Commentary

The crypto landscape in Singapore has never been more action-packed.

To say that the retail sector in Singapore has been hard hit over the past year will be an understatement.

Milieu Insight, in its latest survey, examined how employee demands and expectations have shifted.

Singapore and many countries in the world are facing a tech talent crunch in the post-pandemic digital world – but are we looking at the right place and for the right people to fulfil these needs?

Keeping abreast of changing tax regulations has never been more crucial. Whether for a company that has yet to unleash the value and potential of borderless teams, or a global business that unexpectedly must manage a geographically dispersed workforce, navigating potential tax risks must be a top priority.

Cyber threat actors are constantly adapting to the changing security landscape as they upgrade their tools and amplify their strategies in exploiting network vulnerabilities. With the implementation of remote work, businesses of all sizes have been the target of cybercriminals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Employees connecting to corporate resources from often poorly secured home networks and devices served as an entry point for ransomware attacks and various social engineering techniques such as phishing and CEO fraud target this weakness.

The recently issued advisory to all financial institutions operating in the country, by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), outlined a need for a comprehensive view to developing a public cloud risk management strategy. As the financial services industry adopts digital banking and online services, public clouds are becoming an alternative and efficient way to deliver services to customers online. As such the need to review, analyse, mitigate and recover from online breaches has become the imperative.

For an organisation, setting out to achieve compliance standards, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or Singapore's personal data protection act, is an important step towards protecting its business and reputation. The company will have to address key controls around firewalls, passwords, encryption, malware, access, and implement security best practices through a rigorous compliance process. By doing so, the organisation will have addressed some crucial elements in their security program.

Throughout the pandemic, a wave of ransomware attacks disrupted operations in healthcare organisations around the world. Cyber threat actors have been capitalising on the uncertainty and disruption caused by COVID-19 to conduct malicious cyber activities. In recent months, cyber threat actors have also been attracted by the valuable research data and intellectual property relating to vaccines, treatments and testing of COVID-19 developed and held by healthcare organisations. As frontline workers fought to keep patients alive, many documented records by hand and struggled to deliver effective care in the absence of electronic patient health information (ePHI) and lifesaving, internet-connected medical equipment.

Singapore’s COVID-19 exit strategy has faced recent hurdles - surges in the past weeks have resulted in yet another tightening of measures as the government ramps up its vaccination programme to hit August 9th targets. But how can leaders prepare a blended reopening for a population with different levels of protection, and comfort? One answer might be to take the humans out of the equation and let the data do the work.

Your employees aren’t coming back to the office, at least not in the traditional sense. The pandemic shifted almost all industries into remote work.

For the past years, Singapore has witnessed a significant increase in cybersecurity challenges. The threats and attacks in public agencies and private institutions caused a tremendous impact on the country’s data and security landscape. The call for better regulations in data governance, compliance, and security guardrails has elevated further the pandemic. The virtualised environment translates to an open playing field for potential cybersecurity threats.

With less than six months to go to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), scheduled to be held in the city of Glasgow in November under the presidency of the UK, now is the time for Singapore to flex its green fintech credentials.

According to Singapore’s largest bank DBS, the volume of cash deposits and withdrawals fell by an unprecedented 11% in the first 3 months of 2020, a 6% fall from where the figure had been since 2017. Coupled with extraordinary growth in the adoption of e-payments, it’s safe to say that COVID-19 has altered consumer behaviour—and fast. 

In 2020, one in three people in Southeast Asia experienced online fraud amid a boom in online shopping and activity due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Asia-Pacific already has the highest number of internet users in the world, so the opportunities for scammers were already aplenty before the crisis of 2020.

There is no question that the wealth of the world continues to grow, even amidst the rise of unprecedented and unexpected events of the 2020s. In 2019, the number of billionaires rose by a whopping 38.9%, and with this rise in figures, Asia became one of the major magnets for wealth. A growth of almost 7.9% in the regional high-net-worth sector has resulted in a rise in the number of family offices in Singapore.