Lippo Group invests in fintech start-up

Singapore - THE Riady family's Lippo Group on Thursday announced its first-ever investment into the financial technology (fintech) space with an initial injection of an undisclosed amount into Singapore-based start-up Call Levels.

There are currently no plans for future injections, Lippo said.

Call Levels is a mobile app which monitors live exchange data and provides free immediate price alerts across 10,000 assets to users - mostly financial market players - to enable them to stay ahead of fluctuating financial market prices.

The assets it tracks include stocks, commodities, forex and indices. Users can be notified when prices reach a certain level that they are watching for.

This is different from services that brokerages currently provide to clients, because "the price alerts that brokerages provide are often alerts when the trades are automatically executed, while we focus on alerting our users on the price movements and giving them that precious few seconds to decide whether they should execute the trade", it said.

Call Levels has already seen direct investments from Asian finance and tech titans such as Koh Boon Hwee and Timothy Teo (formerly from GIC and JP Morgan) and prominent US venture fund 500 Startups.

Call Levels said it has seen strong traction and usage, surging to "unprecedented" levels as market volatility persists in 2016.

User growth has risen more than 400 per cent over the past three months, it said. This has resulted in a base of almost 60,000 users to-date, mostly from Singapore.

Call Levels has been recognised as Appster Awards 2015 top 3 Fintech Apps and has been invited to join Level39, a fintech accelerator space in Canary Wharf, London.

The Business Times understands that it is not a formal strategy of the overall Lippo conglomerate to enter the fintech space specifically.

leemx@sph.com.sg

This article was first published on February 12, 2016.
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