Singapore is putting S$220M into fintech as private funding hits a decade low

Singapore has committed S$220M, about $173M, to its fintech sector over the next three years. It made the announcement three days after KPMG reported that private investment in Singaporean fintech had fallen to its weakest first half in roughly a decade.

The timing is not a coincidence, and nobody is pretending otherwise. Gan Kim Yong, who is deputy prime minister, trade and industry minister and chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, set out the commitment on Monday.

The money runs through the fourth iteration of the Financial Sector Technology and Innovation scheme, which has existed since 2015 and has backed more than 350 projects. FSTI 4.0 splits into six tracks covering institutional innovation, AI adoption, infrastructure and platforms, and talent.

The talent track has the most concrete commitment attached. At least 1,000 fintech internships will be created over the three years, with the stipends co-funded, which is a direct intervention in a labour market rather than a grant programme.

“These efforts will help our financial institutions, fintech firms, and workers innovate, scale, and build capabilities to seize emerging opportunities,” Gan said. He framed the AI opportunity in terms of capture rather than defence, adding that the financial industry is not a zero-sum game.

The private market has been telling a bleaker story. Singaporean fintech companies raised $499m across 53 deals in the first half of 2026, down from $1.45bn across 97 deals in the same period last year.

The composition is worse than the total. A single $320m cross-border payments round in June accounted for nearly two-thirds of the entire half, which means the rest of the ecosystem shared roughly $179m between it.

Deal count fell less steeply than value, from 97 to 53, which describes a market still doing business at smaller cheque sizes rather than one that has stopped. Early-stage activity holding up while growth rounds disappear is the usual shape of a downturn.

Split by sector, the pattern is familiar. AI and machine learning took $365.9m across 18 deals while digital assets managed 27 deals for $95.5m, so crypto is still doing volume, and AI is taking the money.

None of this makes Singapore a small market. It hosts around 1,800 fintech firms employing about 10,000 people, and the sector took roughly S$3bn during 2025 before the drop.

The decline is also not peculiar to Singapore, which is the more useful context. British fintech funding fell to its own decade low this year, and European rounds have been landing against a broader plunge rather than a recovery.

Singapore also has a specific reason to act rather than wait. Its financial centre competes directly with Hong Kong, Dubai and London for the same firms, and a hub that looks becalmed for two years does not simply resume where it left off.

What differs is the response. Britain reached for a £1bn private growth fund to close a gap it had identified, while Singapore is deploying a comparatively modest sum of public money into infrastructure, adoption and people.

S$220m will not replace a billion dollars of vanished private capital, and it is not designed to. Co-funding an internship or an AI deployment lowers the cost of trying something, which is a different instrument from writing a cheque into a cap table.

Whether that works depends on what caused the drop. If investors have simply repriced fintech everywhere, cheaper experimentation keeps companies alive until sentiment turns, and if Singapore is losing ground to a rival hub, a talent subsidy will not fix it.

FSTI has at least the advantage of a record. Eleven years and 350 projects is long enough to know what the scheme does well, which is more than most industrial policy can claim at the point of renewal.

The government is betting on the first reading. Three years, six tracks, a thousand internships, and a stated intention to be positioned when the money comes back.