As financial systems become more digital and interconnected, new technologies are reshaping the risks to their resilience. Quantum computing could eventually undermine the cryptography securing today’s financial infrastructure, frontier AI is changing the scale and sophistication of cyber threats and fraud, and the growth of tokenised money raises new questions about the reliability of the infrastructure on which it depends.
This session brings together perspectives from central banking, financial regulation and digital money to examine how the financial system can prepare for these risks before they materialise. What needs to happen now to ensure that emerging technologies strengthen financial infrastructure rather than create new points of failure?

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?