The programme comes as a partnership between leading financial institutions, Standard Chartered Bank and Allianz Malaysia, as well as strategic partner Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC).

More than 100 early-stage and late-stage scale-ups from 30 countries submitted applications for the programme. Their diverse businesses covered sub-sectors, such as insurance technology (InsurTech), regulatory technology (RegTech), payments, wealth management, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain, all of which represent some of the world’s most cutting-edge solutions.

The 10 finalists for SuperCharger Kuala Lumpur 2017 are listed as below (in alphabetical order):
1. Capnovum - RegTech
2. Chekk - KYC & Digital Identity
3. MyFinB - Cognitive Analytics
4. Neosurance - InsurTech
5. Neuroprofiler - RegTech & WealthTech
6. Pand.ai - Artificial Intelligence & Chatbots
7. Pulse iD - Big Data Analytics
8. Solus - Cybersecurity
9. Springday - InsurTech & SaaS
10. Tramonex - Payments

The 10 finalists all bring unique and complementary solutions to the programme, with all featuring several cross-industry innovations. The businesses tackle problems that improve financial services, whether it comes from client security, user experience and wellbeing, new products, or intelligent services for banks. As a result, there are many potential collaboration opportunities between start-ups and SuperCharger’s institutional partners.

With MDEC’s support, the programme will take place at Komune co-working space, UOA Corporate Tower, The Vertical in Bangsar South and will run until December 15 2017.

The SuperCharger programme comes at an exciting time for Malaysia’s budding FinTech ecosystem. In particular, the country benefits from a high smartphone penetration of almost 70% (GSMA 2017). This enables financial service providers a powerful channel to provide access and increase usage to consumers.

Malaysia’ key institutions have always been supportive of constant innovation. In 2015, Standard Chartered established its Global Collective Intelligence and Command Centre in Malaysia with the role to create new technological solutions to improve banking using dedicated teams of software engineers and operation specialists. As for Allianz Malaysia, it has also driven new solutions through innovative partnerships, such as its recent push for usage-based insurance adoption (UBI).

As for public institutions like MDEC, they are very supportive of Malaysia’s digital sectors, including e-commerce, data analytics, security practices, and FinTech.

With SuperCharger programme bringing international start-ups into the acceleration programme, it directly address some known critical issues and offer new services to them, both of which complement the need of balance between market opportunity and security.

SuperCharger is also hosting its Launch Day Event today at Cornerstone Wisma Selangor Dredging, where start-ups will be pitching on-stage while the audience network and celebrate the selection of these start-ups.