The world is waking up to a green revolution. From banning the use of single-use plastics to creating a sustainability awareness in manufacturing and production industries, many initiatives are driving the environmental preservation wave today. The Paris Agreement, especially, requires countries to follow through with their greenhouse gas emission reductions as promised during the summit.

So, how can countries take measures to reduce their carbon footprint? In a continent as large as Asia, a land that is home to about 60 per cent of the world’s population, every step towards pollution reduction counts.

When it comes to controlling greenhouse gas emissions, the most effective way is to make the use of energy more efficient. By reducing the consumption and reliance on traditionally generated energy, Asia would take a big leap towards a cleaner future.

One effective way to manage energy consumption is using modern smart building technology, like automated lighting and intelligently managed HVAC systems. Let’s dig deeper into the various ways building technology can help Asia move towards a greener, healthier future.

The confluence of security solutions, analytics and utility automation

Energy consumption is the highest during peak times in commercial buildings. Being larger in size, the management of HVAC and lighting becomes a matter of complication. These buildings have spaces that are intended for different purposes, which define how frequently these spaces will be utilised and by how many people.

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By integrating your building’s commercial access control system with automated HVAC control and an analytics platform, an efficient way to manage energy consumption can be achieved:

• Security cameras would give the data input regarding the frequency, quantity and duration of use of each space of a building by the populace while also keeping your building secure by deterring up to 61 per cent of burglaries.
• The analytics engine would then draw up a trends chart that would display the usage patterns of each space, clearly determining the high and low use areas of a commercial building.
• The automated/managed HVAC system can then utilise these trend charts to deploy services according to space use.

The commercial access control system sensors, furthermore, can be programmed effectively to communicate one-time use areas to prevent HVAC from deploying resources for such cases. Space utilisation combined with intelligent analytics and HVAC management work to streamline energy consumption based on space occupancy.

Service automation

Automation has always been a driver of efficiency, wherever it is applied. In fact, in a study published by Report Linker, it was found that the market for building automation systems is expected to reach an amount of US$148.6 billion by the end of 2027, rising at a compounded annual growth rate of 11.4 per cent. These figures alone spell out the seriousness of the global building management industry to optimise its energy use through automation and its implements.

To that end, the automation of HVAC management systems can prove to be instrumental in achieving energy consumption efficiencies in managed smart buildings. HVAC would need to be digitised and integrated with access control systems to reduce energy consumption when occupancy is low:

• The system control activation mechanism is a great way to adjust a building’s energy use according to occupancy. The system relies on utilising access card data to deduce the occupancy of a space. Integration with HVAC, lighting and other utilities allows the automation engine to switch up or down the energy consumption accordingly
• The event management mechanism relies on high-footfall event analysis to adjust energy consumption. For example, if a commercial building hosts conferences, meetings or seminars during a week, the resource planning software can be programmed to receive inputs from digitised building use schedules to plan the deployment of building services intelligently

Building management systems are smart, automated and reliable today. Integrating them with building services, access control and building use patterns sets a great foundation for managing efficient energy use.

Building management IoT

Internet of Things, or IoT, is a way to intelligently analyse the space use of a building through integrating various access controllers, sensors, and other security devices on a single, communicative platform.

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When these devices transfer their data to a building management system, the smart analytics draw up the trends and patterns of space use, allowing the management system full control over service deployment (HVAC, lighting and others).

The best benefit that comes from enabling IoT with smart building management is the access to real-time data that can provide high-quality, actionable insights to plan energy consumption effectively.

Furthermore, by automating the HVAC and lighting of the building, the building management system would practically run itself and learn from the analytics of building use, polishing its resource use more with each run.

Wrapping up

Energy consumption is one of the highest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions across the globe. In Asia, with a huge portion of the population inhabiting the continent, these emissions are far more prominent; the need to manage energy consumption is far more pressing than in other continents.

The adoption of smart buildings is helping lead the effort to reduce energy consumption, with the smart building market projected to grow by 10.9 per cent from US$72.6 billion in 2021 to US$121.6 billion by 2026. Implementing automation, IoT, and smart analytics with smart building technology in managing energy use is a great start in the revolution for a cleaner future.

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Alibaba said to be doubling down on SEA amid tech correction
Several industry sources said to DSA that Alibaba’s investment team has been on a SEA tour in the past 2-4 weeks, zipping across Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore to engage directly with startup founders.

Accelerating Asia on building a company culture that fosters innovation and inclusion
To achieve its mission, Accelerating Asia needs to implement an organisational culture that supports and promotes the values they live by, says Co-Founder and General Partner Amra Naidoo.

Vision Fund’s US$21B in losses drag SoftBank Q1 earnings down
The Vision Funds, which posted a total of about US$21B in losses, saw its investments in publicly listed companies depreciating amid concerns of an economic recession.

Indonesian logistics firm Paxel secures US$23M funding
Investors are Astra Digital International, Central Capital Ventura, and MDI Ventures; Paxel provides same-day local and intercity deliveries, smart locker service, a local snack platform, bulk delivery offering, and waste treatment solution.

Singapore investment platform Xcelerate scores US$11M funding
Investors are Altair Capital and Exacta Capital; Xcelerate provides software solutions and services catering to the GRC and ESG requirements of corporates operating across geographies.

Crypto exchange Hodlnaut shuts down due to current market conditions
The Singapore-based exchange said the move will allow it to focus on stabilising liquidity and preserving assets while working toward a solution to its current situation; It was exposed to the collapse of the Terra blockchain protocol in May.

Binance, WazirX butt heads amid money laundering probe
Binance is distancing itself from its subsidiary exchange WazirX after the latter’s assets were frozen by Indian authorities last week following a money laundering investigation.

SIG, Singtel Innov8 invest in metaverse platform DataMesh
DataMesh helps companies to develop an internal metaverse platform for frontline workers in the manufacturing, construction, and operations sectors.

Crypto.com secures Korean operating licenses
The crypto exchange also acquired payment service provider PnLink and virtual asset provider OK-Bit; Crypto.com earlier secured approvals in Singapore and Dubai, and registrations in Italy, Greece, and Cyprus.

NTU, Royal Golden Eagle to launch US$4.3M textile research centre
The centre aims to bolster innovation in textile recycling and apply research outcomes; It will focus on sustainable textile recycling, automated textile waste sorting systems, eco-friendly dye removal, and new textile development.

SG’s consumer goods brand Cloversoft raises 7-figure seed funding
The lead investor is Apricot Capital; Cloversoft manufactures eco-friendly, high-quality household facilities, notably Singapore’s first unbleached bamboo tissue; It has customers across Malaysia, Brunei, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Taiwan.

Filipino D2C beauty, skincare brand Colourette closes seed funding
The investor is Foxmont Capital Partners; Colourette has fostered a community mindset by utilising social and digital community-powered marketing strategies, and actively engaging with the Colourette Club in product creation and innovation.

SG social networking firm NextBlock raises US$362K pre-seed
Investors are Plug and Play APAC, Farquhar Venture Capital and Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan; NextBlock aims for its platform to improve neighbour-to-neighbour communications by acting as a hub for users in a neighbourhood to come together.

BS Capital acquires Premier Taxis to boost vehicle leasing business
In addition to strengthening BIS Motoring, the group will also take over Premier Taxis’ street-hail service operator license and Class 2 ride-hail service operator license – both issued by Singapore’s Land Transport Authority.

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In 1944, the Bretton Woods Agreement, an American-led system designed to govern monetary relations between participatory states, established the principles for international financial relations and provided the basis of the modern global banking system.

Because of its Western-centric origins, the orthodox financial system operates using the concepts of low-risk vs high-risk territories, pre-supposing that emerging markets carry an inherently higher risk than more economically developed countries. This infrastructure is effectively neocolonialist in its certainty that Western ideals and practices are intrinsically superior and should be exported and enforced onto other peoples and systems. 

Southeast Asia (SEA) has recently witnessed game-changing growth and innovation in banking services. With the World Bank estimating that emerging markets will account for 63 per cent of global trade flows by 2035, this should be an era of unfettered and rapid growth for SEA economies.

However, legacy banking protocols stymy the potential of the markets, rejecting individuals and organisations based purely on geographical and geosocial preconceptions. While 99 per cent of payments within and between parties in US, EU, and UK countries are processed in under two hours, payments into and out of emerging markets are vastly more complex, despite US$6.4 trillion moving annually from these markets.

This Anglocentric financial orthodoxy remains, voluntarily or otherwise, blind to how to measure and adequately identify risk in non-Western markets and defaults to forcing a suboptimal legacy model. Alternatively, it ignores emerging markets entirely, claiming they are ‘too risky’.

Whilst Fintech generally creates fluency and ease of use for Western market users, the fact that such businesses lack custody services of their own means that making a transfer or opening an account is slick for a Western party. Still, the fundamental drawbacks of the system remain when interfacing outside Western markets where the Fintech banking partners are not quite as comfortable.

Adapting to the decentralised nature of Web3

However, the truly global and decentralised nature of Web3 allows for the opportunity of a borderless, unbiased system that will go a long way to abolishing these issues, meaning that risk factors are analysed through raw decentralised data alone, as opposed to within the sphere of existing, institutional presuppositions. 

Currently, financial institutions have in many ways to ‘trust’ a potential client’s representations when they are onboarding, e.g. asking for identity or corporate formation documents and statements of banking history.

In a Web3 environment, there is an environment of permissionless data, which importantly takes trust out of the equation, or at the very least, minimises it. So in a compliance sense, data from third parties about a potential customer takes out the first-person bias and, in many ways, can be treated as a superior data set.

Moving into this way of thinking and operating Web3 technologies can allow Southeast Asian countries to be viewed through a clearer lens by developed market banks on a level playing field by raising the quality of the KYC/AML provided. 

True fiscal inclusion means ridding the infrastructure of geographical, cultural, and racial bias, which we at Tintra are heavily invested in providing. Our unique solution is to build a scalable banking infrastructure with patented machine learning and artificial technology on a full Web3-enabled platform.

Because people’s values, behaviours, and even thought processes are often radically different from one culture to the next, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for understanding each region. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ are subjective constructs, and with the rise of Web3, these gaps and, conversely, nuances will diverge to make a more level playing field. Well, at least that is the potential.

The evolution of Web3 marks the beginning of a financial revolution across Southeast Asia, and its potential is boundless. My hope is that it heralds an era of unprecedented growth in fiscal inclusion across the region so that Singapore does not stand alone as the sole global banking destination in the region but acts as the driving force for regional revolution in banking.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic

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