Recently two local Singapore companies accredited under the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s (IMDA) Accreditation@SG Digital programme won international accolades for their innovative technology solutions.

Launched in July 2014, the programme seeks to help promising Singapore-based tech product companies to win projects, grow and compete in the global market. Being accredited opens up more opportunities for their products and solutions to be showcased and commercialised. For buyers from the Government and large enterprises, the accreditation process provides an independent third-party evaluation of the companies’ claimed product core functionalities and ability to deliver. In the long run, the programme aims to develop an innovative ICM (Infocomm Media) ecosystem to drive economic growth, inspire the younger generation, and build more innovative products and technology companies that can scale globally.

DC Frontiers, a FinTech company specialising in corporate intelligence technology was awarded the ‘Most Innovative Business Idea’ for their product, Handshakes, at the inaugural India-ASEAN CommemorativeSummit in New Delhi in January this year. The Most Innovative Business Idea award is a prestigious accolade presented by the Indian government at the India-ASEAN Youth Awards, which was held alongside the main summit.

The Handshakes platform visually and interactively maps out relationships and events between companies and persons in the corporate ecosystem. The platform can tap into data from official registries, giving up-to-date coverage of 100 million business entities in Asia. This can help financial services firms, regulators, corporates and researchers gain business insight and intelligence.

The latest innovation in the Handshakes platform is the SEER engine, a proprietary artificial intelligence system that specialises in accurately extracting corporate information, events and relationships fromunstructured text. SEER’s natural language processing ability has been honed through deep learning. The SEER engine would help extend the scope of the Handshakes platform into the realm of unstructured data sources such as the news, document archives and emails.

Mr Daryl Neo, CEO and Co-Founder of DC Frontiers said, “We are extremely grateful to the Indian government for recognising Handshakes as the Most Innovative business idea in ASEAN. Handshakes exists to help our customers do business safely. Even though much of our work is unseen by the public, it is profoundly felt. This year, we’re expanding Handshakes’coverage to more parts of Asia. We believe in collaborating for speed and are looking for partners across the globe with whom we can produce innovative and profitable products.”

Mr Edwin Low, Director of Accreditation@SG Digital commented, “We are extremely pleased that DC Frontiers’ solution has been conferred such a prestigious award by the Indian government. We will continue to work with DC Frontiers to increase their traction through new opportunities in both the government and enterprise sectors”.

Another Singapore headquartered company, Affle, which has built ‘Mobile Audience Intelligence and Analytics Platforms’ received an award for its SG:D Accredited ad fraud detection platform, mTraction FaaS or mFaaS. It was recognised as the industry wide best Big Data Technology Product of the Year at the IAMAI India Digital Awards. The Internet and Mobile Association of India or IAMAI is the leading non-government advertising industry body in India. Its mandate is to expand and enhance online and mobile value-added services sectors.

mFaaS enables mobile advertisers and networks to detect and prevent mobile ad fraud not only at a post-mortem level, but during runtime. Itprocesses massive volumes of click and conversion data using multiple algorithms to detect patterns of indicative or definitive fraud, and is currently used globally to detect and reduce ad fraud for campaigns of many top marketers. It is also helping advertising agencies, advertising networks & media publishers to optimise ROI (return on investment) for their customers by helping weed out significant amount of fraudulent traffic which is negatively impacting all in the digital advertising ecosystem.

The platform provides a visual analytics suite that displays data in an easy to action format, allowing Advertisers to block or blacklist traffic sources based on the analysis of 15+ reason codes that identify wide ranging variety of frauds including Click or downstream event hijacking, Click spamming, BOT activities, IP Fraud, Device fraud and many more.

mFaaS is currently integrate-able using SDK (software development kit) or APIs (Application programming interface) and can also be integrated with leading third-party attribution platforms, without the need for any additional code by the app owners.

Last year, Affle also won a grant as one of the 18 awarded solutions under the Singapore Tourism Board’s (STB) Tourism Innovation Challenge for Hotels, for its mTraction platform, which is a composite suite of various services like App Reusable Components, Event Attribution, In-app analytics, Customer Data Platform for CRM and Mobile Ad Fraud Detection.

Affle has filed more than 7 patents for the underlying technology and is currently working to make the platform available to top marketers across geographies.

“We are delighted that Affle’s mFaaS platform has been recognised by India’s IAMAI. With the prevalence of mobile devices globally and the growth of mobile ads, Affle’s platform is a much needed solution to dealwith the issue of mobile ad frauds. Accreditation@SG Digital will continue to work with Affle to build their traction in both Government and enterprisesector to further accelerate their growth,” said Mr Edwin Low, Director ofAccreditation@SG Digital.

In May last year, IMDA signed individual Memorandum of Intents (MOIs) with three leading local banks, UOB, DBS and OCBC, to provide accredited companies with increased access to innovative projects in the banking sector. IMDA also entered into a partnership with the Singapore Exchange (SGX) to lower the barriers for IMDA-accredited companies to access capital markets.

At the launch of the Industry Transformation Map (ITM) for Singapore’s Infocomm Media sector in November 2017, IMDA announced the expansion of scope of the Accreditation@SG Digital programme. The pool of accredited companies would be expanded beyond start-ups and young SMEs to include later stage SMEs and deep technology foreign companies. IMDA is working with the Economic Development Board (EDB) to anchor best in class foreign high-tech companies to complement Singapore’s local enterprises and ecosystem. By congregating a critical mass of high growth tech product companies in Singapore, IMDA expect more global investors and high tech talent to be attracted to Singapore’s ecosystem, creating synergies and positive spinoff.

By November 2017, over S$80 million worth of government project opportunities had been created for accredited companies and more than 120 projects had been awarded. In addition, more than S$68 million of new growth capital had been invested in the companies during and after accreditation.

As of January 2018, 21 companies had been accredited, in areas such as cybersecurity, data analytics and artificial intelligence, enterprisedevelopment platforms, Internet of Things (IoT) and media tech.