Singapore fintech Spark Systems lands $10.5m from Citi and HSBC

Written by Ruby Hinchliffe
19th May 2020

Spark Systems, a Singapore-based fintech which describes itself as the middleman between liquidity providers and takers, has landed $10.5 million in a Series ‘BB’ from Citi, HSBC and Malaysia-based investment holding company OSK Ventures.

These heavy weight investors join existing backer Goldman Sachs, alongside a series of Southeast Asian venture capital funds.

The fintech says the fresh capital injection will go towards its in-house technology stack

The fintech builds trading platforms for the foreign exchange (FX) buy-side market, promising a “stable” and “ultra-low latency” marketplace which rests on an aggregator and algorithms to execute.

“We are grateful for the confidence placed in Spark Systems and the resources; in both deep insight and funding accorded to us to develop a premier deep tech trading platform by some of the most respected and influential financial institutions in the world,” says Spark’s founder and CEO Wong Joo Seng.

“That this is occurring during a period of significant macro-economic upheaval [and] further underscores the strategic nature of the FX industry infrastructure requirement we are addressing.”

The fintech says the fresh capital injection will go towards its in-house technology stack, particularly towards broadening experience of the development team, as well as module building for client onboarding and improving analytics.

CitiFX’s managing director and global head of electronic platforms and distribution, Alaa Saeed, says the bank is “excited” to “further the advancement of Singapore as a low latency financial hub through our local infrastructure and data centre”.

Spark also wants to expand into two of the world’s major financial hubs, New York and London, and it plans to develop a Singapore-based marketplace for G10/emerging economies’ currencies with low latency trade matching data centre.

The start-up is currently a grant recipient of the Financial Sector Development Fund (FSDF) under the Financial Sector Technology and Innovation (FSTI) scheme from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).