Tokenisation has moved well past the pilot stage, but a market only works if the infrastructure underneath it can be trusted: networks built for institutional scale, platforms that connect issuance, trading and settlement, a trusted form of money to settle in, and an infrastructure that lets institutions run digital assets as everyday business. This panel brings together the people building each of those layers.

The discussion works through what each layer needs to hold up under real institutional volumes, where the handoffs between networks, platforms, settlement money and legacy systems still cause friction, and what the operating model behind digital assets looks like in practice: who runs what, how it connects to existing infrastructure, and what it takes to scale. Attendees leave with a practical view of what "anchoring" digital markets means, from the network to the money that settles on it.

For years, the payments industry has shared one ambition: make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, more transparent and more inclusive. Progress has been made, but the hardest problems are no longer technical. Firms moving money across borders still face differing compliance requirements, inconsistent standards, limited interoperability and persistent first- and last-mile frictions. These costs fall hardest on merchants and small businesses.

With the G20’s 2027 targets for cross-border payments approaching, the question is what can actually be delivered, and by whom.

This session brings together practitioners who move money across borders every day, from merchant acquiring and cross-border platforms to the fintech industry. It looks at Asia’s corridors, where markets operate at very different stages of development. Which bottlenecks cost businesses most? What has worked in practice? And where does industry need to act together, or need policymakers to step in, to turn ambition into measurable progress?

Bilateral links between Asia's national instant-payment systems already exist and are multiplying. QR code interoperability between several member states has been live for years, built one country pair at a time. The next opportunity is a genuinely connected system, one where a payment initiated in any linked market settles instantly in any other, without each pair of countries negotiating its own bridge. Emerging multilateral models such as Nexus show how the region and beyond could move beyond corridor-by-corridor integration. As Singapore prepares to take over the ASEAN chairmanship from the Philippines in 2027, regional payment connectivity is shaping up to be one of the flagship items on its agenda, and this session is where that opportunity gets mapped out, a year ahead of time.

This panel brings together central bank representatives from across ASEAN and India to discuss what a genuinely connected instant-payment system could unlock: aligning local-currency settlement frameworks, building on the links already in place, from ASEAN's QR interoperability to the UPI-PayNow corridor, to reach true multilateral interoperability, and establishing the shared governance that lets partners trust a system built together rather than one at a time. Attendees leave with a clear view of the progress already made, what Singapore's incoming ASEAN chairmanship could prioritise, and how close the wider region actually is to instant payments that work the same way whether you're paying across the street or across a border.