IBM Cloud helps Singapore fintech startups develop cognitive investment solutions

SINGAPORE - 16 Nov 2016: IBM (NYSE: IBM ) today announced that Eigencat, a Singapore-based startup, is migrating its existing systems to IBM Cloud’s Platform-as-a-Service, Bluemix, to deliver digital investment solutions for the financial market. The FinTech startup is also using IBM Cloud to develop new cognitive-based investment solutions using Watson APIs and broaden its reach within and outside Singapore.

Eigencat is a startup which offers a digital, multi-asset class portfolio analysis platform that caters to both private banks and new entrants such as Internet and telecom companies looking to manage the risk and performance parameters of their investments.

With strong backgrounds in the financial and technology sectors, the co-founders of Eigencat built a multi-product robo-advising software that provides automated portfolio management advice without the use of human financial planners, to meet this need. However, they needed to run their solution on a platform that could be accessed by clients globally, at an economical cost. Bluemix , provided them with an open standards-based cloud platform that allowed them to develop and deploy apps quickly, with scalability to build more solutions in future.

Since its move to the IBM Cloud, Eigencat has seen significant improvement in business productivity and a reduction in lead time for application development. For example, it now takes Eigencat two days instead of seven to set up the application development infrastructure. Eigencat has also gained about 20 per cent in time efficiency through significantly reduced system administration effort.

Eigencat also turned to IBM for its Global Entrepreneurs Program for Cloud Startups , which provides startups with access to resources like IBM Cloud credits, tech support and business mentorship. With this, the startup will also be able tap into over eight million IT professionals from around the world from within the IBM developerWorks community.

"Given that Eigencat is a startup, joining the IBM ecosystem was really appealing as it introduced us to a bigger world of possibilities. We are truly impressed by how easy our migration process was with Bluemix, allowing us to reduce the time and cost for service deployment. It was an added bonus to receive mentoring and technical assistance from the IBM team. We look forward to our continued relationship with them and are confident that investors too will find it convenient to use our platform to meet their investment needs," said Will Lawton, Co-Founder of Eigencat.

“ With Singapore fast becoming a leading global FinTech hub , we hope to engage with more startups like Eigencat to help them gain a strong foothold in the FinTech space. IBM’s cloud platform with cutting-edge cognitive and analytics capabilities is a natural place to build industrial strength Fintech. IBM has been proactively helping to build a rich ecosystem for startups and developers, and provide a strong network of resources to drive collaborative cloud innovation. Over 20,000 new developers join Bluemix every week and through the Global Entrepreneurs Program for Cloud Startups, we have worked with more than 2,000 startups globally. This is just the beginning for FinTech in Singapore and we are excited to mentor other fintechs to help bring them to the next level as we did with Eigencat. ” said Richard Turrin, FinTech Executive for IBM Asia-Pacific.

Bluemix, launched in 2014 with a $1 billion investment, has quickly risen to become the largest Cloud Foundry deployment in the world. With a developer-friendly catalog based on open-standards and offering portability as well as choice, Bluemix provides access to over 100 tools and services of the most prominent open-source technologies combined with IBM and third-party services that let developers focus all of their energy on the creation of enterprise class cloud applications at consumer scale.