India’s HCL Technologies, doing business as HCLTech, is planning to set up a new artificial intelligence/cloud native lab in Singapore.
The lab, which is co-funded and supported by the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), means another measure in the financial hub to improve digital resilience efforts and AI-powered testing capabilities, following a range of recent measures by the country’s regulator, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).
The news was announced as QA Financial held its QA Financial and E-Commerce Forum in the Southeast Asian business hub earlier this week.
Finserv powerhouse
Singapore’s financial services space stands to benefit from the new tech hub, according to Roshni Nadar Malhotra, HCLTech’s chairwoman, who made the announcement at an event with Singapore’s Ministry of Digital Development and Information, as well as representatives from the EDB.
The banking and finance space in the city-state is considered a regional financial services powerhouse and one of the most important banking hubs in the world, alongside New York City and London.
HCLTech said that expertise and resources of the Nanyang Polytechnic and Singapore Polytechnic institutions will be used in the lab, in order to develop, test and roll out new AI and GenAI-powered solutions, including testing tools and software monitoring platforms.
“Our lab is a conducive starting point for firms that want to embark on a collaborative journey to develop blueprints for AI and GenAI-led efficiencies, new business capabilities, skilling roadmaps and overall organisational competitive advantage with a pragmatic approach,” Nadar Malhotra explained.
Singapore has made significant strides in helping companies adopt and innovate with AI across various sectors, but particularly in financial services and banking.
In 2023, the Singapore government launched the Singapore National AI Strategy 2.0, highlighting its commitment to leading global AI innovation. This strategy aims to build a trusted and responsible AI ecosystem.
Investments in AI
The new AI lab comes amid a host of measures to improve digital resilience in Singapore’s finance space, primarily by investing in AI capabilities.
MAS announced earlier this year to commit S$100 million, or close to $75m, to support the island-state’s banks and other financial services firms to design, test and build capabilities in artificial intelligence technologies.
The capital was meant to speed up the advancement of AI related innovation and adoption in financial services, MAS said.
“While financial institutions have been progressively adopting AI, recent technological advancements have made such tools more widely accessible and increased the pace of adoption,” the body explained at the time of the announcement.
“There are strong prospects for the financial industry to apply AI to solve industry-wide problems beyond what each financial institution can do individually.”
– Singapore’s MAS
With the advent of Generative AI, financial institutions have embarked on initiatives to map the technology’s opportunities and risks, and have begun piloting it across a range of use cases, it stressed.
“Nevertheless, the level of AI-readiness and adoption varies hugely across financial institutions in Singapore,” the regulator warned.
“MAS will therefore bolster financial institutions’ development and deployment of AI technologies in Singapore,” it said.
The watchdog firmly believes that Singapore has “the potential to become a centre of excellence for anchoring AI capabilities, such as in the development of applications, as well as testing and deployment of AI solutions for the financial sector.”
MAS will support financial institutions in establishing AI innovation centres in Singapore for a range of functions including AI model building and training, deployment of AI models for high-impact use cases, governance and risk management, as well as testing and monitoring.
It also plans to develop AI platforms to address industry wide use cases.
“There are strong prospects for the financial industry to apply AI to solve industry-wide problems beyond what each financial institution can do individually,” MAS clarified.
This involves the development of frameworks and platforms for policies and protocols that enable secure and privacy protected data exchange where financial institutions can collaborate on industry-wide use cases, the regulator explained.
HCLTech operations
Zooming in on HCLTech’s AI efforts, the firm’s new lab follows similar initiatives in the US, UK, Germany and India.
The company has been operating in Singapore for over four decades, building a relatively strong and visible technology presence in the country’s finance space by working with a host of local and regional banks and other financial services firms.
In fact, in recent years Singapore has become the main hub for HCLTech’s Southeast Asia operations and has led technological advancement.
With regards to testing, only recently, HCLTech confirmed to QA Financial it had struck a partnership with Computer Aided Software Technologies (CAST), which is aimed at testing the quality and reliability of a range newly developed customised chips that should soon power a range of apps and digital solutions at financial services firms.
The company plans to test and trial the design verification, emulation and prototyping of the company’s new turnkey SoC solutions, or system-on-chip, which will be done by leveraging CAST’s silicon-proven IP cores, testing models and controllers.
According to HCLTech’s president of engineering and R&D services, Vijay Guntur, the deal evolved around the ability to offer customised chips in order to accelerate the digital transformation and automation processes across banking, insurance, asset management and other financial services.
“It will help firms to significantly reduce not just their engineering risks but also development costs,” Hyderabad-based Guntur explained. “CAST shares our vision for this electronic systems design,” he added.
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