Tencent Cloud teams up with ADBC on banking services

China’s Tencent Cloud has teamed up with Singapore’s Asia Digital Bank Corporation (ADBC) to support the former’s digital banking services.

The partnership could see ADBC – one of 21 entities that have applied for a digital bank licence in Singapore – leverage Tencent Cloud’s financial cloud platform to provide banking services to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The two parties, which signed a memorandum of understanding earlier this week to formalise the pact, will also rope in Yincubator, a Singapore-based innovation advisory firm, to develop a cloud platform to orchestrate workflows and processes.

By doing so, ADBC said it would be able to tailor its offerings to customers by identifying their challenges, desires and goals.

“ADBC believes in delivering contextualised personal experiences to its customers,” said Nelson Goh, board director of ADBC. “To achieve this level of digital journey and customer-centricity, we need to automate the thousands of processes that underpin the customer journey.

“Doing this via cloud-based technology will result in an end-to-end, frictionless and seamless process that connects internal core banking and legacy systems, complementary products, and cognitive system providers.”

ADBC is a consortium formed by six primarily Chinese government-linked and private companies to bid for a wholesale digital banking licence from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the city-state’s central bank and financial industry regulator. Collectively, the six shareholders said they have had successful investment cases in big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain and information security.

Earlier this year, Tencent Cloud bolstered its security credentials when it obtained tier three of Singapore’s multi-tier cloud security standard, the most stringent tier designed for regulated organisations. Industry-specific regulations may be applied in addition to these controls to address security risks and threats to sensitive and personal data on the cloud.

Tencent Cloud said it is also an Ospar (Outsourced Service Provider Audit Report) supplier, among nearly 100 outsourced service providers including public cloud companies and cash processors, whose controls around security and other business processes have been validated by the Association of Banks in Singapore.