Swiss fintech incubator F10 sets up office in Singapore

ZURICH-BASED incubator and accelerator F10 has expanded to Singapore, and will kick off its six-month programme in the city-state next May.

Its Singapore office will support pre-seed and seed-stage financial technology (fintech), regulatory technology (regtech) and insurance tech (insurtech) startups, F10 announced on Friday.

Lisa Schröder, head of programme management at F10, will transfer from Zurich to be based in Singapore and lead a local team here.

This will be the second location for the incubator and accelerator, which had earlier held two hackathons in Singapore.

Corporate members of F10 in the Republic will be able to collaborate with high-potential startups. So far, Switzerland's principal stock exchange SIX and Swiss private bank Julius Baer have come on board as its Singapore members, and more will join in the coming months, F10 said.

"Singapore offers an ideal framework for fintech initiatives and is centrally located in Asia with high-potential neighbouring countries," said F10 co-founder and board member Andreas Iten.

"We want to bridge the gap between Switzerland and Singapore, and offer startups the opportunity to benefit from both ecosystems."

Applications are open until Jan 12, 2020, for the Singapore programme starting in May 2020.

It is open to teams with a validated prototype of their product or service that solves a problem within the financial industry.

Some 100 startups have participated in its P2 "Prototype to Product" startup programme in the past four years in Switzerland, with a "survival rate" of around 85 per cent, F10 said.