Building the infrastructure for financial inclusion and cross-border connectivity is one challenge. Financing it is another, and it's the one that usually gets skipped over in the excitement about what could be built. Is the binding constraint on financial inclusion the technology, or the capital to build and sustain it?

This panel brings together leaders from a small economy building its own digital public infrastructure, a hub positioning itself to draw global capital into a fast-growing regional market, and a development bank whose entire mandate is getting credit to populations mainstream finance still doesn't reach. The dialogue will focus on where the funding for this actually comes from, state budgets, development finance, or private capital drawn in by the right market positioning, and what it takes for a smaller or developing market to make itself genuinely investable.

Imagine a world where employees never submit another expense report. Transactions are captured, categorised, checked against policy and routed for approval automatically. Finance professionals only intervene when exceptions genuinely require human judgement.

As AI continues to transform financial services, promising solutions still face significant barriers to institutional adoption, from technology risk management and regulatory requirements to enterprise procurement and commercial deployment. This session explores the challenges AI solution providers face in bringing their technologies to financial institutions, and introduces the AIDF Digital Finance Scaler, developed in collaboration with GFTN, as an initiative designed to bridge these gaps through institutional readiness support, technical expertise and curated industry connectivity, accelerating the journey from innovation to commercial adoption.