Coming from London, I find Singapore rather backwards in many areas - especially where tech has to intersect with culture or other industries. Compared to Japan

Coming from London, I find Singapore rather backwards in many areas - especially where tech has to intersect with culture or other industries. Compared to Japan and Germany they're ahead, of course, but everything in Singapore seems to involve a ton of paperwork and calling people. The country overall is _extremely_ bureaucratic. Lots of things that in London would be buy online, same/next day delivery were, in Singapore, have an in person, shake some hands, sign a bunch of contracts and then wait two months for delivery. On the other hand, they have things like Sim Lim Square, which initially seemed like an anachronism to me (like Tottenham Court Road in the 90s), but then when contrasted to ecommerce situation there, I kind of understood it. Paying for things was confusing, most shops had 3 or so readers for different payment systems, and sometimes things that were supposed to work didn't (e.g. Google Pay or NFC). The details are long and confusing and involve lots of acronyms like NETS, ENETS, EFTPOS, etc. but overall I wasn't impressed. In fintech specifically (my area), their regulators have a bunch of rules that basically force you to do things the old fashioned way.