Purpose-bound money, still searching for its purpose

AT the recent Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF), I bought lunch for myself using some digital Singapore dollars. The experience was rather underwhelming – it reminded me of the process of using the digital Community Development Council (CDC) vouchers, except it was more unwieldy.

My tokens were loaded on to a unique wallet that I knew how to access only via a weblink. I had emailed this link to myself a week before, so I spent some time fishing for the link when I wanted to use the vouchers. I should have bookmarked the link, but the user experience could have been more intuitive.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), organiser of SFF, had used the event to test two types of so-called “purpose-bound digital Singapore dollars”. One was disbursed by the government and issued by DBS in the form of tokenised deposits. This was the one I managed to use for my lunch.