Singapore’s payments industry is getting a new conduct playbook at a time when digital wallets, cross-border transfers and instant payments have become part of daily life for consumers and businesses.

The Singapore FinTech Association (SFA), together with industry players, today launched the Payments Industry Code of Conduct, a voluntary framework that sets out common standards for payment service providers in the city-state. The Code covers areas including pricing transparency, advertising, fraud prevention, card dispute liability, data protection, operational resilience, and anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism controls.

Also Read: Southeast Asia’s fintech apps don’t have a literacy problem, they have a fear problem​

The move comes as Singapore’s payments market matures beyond basic digital adoption. Consumers now expect payment services to be fast, cheap and available across borders. At the same time, regulators and industry bodies are facing a more difficult question: how to preserve trust when payment products are increasingly embedded into apps, platforms and regional business flows.

Unlike a regulation issued by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the Code is not mandatory. Instead, payment service providers may assess their own policies, systems and processes against the standards and publicly declare themselves as “Code Adherents”. These declarations are valid for one year and must state the year in which the self-assessment was conducted.

That voluntary structure is important. It gives the industry room to adopt a common baseline without creating a new licensing regime. But it also means the Code’s impact will depend heavily on how many providers sign up, how seriously they conduct their assessments, and whether customers begin to treat adherence as a marker of trust.

What the Code covers

The Code applies to holders of major payment institution licences, standard payment institution licences and money-changing licences, as well as exempt payment service providers, in relation to regulated fiat currency payment services under the Payment Services Act 2019. It does not cover digital payment token services, even where those services are offered by the same provider.

At its core, the Code is an attempt to make payment costs easier to understand before a customer commits to a transaction. Code Adherents are expected to show the full cost upfront, including the principal amount, transaction fees, applicable exchange rate, any mark-up, and the final amount to be transacted.

This is especially relevant for cross-border payments, where consumers and small businesses often compare providers based on advertised fees, only to discover that part of the cost is built into the foreign exchange spread. The Code explicitly discourages “free” or “zero fee” claims where the provider still earns through an exchange rate mark-up, unless that cost is clearly disclosed.

It also takes aim at drip pricing, where mandatory charges are added partway through a transaction. For consumers, this means fewer surprises. For providers, it raises the bar for how pricing must be presented in user flows, advertisements and competitor comparisons.

The Code also states that marketing must not create a false or misleading impression about the cost of a service. Comparisons with competitors must be fair, accurate and capable of being substantiated. Providers should not selectively omit their own costs while highlighting rivals’ fees to suggest savings that may not exist.

Also Read: Singapore’s next payments chapter will be written by AI and tokenised money

SK Saraogi, CEO of Wise Asia Pacific and outgoing Co-Chair of the SFA Payments Subcommittee, said the Code sends a clear message that customers should understand the total cost before making a payment. “A mark-up hidden in the exchange rate is still a cost to the customer and should be displayed transparently,” he said.

Fraud, data and resilience move up the agenda

Pricing may be the most visible part of the Code, but its wider significance lies in how it frames consumer protection as a shared industry responsibility.

Code Adherents are expected to maintain a documented fraud prevention framework. This includes regular risk assessments, transaction monitoring, clear escalation procedures and user education on common scams. They are also expected to participate in or support structured industry-wide initiatives led by SFA, MAS or other bodies where relevant and proportionate to their business model, size and risk profile.

That caveat on proportionality matters. Singapore’s payments sector includes large regional players, specialist remittance firms, card issuers, money changers and smaller fintech companies. A one-size-fits-all compliance model could be costly and impractical. The Code instead tries to establish common expectations while recognising that providers face different levels of risk and operational complexity.

The framework also addresses card dispute liability. For card-based payment services, Code Adherents are expected to adopt liability standards aligned with those applying to banks under the Association of Banks in Singapore Code of Practice. This includes caps on customer liability for unauthorised transactions and clear procedures for reporting lost or stolen cards.

On data privacy and security, the Code requires internal controls, data minimisation and compliance with the Personal Data Protection Act. In the event of a notifiable data breach, providers must notify affected users and the Personal Data Protection Commission as soon as practicable, and within three calendar days of assessing the breach.

Operational resilience is another major pillar. Code Adherents are expected to identify and stress-test critical systems such as ledger and wallet systems, payment gateways, customer-facing application programming interfaces and authentication services. In plain terms, these are the systems that keep money moving, users verified and balances accurate. When they fail, the impact can ripple quickly across merchants, consumers and platforms.

Why it matters beyond Singapore

Singapore has long positioned itself as a trusted fintech hub for Southeast Asia, and payments sit at the centre of that strategy. The city-state is a regional base for global fintech companies, a launchpad for cross-border services, and a testbed for regulatory frameworks that often influence conversations elsewhere in the region.

Across Southeast Asia, payments remain one of fintech’s most competitive and strategically important segments. Digital wallets, real-time payment rails, QR payments and remittance platforms have expanded rapidly, but customer experiences remain uneven. Fees can be opaque, fraud risks are rising, and cross-border payment costs are still a pain point for consumers, migrant workers and small businesses.

Singapore’s new Code does not solve these issues across the region. It is domestic in scope and voluntary by design. Still, it may become a useful reference point for markets trying to balance innovation with consumer protection, especially as payment providers increasingly operate across borders.

Also Read: What stands in the way of fintech growth in Asia?

For Singapore-based providers with regional ambitions, adherence could also become part of their trust narrative when dealing with partners, regulators and enterprise customers in neighbouring markets. In payments, credibility is not just about speed or price; it is about whether users believe the provider will behave fairly when something goes wrong.

Holly Fang, President of the SFA, said payments now touch almost every part of daily life in Singapore, making transparency and protection central to public trust. “For consumers, that means fewer surprises and clearer recourse when something goes wrong. For the industry, it raises the baseline of trust that good businesses are built on,” she said.

The Code will be reviewed and updated regularly as the payments industry evolves. SFA has also said it will welcome new market participants and providers over time.

The key test will come after the launch. A voluntary code can clarify expectations, but it only becomes meaningful if providers adopt it, customers notice it, and the industry treats self-assessment as more than a box-ticking exercise. For now, Singapore’s payments sector has a clearer benchmark for what fairer, more transparent payment services should look like.

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TikTok Shop is moving beyond the basic pitch of helping merchants sell through short videos and livestreams. In Singapore, it now wants to train a larger slice of the people who make that model work: the sellers in front of the products and the creators who turn browsing into buying.

At its inaugural TikTok Shop Singapore Summit on 30 July 2026, the company announced a fresh set of capability-building programmes aimed at local merchants and content creators. It plans to support and train at least 1,000 Singapore-based sellers by the end of 2027 and more than 3,000 creators by the end of 2026.

Also Read: TikTok Shop is eating Vietnam’s e-commerce market alive

The summit, held as a full-day hybrid event, drew more than 1,500 sellers, creators and ecosystem partners. It also gave TikTok Shop a chance to underline the momentum it says it is seeing locally: in the past year, its Singapore business recorded 1.7 times year-on-year growth in gross merchandise value, a measure of total sales transacted on the platform, and 1.6 times growth in monthly buyers.

The numbers point to a broader shift in Southeast Asian e-commerce. For years, platforms competed largely on assortment, discounts and logistics. Increasingly, the battle is moving to content: short videos, creator recommendations and live selling sessions where hosts demonstrate products, answer questions and close purchases in real time.

From listing products to performing commerce

TikTok Shop’s new seller initiatives are designed for different stages of merchant maturity. The GO LIVE Academy targets new sellers learning the basics of running their own livestream sessions. The Growth Accelerator Programme is aimed at sellers ready to scale through content and live commerce, with incubation and strategic guidance.

For merchants that want to reduce dependence on external hosts, the Merchant Self-LIVE Programme focuses on building in-house live selling teams. A separate Brand IP Accelerator Programme will help sellers with an existing content presence sharpen their founder or brand identity on the platform.

The emphasis is telling. TikTok Shop is not merely asking Singapore merchants to list inventory online; it is asking them to behave more like media operators. Sellers need to script product stories, analyse audience behaviour, manage creators and hosts, and build repeatable content formats.

“We’re seeing a clear shift in how businesses grow on TikTok Shop. Success today is no longer defined simply by having a presence online or treating LIVE selling as another sales channel,” said Leon Koh, Fashion Cluster Lead and Head of Seller Management at TikTok Shop Singapore. He added that stronger businesses are investing in content creation, in-house live expertise and more strategic creator partnerships.

That is particularly relevant in Singapore, where the retail market is small but digitally mature. Local brands often face a ceiling at home, while cross-border platforms and overseas brands compete aggressively for consumer attention. For smaller merchants, live commerce offers a way to differentiate through personality and community rather than price alone, but only if they can execute consistently.

Creators become part of the commerce stack

TikTok Shop is also expanding programmes for creators, reflecting how central they have become to social commerce. Its LIVE Host Academy will train aspiring professional livestream hosts and connect them with sellers. The Affiliate Accelerator will support creators building affiliate-led businesses through live selling and short-form content. The Short Video Programme will help emerging creators develop product storytelling skills and collaborate with TikTok Shop sellers.

The company says live viewership on TikTok Shop in Singapore has increased by 150 per cent year-on-year. That matters because live commerce requires a supply of people who can hold attention and convert it into sales. In practice, this creates new types of digital work: hosts, affiliate creators, video specialists and community builders.

Also Read: TikTok Shop beats Tokopedia to become SEA’s second-largest e-commerce platform

Across Southeast Asia, this creator-commerce layer has become a key competitive front. Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines have already seen consumers adopt livestream shopping at scale, helped by mobile-first behaviour and high social media usage. Singapore’s market is smaller, but it can serve as a useful testbed for higher-value categories, brand-led campaigns and professionalised creator operations.

The challenge is quality. A flood of low-effort product pushes can quickly erode trust. For TikTok Shop, training creators is partly about expanding supply, but also about making recommendations feel credible enough for consumers to keep watching and buying.

Local brands test a new playbook

Singapore fashion label Young Hungry Free is one example of how merchants are adapting. The homegrown brand, known for bold collections and a community-driven identity, has used TikTok Shop as a channel for content-led selling and live commerce.

Founder and Creative Director Winnie Ong said TikTok Shop had changed how the brand connects with customers. More interesting than the endorsement is the operational shift behind it. According to Ong, Young Hungry Free began with one full-time employee managing live selling sessions alongside other duties. It has since built a dedicated live commerce team of more than 10 people.

That reflects a bigger change in how e-commerce teams are structured. Merchandising and performance marketing are no longer enough. For brands leaning into discovery commerce, content production and live hosting become core capabilities, not side experiments.

TikTok Shop is also positioning itself as a bridge for more traditional businesses. Kim’s Duet, a Singapore brand by coffee company Kim Guan Guan, has used the platform to reach younger consumers while selling traditional local coffee. Nevin Soon, the second-generation coffee manufacturer and management associate, said the company faced a steep learning curve entering live commerce. After joining TikTok Shop’s onboarding and Growth Accelerator efforts, the brand achieved 42 per cent month-on-month gross merchandise value growth in June 2026.

Such examples help explain why social commerce has appeal in Southeast Asia. Many small and family-run businesses are digitally aware but do not have deep e-commerce teams. Platforms that provide training, traffic and creator access can become important growth infrastructure — though they also increase merchants’ dependence on one ecosystem.

A crowded and contested market

TikTok Shop’s push in Singapore comes amid stiff competition. Shopee, owned by Sea Group, remains the dominant e-commerce marketplace across much of Southeast Asia and has invested heavily in livestreaming and affiliate tools. Lazada, backed by Alibaba, continues to court brands and merchants through its regional marketplace infrastructure. Amazon Singapore competes in selected categories with its logistics strength, while Shein and Temu pressure fashion and lifestyle sellers on price and supply-chain speed. On the content side, Meta, YouTube and other social platforms are also trying to capture creator-led product discovery.

This rivalry means TikTok Shop cannot rely on entertainment alone. Its advantage lies in the tight loop between content, recommendation algorithms and checkout. But to sustain that edge, it needs sellers who can produce better content and creators who understand commerce without turning every video into a hard sell.

Also Read: TikTok teams up with Vietnam to power the country’s digital growth

The Singapore summit suggests TikTok Shop is now treating training as part of its market strategy. In a region where e-commerce growth is increasingly shaped by trust, attention and creator influence, the platforms that win may not simply be those with the most products. They may be the ones that teach the most merchants how to sell in a world where shopping starts with discovery.

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One of my jobs in what I came to think of as a corridor business did not look like one at the time. It was in the years before COVID-19, at China Business Network, a small but meaningful consultancy in Beijing, where my role was to help governments attract Chinese visitors, which gave me an actual front-row seat to what I think of as modern commerce.

This was the era when Chinese travellers took 155 million trips abroad in a single year, and spent US$255 billion doing it, reported McKinsey back then. It was amazing to witness, because the world was hungry for a share of it, and governments from Qatar, Bahrain, Luxembourg, the Ivory Coast, Sudan, American tourism boards and destinations, and many more came to our door, all with the same request: help us make the Chinese visitor comfortable in our country, comfortable enough to stay and spend, and show us how to, before our neighbours figure it out.

Our job was to move them to the front of that queue by means of marketing, promotion, media, and consulting advisory services. We secured them top billing at Beijing’s flagship tourism events, had their destinations promoted to the Chinese public, media appearances, and partnerships with local businesses. Needless to say, they routinely stole the show, and the partnerships we grew lasted many, many years.

In hindsight, those governments rehearsed a relationship with a rising economic power, learning its holidays, payment applications, its hospitality codes, and its way of building trust. A tour bus was a prototype to what would pave the way to something greater, a bond I saw take place with every market we served: people flows predict capital flows. Governments signed agreements constantly with China, but only some became actual corridors; now, to know which ones will shape the future, watch the arrivals hall at airports.

The sequence has a shape

Credit: Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Singapore

Signatures on paper come first; for instance, ASEAN and China signed their framework trade agreement in 2002, ASEAN reported, with Beijing granting approved-destination status country by country, and Chinese delegations initiated agreements on nearly every state visit then. But we all know early paper is only permission, not proof of anything, and a lot of signed agreements never made it past the initial stage. What made the others succeed was how they moved, the number of their visitors, the small adaptations, Mandarin signage, familiar payment rails, staff trained to understand what Chinese guests actually wanted, and with that, familiarity was quietly building between parties.

Familiarity allowed deep architecture to consolidate, and from that, trade under the agreement grew more than fivefold. ASEAN overtook the EU as China’s largest trading partner in 2020, Nation Thailand reported, with two-way trade reaching a record US$984 billion in 2024, while the region has been the top FDI recipient among developing regions for four consecutive years, with manufacturing FDI climbing nearly 150 per cent to US$44 billion, which led to CAFTA 3.0 arriving only in late 2025, a quarter century after the framework.

Also Read: Southeast Asia in the 2026-2030 world order: Trade, chips, AI, and capital

So when we say it’s signatures first, people, second, and they’re the real test. Then comes capital, and only then deep architecture that allows existing flows to run. Nothing de-risks a market like millions of ordinary encounters involving tourists, students, and pilgrims are a distribution of due-diligence networks that predict which signed agreement truly comes alive, while others vanish in the halls they were signed in.

Now, watch the same tape run one more time

Credit: Saudi Embassy in Singapore

Apply the rule today, and something jumps out: Asia is emerging as a top choice for Gulf travellers, with destinations from Singapore, Bangkok to Phuket, Penang, and Bali adapting through halal-friendly services and expanding air links with the Gulf. In the Global Muslim Travel Index 2025, Singapore leads every non-OIC destination while Malaysia holds the top position among OIC countries: Southeast Asia is where the Gulf goes on holiday, and notice the symmetry here: some of the same Gulf states that once courted Chinese travellers have become the source market everyone else now adapts for.

This said, unlike the China corridor, this one has a cultural floor, with Indonesia holding the world’s largest Muslim population, halal is natively ingrained, not an accommodation, and a Gulf family lands in Southeast Asia already halfway to comfortable, so a corridor there that serves this public should run the sequence faster.

Now, look one step behind the travellers

Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds manage more than US$5.6 trillion in assets, a figure projected to reach US$8.8 trillion by 2030, wrote Foreign Policy, increasingly run from offices in Asia rather than London now. This is one of the reasons why the Gulf is converting a finite oil endowment into permanent stakes in the world’s fastest-growing consumer markets while hedging deliberately against the unpredictability of Washington’s tariffs, thrown here, there and everywhere.

Asia House expects GCC trade with emerging Asia to climb from US$450 billion in 2023 to US$680 billion by 2030, and the whole deployment has already begun with Abu Dhabi’s ADIA partnering with the Indonesia Investment Authority on toll roads, joining the consortium that acquired Malaysian Airports. While in May 2025, Kuala Lumpur hosted the first-ever ASEAN-GCC-China trilateral summit, here are three blocs representing a combined GDP of US$24.87 trillion and some 2.15 billion people.

Also Read: As global trade fragments, Southeast Asia must build leverage, not just attract investment

I must add, if the China sequence I spoke about took two decades, endless tour buses, and trade partners to take shape, the Gulf-Southeast Asia way is being paved; it is still in its early days, and that’s exactly when positioning is still cheap and highly rewarding, while other regions are still figuring things out.

Northeast Asia is already running the experiment

Credit: Saudi Gazette

Adaptation is a choice, not an accident of geography, and Korea and Japan are running the experiment on behalf of Southeast Asia. It needs to learn from the following two neighbours, and how their diverging results preview what happens when a lead is tended, and another is left alone.

South Korea’s tourism authorities have run a systematic Muslim-friendly program for over a decade, with four-tier restaurant classification, prayer kits for hotels, guide training, and incentives for prayer rooms, and what makes the program remarkable is the anti-Muslim sentiment wind that has been sweeping the country.

South Koreans had years-long conflict over a mosque in Daegu, reported the Korea Herald, where opponents to the project placed pig heads outside the construction site, and a 2018 petition against Yemeni asylum seekers that drew some 700,000 signatures. South Korea’s tourism professionals looked at where travellers are going, and built the pavement anyway.

Japan is the sharper, and quite unconventional, lesson. It made a move very early, and reached an all-time high of 3rd place among non-OIC destinations in the 2019 index, but the country’s efforts remained fragmented. Japan’s tourism authority acknowledges that there is no central agency that handles halal accreditation, and by 2023, the country slipped to the 6th position while Singapore held the non-OIC top spot in 2025. In short, Japan’s early adaptation decayed as soon as it stopped moving forward.

Why people always come first

I learned the trust half in person. I am from northern France, bordering Germany, where business means punctuality, agendas, and follow-through, and I’ve witnessed that in some parts of the world, trust translated into dinners, over months, through relationships preceding any transaction. I began closing deals only when I stopped selling and started understanding and adapting.

That gap now sits in the middle of the Gulf-Southeast Asia corridor mentioned, not only through language alone, but the deeper kind that displays how trust is established before anyone shows a number, and what silence means in Riyadh versus Jakarta. Every Gulf family in Langkawi, every Emirati student in Kuala Lumpur, every new direct flight quietly closes that gap, and the visitors are the corridor’s earliest infrastructure that shapes the future of the bond.

Also Read: The hidden engine driving Bitcoin price action that most retail traders ignore: Open interest

The caveat and how founders can use the rule

All in all, the GCC remains only ASEAN’s seventh-largest trading partner, and the bloc-level ASEAN-GCC free trade agreement is still a feasibility study, not a signature. The good news is Malaysia went the farthest into the relationship by launching its own FTA negotiations with the GCC, and this is where founders can leverage existing opportunities. 

Treat travel data as market intelligence: arrival numbers, flight routes, and Muslim-friendly rankings are public leading indicators almost nobody in technology reads. Build cultural awareness and readiness before the wave, as the businesses that adapted early to Chinese visitors did, because the same window is open now for Gulf customers across hospitality, retail, health, education, and digital services, and sell to the Gulf rather than merely raising from it.

Where Southeast Asia fits

Back at China Business Network, the governments that won Chinese visitors were never the ones with the biggest budgets; they were the ones willing to learn how the other side built trust. They were the ones who kept coming back to Beijing, learned what comfort meant to a Chinese guest, from the food on the table to the pace of a negotiation, and built it before their rivals did.

Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim has long maintained that neutrality is the source of ASEAN’s centrality, and the arrival halls suggest the market agrees. In a world where great powers force everyone to choose, the scarcest asset is a place that forces no one, and that is what keeps Southeast Asia’s terminals full. The pattern has run through the region twice, first with China, now the Gulf region, which is currently after Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Great treaties follow the flows, and corridors get built in a way that no summit can legislate, with halal kitchens a Bangkok hotel adds, the Arabic-speaking staff at a Kuala Lumpur clinic, the direct flight that turns a Gulf family’s holiday into a habit. Millions of small welcomes like these are the region’s real endowment, so when the ASEAN-GCC agreement moves from speeches to signatures, the advantage will belong to those who spent years studying their markets, language, and habits.

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Ask any project manager on a Southeast Asian construction site what eats up their evenings, and the answer rarely involves engineering. It’s paperwork: chasing updates, compiling reports, making sure the right photo is attached to the right ticket.

Ethan Ow knows this frustration intimately. He lived it as a junior executive in 2012, left the industry for tech in 2017, and returned years later to find nothing had changed. Group chats were still buzzing with site updates, but somebody, somewhere, still had to convert that chaos into a proper record,  usually late at night, usually by hand.

Also Read: AI takes centre stage in Singapore’s push for Zero-SIF construction sites

That gap is what Ow set out to close with Wenti Labs, a Singapore-based startup building AI agents that turn WhatsApp messages, photos and voice notes from construction sites into structured reports — no new app, no retraining an entire workforce.

Today, more than 20 paying enterprise customers, including Woh Hup, PentaOcean, Obayashi, and Jacobs, run their reporting through Wenti Labs. The company processes around 20,000 API calls a day and claims to cut a task like a site walk report from an hour down to 30 seconds.

Building inside the chat, not around it

The decision to embed Wenti Labs inside WhatsApp rather than launch a standalone platform wasn’t a branding choice; it was a survival strategy.

“WhatsApp was the obvious starting point because of its ubiquity across Southeast Asia,” Ow explains. The real problem wasn’t a lack of data; it was what happened to it afterwards. Project managers were still pulling information out of chat threads and manually re-entering it into spreadsheets before a report could be filed. Wenti Labs was built to eliminate that step entirely.

“This allows them to continue using a familiar channel while the administrative work happens in the background,” he says.

Why an entire industry got stuck

Construction’s resistance to digitisation is often framed as stubbornness. Ow disagrees.

“A lot of project data is logged in group chats, but the actual digital records are often created later, when the person responsible has time to enter everything manually,” he says. “This delay creates gaps, so different teams can end up working from different sets of information.”

His conclusion is blunt: “I do not think that the industry is resistant to technology. The problem is that many digital tools have asked people to do more admin before they save them any time.”

Inside the pipeline

Before writing any code, Wenti Labs maps out each customer’s workflow — what needs tracking, what a correct report looks like, and where information needs to land. Only then does the team build customer-specific agents using OpenAI’s Responses API, tools, and Agent SDK.

Ow describes a typical scenario: a worker spots a missing safety barricade during an inspection and sends a photo into the project’s WhatsApp group. The model extracts the issue, location, category and criticality, and the system generates a ticket automatically. Once a colleague fixes it and shares evidence in the same chat, the agent closes the ticket, no forms involved.

“The difference is that changes are recorded in real time and the worker does not have to transfer the same information from one platform to another,” Ow says. “Because the output is structured and follows the customer’s workflow, it can be used for official reporting.”

One playbook, many markets

Expanding across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam means confronting different documentation standards and languages, a challenge Wenti Labs tackles through configuration rather than a rigid template.

“We tailor the final output to each customer’s local requirements by configuring the required fields and connecting the result to their existing systems,” Ow says.

Some Singapore-based contractors communicate in Mandarin; other customers operate entirely in Vietnamese. Site teams message in whatever language they’re comfortable with, and the agent produces the report in whichever language is required. The company has extended the same approach to heat stress management for customers in Singapore, Australia and Japan, each with distinct regulations.

Whose data is it, anyway

Construction data can include safety incidents, contractor performance and project delays, all flowing through a consumer messaging app. Ow is direct about where the company draws the line.

“We stay true to the principle that all project data belongs to the customer,” he says. “Wenti Labs does not use customer uploads to train or fine-tune a shared model, and our agents can access only the information the customer has authorised.”

Also Read: The dawn of housing abundance: Why AI will collapse construction costs by 90 per cent

Deployment isn’t one-size-fits-all either; the company supports granular access controls alongside region-specific and on-premises storage, letting customers control exactly where their data lives.

Winning over the sceptics

Older, less tech-savvy site supervisors are often assumed to be the hardest group to convert. Ow found the opposite, provided the tool asked nothing new of them.

“Workers of all ages can simply keep doing what they already do,” he says. “From the site team’s point of view, Wenti Labs functions just like another user they can message on WhatsApp.”

The numbers back him up. One customer had previously logged around 30 safety issues a month through a form-based system. After adopting Wenti Labs, that jumped to 300 — not because more accidents were happening, but because roughly 90 per cent of existing issues simply weren’t being recorded before.

“Any new tool can feel unfamiliar at first, but seeing is believing,” Ow says.

The reliability bar nobody talks about

Perhaps the most candid part of the conversation is Ow’s math on reliability. At 20,000 API calls a day, even a model with a 90 per cent success rate would generate roughly 2,000 unreliable outputs daily — “a margin that is not feasible in construction.”

Cheaper open-source models were tested along the way, but the extra engineering needed to hit the necessary consistency wasn’t worth the trade-off. “OpenAI’s reliability has generally kept pace with each update, so we eventually decided it was more practical to stop evaluating every new model and focus that time on solving customer problems,” Ow says.

Codex has also become part of the internal toolkit — not just for writing code, but for quality assurance, monitoring agent outputs across customers and surfacing new edge cases. “A typical sprint used to take two weeks; now we can ship a feature in about two days,” Ow says.

Beyond the site walk report

Safety inspections were the starting point, but other bottlenecks are in the crosshairs too. Equipment certificates, for instance, typically arrive as PDFs that someone manually copies expiry dates from into a spreadsheet. Wenti Labs’ agents now extract that information automatically and flag renewals before they lapse — the same logic applied to consolidating concrete supplier and test lab data for real-time project oversight.

A retention play, not just an efficiency play

Singapore’s construction sector has a well-documented labour crunch, and Ow frames the company’s impact in terms broader than pure productivity.

“It does not help when teams find themselves weighed down by repetitive paperwork instead of the engineering and site work they signed up for,” he says. “Over time, that can push people away from the industry.”

Staying in its lane

Despite interest from farming, manufacturing and shipping, Ow has no plans to turn Wenti Labs into a generic tool for every industry.

“Wenti Labs’ domain knowledge lies in construction,” he says, pointing to legal-AI platform Harvey AI as the model he’s chasing: deep, not broad.

Also Read: The vision-based shift: Transforming construction safety with AI

The ambition stretches beyond report generation altogether — Ow wants Wenti Labs to become something closer to an operating system for construction projects, quietly connecting chats, emails, documents and existing software into a single, coherent record of what’s actually happening on the ground.

For an industry that has spent decades logging its most important information in group chats and losing track of it soon after, that would be less a feature than a fundamentally different way of working.

The post The 30-second report: How one startup is killing construction’s paperwork problem appeared first on e27.

For every startup that celebrates a successful Series A funding round, dozens quietly discover that raising capital is the easier part.

The real test begins after the money arrives, when investors expect not just growth but predictable, repeatable execution. It is at this stage that many founders realise they are no longer building a product, but they are building an institution.

India’s startup ecosystem has matured enough to reveal a pattern. Companies that successfully transition from Series A to growth-stage businesses rarely win because they raised the most capital. They become bigger because founders reinvent themselves as the company evolves.

The founder who excels at discovering product-market fit is not automatically equipped to manage a 300-member organisation, multiple business lines, international markets and board expectations. Scaling requires learning a completely different set of skills.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.

Join us on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn to stay connected.

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