The Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF) celebrated its 10th anniversary this year – marking a decade of charting how technology is reshaping the financial world. What began in 2016 as an 11,000-strong gathering of bankers, start-ups and regulators has evolved into one of the largest fintech festivals in the world with over 65,000 attendees from 134 countries.
In 2025, fintech is no longer confined to banks, payments firms, investing platforms or tokenisation. It’s everywhere – embedded in how we communicate, travel, and even learn.
Walking through the exhibition halls at the SFF this year, I couldn’t help but notice a few unexpected names. While these brands aren’t what I’d immediately associate with finance, each is quietly building its own niche in the fintech space.
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#1 WhatsApp (Meta Platforms)
One brand that immediately caught my attention was WhatsApp. Many of us in Singapore are among its almost 3 billion monthly users worldwide. But, perhaps not for anything finance.
While WhatsApp also offers a Business Platform enabling businesses to connect with their customers, it’s also taken a more concrete fintech approach. Partnering Stripe, WhatsApp allows in-chat payments (via credit cards and PayNow) directly within its chats.
Their participation at the Singapore Fintech Festival 2025 signals a greater urgency to position themselves as a commerce-led messaging layer for businesses, offering secure, two-way conversations, product catalogues, multimedia messages and CRM integration, via partners.
WhatsApp’s booth at SFF 2025 highlighted its partnership with business solutions providers, Twilio, Infobip and Synch. For example, with WhatsApp messaging, powered by Twilio, businesses can use the world’s most prevalent messaging platform across their customers’ journeys, for support, notifications, verifications, and personalised promotions.
#2 ST Engineering
Another brand I definitely didn’t expect to see as one of the main exhibitors at SFF 2025 was ST Engineering. Usually associated with Singapore’s defence technology and engineering sector, ST Engineering’s fintech angle is actually quite compelling.
Their presence suggests that fintech is increasingly not just about consumer-apps or banking, but about infrastructure, security, trust and next-gen tech – areas where broader “tech” and “engineering” firms participate.
Visiting their booth at SFF 2025, I learned more about their advanced AI and cybersecurity solutions that help firms boost operational efficiency and enhance cyber resilience. ST Engineering also introduced their latest enterprise-grade Quantum-Safe Encryptor solution to help financial services firms to start integrating quantum security measures.
#3 Hitachi
We don’t often think of Hitachi as a fintech business. Rather, it’s better known for its reliable appliances for consumers and heavy industries, such as energy and infrastructure. With Hitachi having one of the largest booths at the Singapore Fintech Festival, it is a signal that large industrial-tech players view fintech (payments, embedded finance, sustainability-linked finance) as part of their growth frontier.
For the fintech ecosystem, it suggests more potential cross-industry collaboration (and competition) from firms not traditionally in finance.
Hitachi’s suite of solutions showcased at the SFF 2025 include, Green Loan Prospecting & Management Services, matching prospective customers to financial institutions and manage green loan. This also ties in with its Whole-life Carbon Assessment solutions that aims to calculate carbon emissions for projects.
Hitachi also has a Payment Services arm and a Digital Services arm, which aim to help businesses integrate merchant onboarding and payment solutions, and digital infrastructure support services, respectively.
#4 Singapore Airlines (Actually Its Academy)
Most fintech festival attendees expect banks, fintechs, payments firms, and maybe even other brands in technology and sustainability, but perhaps not an airline.
Singapore Airlines (SIA) made an appearance at SFF via its academy. This part of the company was kickstarted at the height of COVID-19, when its main operations halted and it decided to lend its hospitality excellence as an academy to other businesses.
As part of its Service Excellence Programmes, SIA Academy offers programmes for:
– Customer Experience & Journey
– Effective Communication
– Handling Challenging Customers
– Leading Service Teams
– Professional Grooming
– Professional Image
Its Operational Excellence Programmes offers:
– Building A Culture of Safety
– Leadership for Operations Success
– Leading High-Touch Operations
– Team Synergy for Operations Success
– Resilience: Performing Under Pressure
#5 TADA
Ride-hailing app, TADA was at SFF 2025 with a solution called TADA Corporate – Smarter Mobility for Modern Workplaces. Their platform enables businesses to manage employee transport, rides, expense tracking, etc.
Though mobility-focused, the solution embeds expense tracking, analytics for mobility spend, and corporate travel payments for firms. There could also be more competitive pricing and savings for corporates to manage their mobility needs with TADA.
TADA’s presence at the SFF signals an increasingly broader definition and adoption of “fintech”, expanding to include platforms that embed financial flows into other services.
FinTech Is No Longer A Sector – It’s An Ecosystem
These 5 brands at SFF 2025 underscore a broader trend that fintech is no longer just about the biggest and most innovative finance brands.
It’s about ecosystems, verticals, embedded finance, security infrastructure, and partnerships. When messaging giants, defence-engineering firms, airlines and mobility platforms show up at a fintech festival, it tells us that the real action is in the convergence of fintech with every industry, and not only between FINance and TECH.
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