Temasek favouring fintech investment over US banks
Temasek, a Singapore-based investment firm, has fully sold out its list of US banks in the second quarter, ridding of holdings in institutions, according to its 13F filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Some of these institutions include Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which are being neglected in favour of fintech. Chinese banks are not being neglected, though.
The investor’s portfolio went up by 12% to $308 billion in the year to 31 March.
Png Chin Yee, Temasek’s senior managing director for China, said last month: “Today, insurance is about 15% of the overall financial services portfolio and really we went into insurance because of the theme around rising affluence.”
“Then later, we identified payments as a very interesting sector, given the rise of e-commerce. We felt that digital payments, online payments were growing in importance and so our payments portfolio is now about 3% of the overall financial services portfolio.”
The firm has said that it expects global growth to moderate and that expansionary fiscal policy in the late cycle may risk a cyclical recession in the US.
The investment firm has increased its number of shares in Global Payments, PayPal, CenturyLink and Visa.
Temasek also slightly decreased its stake in Alibaba and now holds 1.4% of the Chinese tech giant, according to Bloomberg.
Alipay (created by Alibaba) and Funding Circle are some fintechs that have seen good treatment by Temasek.
