The Singapore Economic Development Board has entered an agreement with MasterCard to help Singaporean companies build innovative solutions in urban mobility, tourism and trade.
The announcement was made at the World Cities Summit 2016 being held this week at the Sands Expo & Convention Centre, Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.
The two parties said they will focus on tackling some of the biggest urban challenges of our time in the next two years: how to promote mobility, tourism and trade while enabling seamless experiences and sustainable growth.
MasterCard and the EDB in partnership with other Singapore-based companies plan to work together to design and build technology platforms in the three mentioned.
In tourism, the goal is to help Singapore residents and visitors navigate the city state’s attractions easier and in a more connected way. In urban mobility, the platform will strive to ensure that residents and visitors have an easy time using the local transit system. In trade, the goal is to digitize and automate how companies buy, sell and pay each other.
For each of these three areas, solutions will be designed and developed out of Singapore, further enhancing Singapore’s ability to create innovative products and services which are exportable and can be globally deployed.
“We are happy to work with MasterCard to enable the creation of new solutions in the identified themes. This is in line with EDB’s drive for Singapore to be a hotbed for innovation and creation of new businesses, which in turn will contribute to economic growth and the creation of good jobs,” said Kelvin Wong, assistant managing director at EDB.
In major cities around the world including London, Athens and Bogota, MasterCard is already working with local authorities and other technology companies to make public transport more accessible and more efficient.
Ari Sarker, co-President MasterCard Asia-Pacific: “For many years, Singapore has been setting the benchmark for what it means to become a smart city and a smart nation.
Since 2012, Singapore has been one of MasterCard’s global R&D Centers (MasterCard Labs) – which most recently launched the first commerce application for SoftBank Robotics’ humanoid robot Pepper.
Earlier this year, MasterCard also teamed up with IBM to offer smaller merchants in Singapore and across the Asia-Pacific region market insights that integrate IBM Watson Analytics with insights based on aggregated and anonymized transaction data through MasterCard Advisors Local Market Intelligence (LMI).