The agreement is meant to provide EZ-Link with insights into user behaviour and help facilitate a shift towards a cashless Singapore

(From left to right) Mr. Ethan Yu, Vice President of Alibaba Group and General Manager of Alibaba Cloud Global, Professor Ho Teck Hua, NUS Deputy President (Research & Technology), Mr. Nicholas Lee, Chief Executive Officer, EZ-Link Pte Ltd.

In a tie-up across three organisations, Alibaba Cloud, the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the city-state’s card-based wallet system, EZ-link, announced a Memorandum of Understanding to boost big data capabilities.

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.

EZ-Link, which is most commonly associated with the plastic cards Singapore uses to pay public transportation fares — but have a variety of uses — will partner with Alibaba Cloud and NUS to pilot a big data analytics project.

The project will analyse card usage patterns across the various schemes, touch points and customer categories.

According to Nicholas Lee, the CEO of EZ-Link, the company hopes the deal will improve the card’s cashless payment options and make it a driving characteristic of the system. Today, it is still very common for people to top-up their cards with cash at physical systems located in all MRT stations.

“Alibaba Cloud’s global technological prowess, NUS’ growing digital know-how and EZ-Link’s cashless expertise will provide a robust framework to covert usage pattern data into actionable intelligence,” Lee said in a statement.

“It will move our customers into an era whereby they will be served according to their behaviour, interests, and needs”.

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One good example is the EZ-Link Mobile application. It uses NFC technology to allow people to top-up, manage their account, and pay for fares and items by touching one’s phone to the scanner.

Furthermore, Alibaba Cloud will contribute US$500,000 in cloud credits to allow NUS students and researchers to use the service for academic and research purposes. The company will also offer classes for students and teachers.

NUS Deputy President (Research & Technology) Ho Teck Hua also highlighted a goal to work towards a cashless Singapore.

“The partnership with Alibaba Cloud and EZ-Link further demonstrates the close collaboration between academia and industry in solving real-world problems, and will help contribute towards a future, cashless Singapore,” he said.

Alibaba’s Southeast Asia push

The MOU comes in the context of a larger push by Alibaba into Southeast Asia. The company’s purchase of Lazada in April was one of the major stories of 2016, and the Alibaba-owned fintech company, Ant Financial, made a big investment into Thailand’s Ascend Money in November.

In Kuala Lumpur last week, Alibaba Cloud signed an MOU with the digital media support company Conversant Solutions and the ICT training company Prestariang Berhard to build an education platform called EduCloud.

EduCloud will be a centralised platform to include campus management, teaching and learning help, digital payments and entertainment, among other services. In the announcement, it was hinted that if it is successful in Malaysia, EduCloud may be launched across the APAC region.

In August, Alibaba cloud signed an MOU with Infocomm Investments, the Singaporean government-owned investment arm entity, to help bridge the gap between Chinese and Southeast Asian innovation.

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Globally, Alibaba Cloud has more than 2.3 million users and over 651,000 paying customers. From numbers generated in Q3 2016, the company made US$224 million in revenue in the 12 month period spanning 2015 to 2016.

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