Key Takeaways
- Ranking leap: Singapore climbs from ninth place in 2015 to fifth place globally among financial centers in 2025, according to think tank New Financial.
- Assets under management: Singapore holds SGD 6.7 trillion (USD 5.2 trillion) in assets under management as of year-end 2025.
- AI expansion: Amity opens an AI Research & Application Centre backed by a USD 100 million Series D round led by EDBI; Plaud commits over SGD 10 million to its Asia-Pacific hub.
The fifth-place finish nobody saw coming
Singapore has stopped being a mere stopover for capital in transit. The report from London-based think tank New Financial confirms a shift that would have seemed like science fiction back in 2015: the city-state climbs the global rankings of financial centers to claim fifth place overall, overtaking markets with far longer histories and larger volumes, such as China and Luxembourg. The top three remain unchanged — the United States, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong — but the fourth and fifth spots tell the story of a rebalancing that analysts describe as structural rather than cyclical. The ranking's methodology leaves little room for interpretation: it rests on verifiable data, including assets under management, the presence of foreign banking institutions on the ground, and the volume of both public and private financing activity.
The figures behind this positioning carry real weight. By the end of 2025, Singapore managed a combined SGD 6.7 trillion in assets, roughly USD 5.2 trillion. That volume has pulled in tens of billions in fresh flows at a moment when global wealth is redrawing its routes. This isn't an isolated case: major international banking groups such as JPMorgan Chase are strengthening their operational footprint in the city-state to capture this momentum, while local authorities are working closely with private institutions to sharply cut the red tape involved in opening accounts for high-net-worth clients, bringing the process down to roughly a month.
From asset management to artificial intelligence
But reducing Singapore to a vault with a harbor view would be a misreading. The city-state is simultaneously building an artificial intelligence ecosystem that draws in international players with the same speed it draws in capital. The latest example comes from Amity, a Thai enterprise software group that, in late June 2026, opened an office in Singapore alongside a dedicated applied research center — the AI Research & Application Centre (ARAC). Behind the move sits a USD 100 million Series D funding round, led by EDBI, the investment arm of SG Growth Capital.
The center wasn't built as a showroom — it's an operational headquarters for all of Southeast Asia and a global base for the group's AI research. The stated strategy centers on vertical models built from real industry data, not generic datasets repurposed for the occasion. The commercial targets are explicit: USD 200 million in annualized revenue by the end of 2026 and a public listing set for 2027. Over the next three years, the company plans to create up to 60 new positions in Singapore across research, engineering, and go-to-market functions. Founder Korawad Chearavanont summed up the thinking behind the move, saying Asian businesses deserve artificial intelligence built around their specific reality — not tools designed elsewhere and simply retrofitted.
Plaud and the race for smart devices
Moving along the same trajectory is Plaud, a US company that makes AI-powered recording and transcription devices, best known for its Plaud Note Pro — a credit-card-sized gadget that automatically records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings and conversations. In June 2026, the company announced an investment of over SGD 10 million to turn the city-state into its first R&D hub dedicated to the Asia-Pacific region. The plan includes expanding the local workforce from roughly 100 to 150 employees by the end of 2026, with the Singapore office set to coordinate regional strategy, cloud infrastructure, AI development, HR, finance, and legal compliance on a global scale.
CEO Nathan Xu pointed to access to skilled talent in AI, engineering, and regional business management as the driving factor, describing the region as diverse, multilingual, and fast-moving. Internal estimates suggest Asia-Pacific will contribute roughly USD 100 million to the company's projected 2026 revenue — somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of the total.
A pattern that isn't accidental
The combination of Singapore's climb in the global financial center rankings, the arrival of Amity's research center, and Plaud's expansion shouldn't be read as a string of unrelated events. These are pieces of a strategy that deliberately weaves established financial strength together with an aggressive AI agenda. Yeung Chia Li, Senior Partner at EDBI, noted that Amity's decision to base its research center and regional headquarters here confirms the city-state's ability to build advanced AI capabilities, turn them into marketable products, and use them as a lever for regional expansion. The result is an ecosystem where capital, technical expertise, and regulatory infrastructure feed off one another, pushing Singapore beyond its historical identity as a financial hub and toward a role as a permanent laboratory for applied innovation.
