The Asian Institute of Digital Finance (AIDF), a research institute that will develop deep capabilities to support the needs of digital financial services in Asia, will begin operating at the end of the year, as a result of a partnership between the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the National Research Foundation (NRF) and the National University of Singapore (NUS).
The institute will combine education, research, innovation and business incubation. AIDF, which will be hosted at NUS, will offer a Master’s program, will award scholarships for students to pursue research at a doctoral level and will train post-doctoral fellows in digital finance and fintech. From a research perspective, key points of interest will be digital assets and distributed ledger technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning, digital finance platforms, green finance technology, and next-gen financial services on 5G networks.
Alongside this, AIDF will also establish a unique “Fincubator”, an incubator program that aims to promote entrepreneurship and provide the support to drive transformation of ideas and projects into market-ready products and services, with focus areas such as financial solutions to solve unmet digital financial service needs of Asia, strengthening the link with investor community to spur research commercialization or industry collaboration to provide comprehensive mentorship to build market-ready solutions.
(Sources: The Monetary Authority of Singapore; The Business Times; The Straits Times)
