the space, which shows the strong commitment to create the right ecosystem.

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It was established by the Marvelstone group founded by a Korean entrepreneur and hedge fund manager, Joe Cho.

It is a great step for Singapore to fully leverage its well established common law system with its highly skilled labour force. There is no doubt that Singapore will be playing a key role in fintech space.

Personally, I am thrilled to enrol on the MIT Fintech Course, which will take place during the next 12 weeks. It will kick off on 21 November.  It is not only a regular academic education, but importantly the course will need students to participate in business planning of a fintech idea to pitch to venture capitalists.

I look forward to sharing my experience about the course within the next weeks.

All the best from Singapore.
Sukru Haskan

Twitter: @sukru_haskan

Can Singapore model be applied in Turkey?

Following from my last article, I would like to find some answers as to whether Turkey could replicate the success of Suzhou Industrial Park in Diyarbakir.

Actually, some work has already been carried out in this field.

A reputable businessman and philanthropist, Erdal Aksoy, aims to replicate the project in Diyarbakir in order to create an eco-system for 1 million people in the region, including Syrian migrants.

Turkey has a strategic role in natural gas transit because of its position between the world’s second largest natural gas market, continental Europe, and the substantial natural gas reserves of the Caspian Basin and the Middle East.

Since Turkey is well placed to serve as a transit hub for oil and natural gas supplies as they move from Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East to Europe and other Atlantic markets, the project is to develop an energy industrial park as the main platform to:

  • Create employment to improve lives in order to stabilise the region, particularly at the borders.
  • Leverage the energy resources and infrastructure in the region and target markets in Eastern Europe and Western Asia.
  • End the refugee crisis in Turkey and Europe.
  • Eradicate terrorism and maintain stability in the region.

The project will involve social housing (HDB equivalent in Singapore or council housing in the UK), education centres such as nurseries, primary schools, and universities, as well as hospitals for the health services.

To ensure that it is built on strong foundations, the project is intended to be a public private partnership involving the Turkish government and possibly other governments.

Surbana Jurong, a Singapore company that also provided the expertise for Suzhou Industrial Park, has already drafted the project and the Turkish government has already been briefed and promised support for the project.

The next step is to find other sustainable and strong partners, especially from Asian countries such as China and Singapore, to support the project.

Mr Aksoy is quite open to sharing the project with anyone that would like to enhance and take ownership of this huge socio-economic innovation.

The realisation of a project of this scale could bring stability and prosperity to the region, and could potentially be replicated in other parts of the Middle East.

Personally, I believe that this is an exciting project and that everyone who wishes to contribute to peace of Middle East shall be involved in it.

All the best from Singapore.
Sukru Haskan
Twitter: @sukru_haskan

 

 

 

Suzhou Industrial Park in China

I had an opportunity to go Shanghai last weekend and I took the opportunity to visit Suzhou Industrial Park which is about 1.5 hours away from the city centre of Shanghai.

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Suzhou Industrial Park is a landmark project between Chinese and Singaporean governments to create an ecosystem to enhance people’s lives through creating jobs, providing healthcare and education services.

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In the late 1980s, when China modernisation gained momentum, Chinese delegations visited Singapore and they were eager to learn modern management methods from Singapore. In 1992, the idea of developing a modern industrial city with Singapore flourished when China’s leader Deng Xiaoping told the public that they must tap into Singapore’s experience and learn how to manage better from Singapore’s good social order.

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After several rounds of discussion, both governments decided to develop a modern industrial park in the east of Suzhou, which was founded on February 1994 when Chinese Vice Premier Li Lanqing and Singapore Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew signed an agreement on the joint development of Suzhou Industrial Park in Suzhou. Suzhou Industrial Park has a total jurisdiction of 288 km2 where China-Singapore cooperation area covers 80 km2 with a residential population of 1.2 million.

Of course, this huge project has gone through many different phases and there were a lot of disagreements with both governments during the journey. Because of these disagreements, Singapore has decreased its share in the park from 65% to 35%. Also, between 1994 and 2000, the park made huge losses. The profit between 2000 and 2003 has erased all the losses made during the period between 1994 and 2000.

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The numbers speak for themselves today. Today, the park generates one of the highest incomes per capita in China. The regional GDP per capita is 257,900 yuan in Suzhou Industrial Park where Suzhou is 136,700 yuan and Jiangsu is 88,000 yuan. The per capita disposable income of urban residents in SIP is 56,696 yuan, in Suzhou 50,390 and 37,173 yuan in Jiangsu.

Another interesting statistic is that patents per ten thousand people are 86 in SIP, 25.46 in Suzhou and 14.22 in Jiangsu. A lot of international companies have presence in the park such as Bosch, Samsung, Hitachi, Nokia, Loreal and Panasonic.

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Can Turkey copy this model in southeast of Turkey to generate economic growth, to educate Syrian migrants with the Southeastern Turkish population and most importantly to eradicate terrorism in the region?

I will write this in my next article in the coming days. Please keep following!

Best from Singapore.
Sukru Haskan

Twitter: @sukru_haskan

Book Review: Incognito by David Eagleman

I do not know if it is a coincidence, but I have started reading quite a lot of neurology books recently.

Incognito by David Eagleman was recommended by someone who I really value and I immediately ordered it through Amazon in September, but it only arrived in Singapore in early October.

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The author discusses how we run mostly on autopilot and how little we are conscious when we are living our normal lives. One of the provocative parts of the book is: even though we are in a consciousness state in most of our lives, we are not able to access this part of the brain. According to the author, this consciousness is carved by natural selection to solve problems our ancestors faced during our species’ evolutionary history or simply by practising something so hard that it becomes part of our lives such as a tennis player serving a ball or a driver driving a car.

He discusses that when an idea comes to your mind, your unreal circuitry has been working on it for hours, or days, or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations.

It is just like the apple that fell down from the tree onto Newton’s head and he discovered gravity. He had already been working on it quite hard so that the apple falling from the tree and hitting him on the head was just the last touch to the ball to cross the line for the goal!

He emphasises that the conscious mind is not at the centre of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.

One of the interesting examples that he uses in the book is that we believe that we see naturally but actually we learn to see and it is interesting that the majority of human beings live their whole lives unaware that they are only seeing a limited cone of vision at any moment.

There is a very provocative blind spot exercise that I will leave you to find out whilst reading the book.

He argues, “Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it’s true that doesn’t mean it is true.”

According to the author, many people are found to have the neural ravages of Alzheimer’s disease upon autopsy – but they never showed the symptoms while they were alive. This is because these people continued to challenge their brains into old age by staying active in their careers, doing crossword puzzles, or carrying out any other activities that kept their neural populations well exercised. As a result, they built cognitive reserve.

The author gives many very interesting examples throughout the book, which I will leave you to discover. He discusses that a slight change in the balance of brain chemistry can cause large changes in behaviour and he adds that the behaviour of the patient cannot be separated from his biology.

The conclusion is: human behaviour will always remain unpredictable and we are not really responsible for all our actions, since many parts of the brain lead us to do a lot of stuff against our will. In addition, he believes the legal system and punishments should be adjusted to the state of the criminal’s brain where they may not be responsible for their actions, but his brain would (!)

Finally, David Eagleman has a more recent book, Brain: The Story of You, and he has a website, www.eagleman.com, where you can follow him.

Best from Singapore.

Sukru Haskan
Twitter: @sukru_haskan