Going beyond the headline figures of rising temperatures and sea levels, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) captures the full scale of the threat to human life in a heating world. It explains how extreme weather, drought, habitat and species loss, urban heat islands, and the destruction of food sources and livelihoods are all intensifying.

The inevitable rise of China as a global power that is increasingly challenging the supremacy and hegemony of the United States (US) both in the Asia Pacific and the world has been one of the dominant issues that has received a great deal of media coverage. Both locally and internationally, it continuously predominates attention in foreign policy circles and among local and international academics and experts of international relations and global politics. And in as far this

The COVID-19 crisis has laid bare the importance of access to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene. As we all know now, hand washing is one of the best frontline defenses against the virus.

Today’s unprecedented COVID-19 crisis has prompted billions of people to work, socialise, and consume digitally. This shift creates a historic opportunity to unlock the potential of digitalisation to finance more inclusive, sustainable development. Digitalisation is transforming every aspect of finance.

Southeast Asia has a growing fintech ecosystem which provides innovative services such as loans and payment platforms. Fintech fosters a financial inclusion strategy that can reduce the growing wealth gap and provide the poor with critical resources.A 2019 study by ValueChampion, a Singapore-based personal finance and consumer research brand, placed Singapore second after Australia as one of the ‘Best countries for women in fintech in Asia-Pacific’.

Blockchain is an online distributed ledger which allows parties to conduct secure (encrypted) transactions on a decentralised platform where time-stamping ensures that every data is easily traceable. It functions on peer-to-peer networking where there is minimal third-party interference.Blockchain is not a concept, but a technical application to log data in a way that it cannot be changed or erased de-centrally.

Due to Southeast Asia’s largely unbanked and underbanked populations, the region has a growing fintech ecosystem which provides innovative services such as loans and payment platforms.

Financial institutions are reporting losses in the billions. According to a whitepaper published by Accenture titled ‘Unmask digital fraud today’ on digital fraud, the expected global loss associated with transaction fraud is worth at least US$31.3 billion.The advances in technology and high-speed internet have transformed the payment market, giving financial institutions unprecedented access to consumers.