Singapore partners with Japan, UK, Switzerland on digital asset initiative

Geneva - Regulators in Singapore, Japan, the UK and Switzerland are planning asset tokenisation tests for fixed income, foreign exchange and asset management products, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) reported on October 30.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has set up Project Guardian, a policymaker group that includes Japan's Financial Services Agency (FSA), the U.K's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the FINMA to advance cross-border collaboration in asset tokenisation.

Tokenisation, which digitises real-world assets using the blockchain, is all the buzz among banking giants and institutions worldwide with major economies testing bond issuance and fund tokenisation to potentially improve the efficiency of global financial markets.

Project Guardian is focused on discussing the legal and accounting treatment of digital assets, identifying potential risks and gaps in policy, as well as developing common standards for digital asset market design and best practices across jurisdictions.

According to MAS, the project will also look to facilitate industry pilots for digital assets through regulatory sandboxes.

Singapore’s Energy Market Authority (EMA) on October 24 announced that it has given tentative approval for plans to import 1.2 gigawatts (GW) of primarily wind-generated electricity from Vietnam.

The Spotlight Singapore in Vietnam 2023 event marked a half-century of diplomatic relations, emphasising the nurturing of young entrepreneurs and addressing the complexities of cross-cultural business environments.

The number of retrenchments and unemployed residents in Singapore rose in the third quarter of 2023 as a weaker economic outlook dragged down sectors such as wholesale trade, according to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM)'s statistics.