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?

Supporting founders takes more than announcing incentives. It means helping them move from an idea to a working product, investment and a first customer.
This keynote explores how India’s national startup framework and state-level delivery can work together, with Odisha as a practical case study. What can government unlock through early-stage support, incubation and access to markets - and where do founders still encounter friction? The audience will leave with lessons on turning policy into practical support, including for research-led ventures, and what must improve for founders building in 2027.

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.