Overall investment in the city-state is up almost a quarter despite last year’s widely publicized blowouts, with Wealthtech spending up almost 17-fold. finews.asia takes a closer look.

The names are familiar to everyone. FTX, Terra, Luna - Celsius. Closer to home, it is Three Arrows - Zipmex. The common link? All are now collapsed husks of their former selves, victims of 2022’s deep crypto winter.

As regulators, litigators, and clients pick through the bankrupt embers, one very surprising fact has come to light. Singaporeans haven’t lost any appetite for fintech investment, particularly in wealthtech.

That, at least, is KPMG’s take, which released its regular «Pulse of Fintech» report Thursday. In it, Singapore appears to be very happy to invest in whatever remnants are left while the rest of the world hunkers down and nurses their losses.

Massive Increase

KPMG said the gain in wealthtech spending was a result of expanded access to a broader base of investors. But still, the figures are breathtaking. Investors were happy to provide $500 million in funding in 2022, up 16.9 times from the year-earlier figure.

More generally, the consultancy said that city-state fintech investments were up 22 percent last year, rising to $4.1 billion. By contrast, during the same period, global spending fell 30 percent to $164.1 billion. Extrapolated, that means that 2 percent of all fintech investment globally was in Singapore.

With that, the city-state seemingly punched above its weight, with KPMG adding that the investment total last year was up three-quarters from a pandemic-disrupted 2020.

Still, last year’s debacles did leave their mark, with investments in crypto falling 22 percent. According to the consultancy, this was because investors put money behind blockchain solutions that didn’t involve crypto in payments and asset tokenization. Funding for payments, for example, was up more than half despite that.

Little Interest

But local investors clearly had less interest in regtech, where investment fell 5 percent. That might not only be seen as counterintuitive given everything that happened last year, it also went against global trends. Internationally, investment in regtech rose by more than half to $18.6 billion.

Regional Developments

Across the region, the picture is far less clear – and far chunkier, even though overall investment levels were little changed at $50.5 billion. That was because almost half of that came from Block’s acquisition of Afterpay. 

It also meant that investment in the second half dropped precipitously to $5.8 billion in the second half, a little more than a tenth of the annual total.

In China, the pandemic and the extensive, prolonged lockdowns in key cities appeared to have an outsize impact. Both investment and deals fell to the lowest level seen since 2013.