Agenda

Many merchants are already operating across Southeast Asia. The next challenge is not entering the market, but growing within it. This conversation explores how merchants decide which local payment methods, wallets, QR and account-to-account rails are actually worth supporting — and what payment localisation really does for customer acquisition and conversion.

- Which payment methods actually move conversion?
- Cards vs wallets vs QR vs A2A
- How much localisation is enough?
- National switches and domestic rails
- Pay-in vs pay-out considerations
- Cost/complexity of adding another payment method
- What merchants should prioritise in their next growth market

Speakers:
- Shane Wan, Head of Retail Marketing, Shell 
- Reggie Weston, Executive Director of Business Development, 2C2P by Antom (Moderator)

As AI agents begin to make purchases on customers' behalf, merchants face new questions: how can they verify that a purchase is authorised, manage fraud and disputes, and reduce false declines? Within the business, using agents to manage money raises similar questions about access, permissions and accountability.

This discussion examines both sides, exploring what merchants should check about customer consent, the payment credential, transaction controls and human oversight before enabling agents to transact with customers or act on business finances. 

TBC

Join us ahead of Singapore FinTech Festival as we welcome fintechs, startups, investors, SFF Ambassadors and Partners.

​Start your SFF week with the people you’ll want to know, with a chance to make connections early before the show floor gets busy.

​SFF Day 0 Mixer is presented by GFTN, AWS, and Singapore Global Network (SGN).

​What to expect:
- ​Meaningful introductions. Meet founders, investors, and ecosystem leaders in an informal setting, and leave with a list of people to follow up with during SFF week.
- ​A global crowd. Connect with SFF Ambassadors and Partners from markets around the world, alongside Singapore’s fintech community.
- ​A head start on the festival. Make plans, share tips on sessions and side events and arrive on Day 1 already connected.

Register here: https://luma.com/5qeo05lt

Join us as we kick off SFF 2026 on the Festival Stage, featuring insightful conversations, groundbreaking ideas, and inspiring voices shaping the future of FinTech.

AI is arriving as finance is being reshaped by geoeconomic fragmentation, technological change, shifting capital, talent constraints and evolving policy. Its effects will not be uniform: the same capabilities that widen access and improve productivity could also concentrate advantage, deepen dependencies and test the resilience of institutions and markets. Drawing on a global view of finance and public policy, this keynote examines where AI could accelerate these ruptures, where it might help bridge them, and what choices will determine the difference. The session asks what must be rewired for financial systems to remain trusted, inclusive and resilient.

AI is advancing faster than previous waves of technological change, raising a profound economic question: will the productivity gains from AI translate into broadly shared prosperity, or will they accrue disproportionately to capital, highly skilled workers and the companies that control the technology? The answer will shape productivity, employment, wages, inequality and economic competitiveness — and whether governments, businesses and financial institutions are prepared for a labour market in which many of today’s skills are rapidly changing. The conversation will explore what history can — and cannot — tell us about technological disruption, whether AI could break the traditional link between growth and employment, and what policy choices will determine who captures the AI dividend.

Money can now move in seconds, but settlement between banks still keeps office hours. Behind every instant payment, banks pre-fund accounts around the world, work to cut-off times and business-day calendars, and hold costly buffers for the hours when markets are closed. As commerce, trading and tokenised assets run around the clock, the way money settles between banks will need to do the same.

Drawing on the LSEG Digital Settlement House (DiSH) and Partior partnership, this session brings together a market infrastructure provider, global banks, an interbank settlement network and an industry adviser to explain what always-on interbank settlement is, and what it changes:
- From instant payments to instant settlement: What is the difference, and why does it matter when money crosses banks, currencies and time zones?
- What changes for banks: How does settling in real time, at any hour, reduce the liquidity banks must lock up in advance, and what does that free up?
- What changes for corporates, fintechs and payment providers: What could always-on settlement mean for treasury, cross-border payments, and the cost and speed of moving money?
- What it will take: Which operating, risk and regulatory questions must be answered before this becomes everyday infrastructure?

Attendees will leave with a practical picture of what is live today, what is still being tested, and how always-on settlement could change the way they move money.

This is presented by:
- Bud Novin, Head of DiSH, LSEG Post Trade Solutions
- Rachel Whelan, Global Head of Payments & Transactional FX Product Management, Managing Director, Deutsche Bank
- Mark Willis, Managing Director, Head of Emerging Payments
- Shirish Wadivkar, Chief of Payments, Partior
- Anton Ruddenklau, Global Head of Innovation and Fintech, Financial Services, KPMG

Location: Level 2, Garnet 215

Europe has taken important steps to shape its financial future, from advancing integrated payments and digital financial regulation to exploring tokenised markets and the next generation of financial infrastructure. As AI and new forms of digital money reshape the financial landscape, central banks must continue to navigate their responsibilities for monetary and financial stability while responding to the opportunities and risks that innovation presents.

This dialogue brings together European central bank leaders to reflect on what Europe’s experience so far reveals about navigating financial innovation, how different approaches have emerged across markets, and what the next phase will require. As technology advances at an accelerating pace, is policy keeping up - and should it move faster? The discussion will explore how central banks should approach their role in this environment, and whether trade-offs between innovation, stability and sovereignty are inevitable.

As the fintech industry continues to evolve, organisations face increasing demands for high service availability, robust cybersecurity, operational efficiency, and scalable IT infrastructure to support digital banking, e-wallets, and online payment services. Traditional infrastructure can introduce operational complexity, increase maintenance overhead, and make it challenging to meet growing business demands and business continuity requirements.

Speaker: Dayve Tan Wei De, Presales Manager

Asia’s financial system is entering its next transformation. As AI, real-time payments and embedded finance reshape how money moves and financial services are delivered, the boundaries between banks, technology companies and platforms are rapidly dissolving. This session explores who will build, and control, the next generation of financial infrastructure. The conversation examines how technology and traditional finance will converge, where new sources of competitive advantage will emerge, and whether Asia will pioneer a fundamentally new model for intelligent, interconnected finance.

Most founders spend their early years chasing product-market fit, and rightly so. But when it’s time to raise, investors look beyond the pitch. A fragmented back office, with messy cap tables, missing filings, unclear IP ownership and unreliable numbers, can delay rounds, lower valuations or even kill deals.

In this session, Christian Corrigan, COO & CFO of BlockOffice, walks through what investors actually check in due diligence across corporate, financial, tax and compliance, and people and IP, along with the most common gaps founders face. Drawing on BlockOffice’s experience with clients, he shares a practical readiness checklist and how BlockOffice built Dome to bring the entire back office onto one platform.

Singapore's QR payment landscape has come a long way, but acceptance is not yet fully interoperable. Customers may still find that their preferred banking or payment app does not work at a particular QR merchant. For inbound visitors, cards work well across much of Singapore, but gaps remain at hawker centres and smaller merchants, where those without supported payment apps may still need to use cash.
 
PayNow Generation 2 has outlined the next step: a proposed SGQR+ switch that would provide a common routing layer across participating payment schemes and merchant networks, while preserving existing infrastructure and merchant-acquiring relationships. The opportunity is broader acceptance without requiring every network to establish separate connections with every other network.
 
But interoperability is not just a technical question. It is also a commercial and operational one. Who pays when a transaction crosses networks? How should it be routed and settled? What happens when something goes wrong? And can broader acceptance be delivered without undermining the low-cost economics that merchants value? These are among the design questions that still need to be worked through.
 
This session brings together payment networks and ecosystem players to examine what a more interoperable QR future could mean at the merchant counter: broader domestic and tourist acceptance, scalable network connectivity, sustainable economics and a payment experience that merchants can rely on transaction after transaction.

Digital infrastructure can lower barriers to financial services, markets and public support, but access alone does not guarantee participation or prosperity. The harder task is building the skills, institutions, trust and locally relevant services that let people and businesses turn connectivity into opportunity. Digital infrastructure must also be trusted, secure, resilient and designed around real-world needs. Drawing on experience across policy, development and fintech, this session examines what helps digital systems reach underserved communities, support livelihoods and strengthen local economies, and where infrastructure-led strategies fall short. Attendees will leave with a clearer view of the capabilities required to turn digital infrastructure into trusted ecosystems for genuinely inclusive growth and resilience.

Whether you're a student starting out, a finance professional planning a career pivot, or a startup founder facing a specific business challenge, Pay It Forward connects you with established industry professionals for face-to-face, one-to-one mentorship. It's a chance to get advice from people who have already worked through the challenges you're facing. Sessions are 15 minutes long and take place at the Pay It Forward Lounge in Hall 3, from 18 to 20 November, 12.30pm to 4.30pm. Come with one specific question or challenge, and leave with focused, practical advice.

Join us as we kick off the day's sessions on the Policy Stage, featuring insightful conversations, groundbreaking ideas, and inspiring voices shaping the future of FinTech.

India’s young workforce is often called a demographic dividend. Realising that promise means equipping people to adapt as technology reshapes industries, connecting skills training to opportunity, and making entrepreneurship a viable path. This fireside conversation explores what it will take to prepare young Indians for meaningful work and empower them to create opportunities of their own.

As financial systems evolve, central banks face a dual challenge -modernising the infrastructure that works today while building the foundations for what comes next. This means making strategic choices around the future of digital money and settlement, wholesale and retail systems connectivity across borders, and the interoperability, liquidity and governance arrangements that underpin them. At the same time, an increasingly AI-enabled financial system is raising the bar for the safety, reliability and resilience of critical payment infrastructure. This panel will discuss the key building blocks for the next generation of payments and where deeper cross-border collaboration can deliver capabilities that individual jurisdictions cannot achieve alone.

Hard Decisions behind Companies that Last.

Capital. Customers. Control. Growth. Exit.The rules have changed. What must a company get right to keep building in 2027?

The founder playbook is being rewired. Capital comes with harder terms. Enterprise buyers can build, wait or buy. AI can make a product look brilliant - and make it easier to copy. Growth no longer guarantees a path to liquidity.

Rewiring the Founder Playbook brings founders, investors, enterprise leaders and policymakers together for the conversations that usually happen behind closed doors: how to protect equity when financing gets hard; what evidence earns a term sheet; whether a customer will share risk; what makes a moat real; and when an acqui-hire or asset sale is the smartest decision a founder can make.

Across the three days, the Founders Stage will be anchored by flagship Founders Peak talks - the personal stories behind the pivotal decisions - alongside candid, future-facing practitioner conversations on the capital, customer, policy and exit choices that will determine who is still standing in 2027.

These are not retrospective success stories or generic startup panels. Each session asks one question: what must be true in 2027 for this company to earn the right to keep building?

Join us as we kick off the day's sessions on the Catalyst Stage, featuring insightful conversations, groundbreaking ideas, and inspiring voices shaping the next wave of talent and ideas.

Join us as we kick off the day's sessions on the FutureMatters Stage, featuring insightful conversations, groundbreaking ideas, and inspiring voices shaping the future of FinTech.

Join us as we kick off the day's sessions on the Frontier Stage, featuring insightful conversations, groundbreaking ideas, and inspiring voices shaping the future of FinTech.

Join us as we kick off the day's sessions on the Ignite Stage, featuring insightful conversations, groundbreaking ideas, and inspiring voices shaping the future of FinTech.

Agentic AI is moving rapidly from concept to deployment, but its trajectory across financial services is far from uniform. Institutions are experimenting with autonomous agents across markets, functions and business models, while adoption, ambition and readiness vary significantly.
This opening conversation takes stock of the emerging global landscape: where is agentic AI gaining real traction, which parts of finance are moving fastest, and what are institutions learning as they move from experimentation towards deployment? Most importantly, as the technology develops at different speeds and in different ways, where could the next wave of value emerge?

What can quantum computing contribute to financial services—and what are early experiments teaching us? Convened by Q-FINEX, this session opens with a brief fireside chat between OCBC and ST Engineering sharing early results, practical lessons and the financial problems they are working to address. The session continues then as a panel joined by Quantinuum and an additional quantum-finance expert for a broader discussion on the threats and benefits of using quantum computers in finance. The session concludes by launching the global quantum finance challenge to be resolved at BSS Perth 2027 and the Quantum Finance Report by Q-FINEX.  

As AI becomes more autonomous, how do we ensure people remain at the centre? Explore how trust, explainability and human oversight can help financial institutions scale AI responsibly - unlocking greater autonomy while empowering people to make better decisions.

As startups scale across borders, opening offices in Singapore, hiring in Bangalore, closing deals in San Francisco, ESOPs and equity compensation become some of the most consequential challenges that leaders face.

This workshop cuts through that complexity. Drawing on Qapita’s Equity Compensation Trends Report and real-world data from hundreds of companies across APAC and the US, attendees will leave with a practical yet technical framework for designing ESOP plans that work across multiple jurisdictions, including Southeast Asia, India, Australia and the US.

Whether you are a founder hiring your first overseas employee or a CFO managing ESOP reporting and tax implications across countries, this session covers the tools needed to build an effective equity programme your whole team can benefit from, wherever they are.

The future of AI can’t live without operational data. As agentic AI transforms finance, databases must evolve from systems of record to systems of action. Discover how to build a mission-critical modernization to unify transactions, real-time data, and AI, turning trusted operational data into intelligent decisions and laying the foundation for the next era of finance.

What if a wealth service could remember a client’s goals, keep working between conversations and return with a clear next step? Personal AI agents bring that possibility closer, alongside new challenges around privacy, professional judgment and accountability. This session explores how brokerage and wealth management firms can accept requests through familiar channels, coordinate work in the background and bring clients back to a controlled app experience for results and adviser collaboration. Attendees will gain a practical view of how lasting personalisation, human oversight and smarter allocation of computing resources can come together to shape AI-native wealth services.

Speaker: Edmond Liang, Chief Product Officer

Rapid advances in foundation models and automated engineering have flattened traditional competitive moats. McKinsey's 2026 State of AI report found nearly a third of enterprises now choose to build functionality in-house with AI agents rather than buy it, the clearest signal that a product-level moat alone no longer holds. Defensibility is consolidating around regulatory licenses, proprietary data integrations, and entrenched distribution. This session challenges investors to evaluate the structural integrity of modern technology moats: which advantages endure, and which are eroding under platform pressure. Source: McKinsey & Company, The State of AI 2026.

As AI reshapes commerce, it is also reshaping financial crime. Deepfakes, synthetic identities and organised fraud networks are enabling attacks at unprecedented scale and speed. This session explores how security must shift from authenticating transactions to authenticating actors, human or machine. It also looks at why the organisations that thrive will be those that build the intelligence, visibility and response infrastructure needed to protect trust in an increasingly automated economy.

Stablecoin-enabled card programmes move at real-time speed, creating oversight challenges that traditional monitoring can't match. This joint session brings together a market view of the risks emerging in stablecoin card programmes and a technology view of how to manage them. It shows how card processors can give BIN sponsors real-time visibility and control at scale.

Howard Davies, the chairman of Qivalis, will assess the state of play on stablecoin developments in the EU. Which companies are active? How does the EU regulatory framework compare with others? What use cases are envisaged, and how will they sit alongside the digital euro under construction by the European Central Bank?
Qivalis is an innovative new venture, owned by a large consortium of EU banks, offering a new approach to the marketplace. Having now received regulatory approval it expects to launch in Q1 of 2027.

As AI capabilities become more widely available, financial institutions face a harder question: what will make their use of the technology difficult to replicate? Access to models alone offers little assurance of lasting differentiation.
Where can agentic AI generate additional revenue, improve pricing or make previously uneconomical services viable? Does advantage come from proprietary data, distribution, partnerships or the ability to redesign a business proposition?
This conversation examines which strategic choices could create defensible value, and what evidence would justify committing capital to them.

AI is changing how businesses buy, pay and move money. Systems can now interpret intent and orchestrate invoice approval, payment execution and reconciliation as a single journey within defined controls. This shift is not about faster payments. It is a move from managing transactions to managing outcomes. Hear practical examples, a framework for the agentic enterprise, and what it takes in trust and infrastructure to scale agentic commerce responsibly.

As international visitors return to China in growing numbers, the way money flows into the country is being rebuilt across several rails at once: international cards linked to domestic mobile wallets, overseas e-wallets connecting directly to local acceptance networks, cross-border QR interoperability, and next-generation remittance channels. What does it take to connect these rails, and what opportunities does it open up for payment providers, banks, merchants and fintechs worldwide?

As financial institutions embrace digital transformation and AI, data protection and business continuity are more important than ever. This presentation highlights how Info2soft’s solutions support data protection, disaster recovery, and migration, featuring an ICBC case study to demonstrate practical approaches to protecting critical financial data and ensuring business resilience.

Speaker: Hazriq Surattee, Head of APJ

Merchants today are spending more on marketing than ever, competing for attention across fragmented channels while facing pressure to prove that marketing drives real sales. Now, as AI agents begin to discover, evaluate, and act on consumers' behalf, the path to purchase is changing again.
Discover how Mastercard is helping merchants navigate this transition—driving measurable growth today while building the trusted capabilities needed to be discovered and chosen in an agentic future.

Nine MUFG Young Innovators from Odisha step onto a global stage.

Made possible through MUFG's support, this session brings students from India's emerging FinTech ecosystem, who have undergone the Certificate in FinTech and InsurTech programme, before an international audience of industry leaders, investors and policymakers. The session features a live showcase from the cohort's winning team, presenting the work that earned them their place here.

A demonstration of what happens when talent is met with opportunity and a look at where the next generation of financial innovation is coming from.

Financial institutions aren’t short of intelligence. They are short of agents they will let act. Running AI agents in regulated finance requires bounded permissions, traceable actions and defensible outcomes. The challenge is no longer just what AI can do, but how institutions can govern what it does and prove it.

Stablecoins have moved out of the regulatory grey zone and into a proper legal framework. That shift changes the question facing every institution, from whether to engage at all to exactly how. Regulators in different markets are setting the terms at different speeds, and institutions no longer have the luxury of waiting for global consensus before deciding. This discussion works through the practical choices on the table: issuing, distributing or custodying stablecoins directly, against the risk of simply watching deposits drift toward whichever option moves fastest. Participants leave with a sharper sense of where their own institution sits on that spectrum, and what waiting actually costs under the new rules. One key question the discussion will dive into: whether to issue, distribute or custody stablecoins themselves, or simply watch deposits migrate to them regardless.

Every company is now deciding how much to automate, and how to earn trust when users can’t see what’s happening under the hood. For Tala, that question isn’t new. Over the past decade, the company has built trust at scale with more than 14 million people across Latin America, Southeast Asia, and East Africa, many of them excluded from traditional finance.

In this fireside chat, Tala's founder and CEO Shivani Siroya shares what it takes to build for the global majority: why trust has to be designed into the product from day one, how the company is using AI-native credit infrastructure to serve more people, and what founders and builders can learn from working where the stakes of getting it wrong are highest. Join to hear more about the risks, the tradeoffs, and the lessons from a decade of building.

While Western payment giants race to crack Asia's fragmented markets, the region's homegrown fintechs have quietly gone the other way, expanding into Europe and the US. A moderated conversation with two cross-border payments leaders explores what mastering Asia's complexity has taught them about winning on the global stage.

Based on a true story (hiking trip) that initially went all wrong but, with some hard decisions, ended up successful. The theme illustrates the journey of entrepreneurship in all its pains and glory. It covers the high points, the low points, the pain of corrections and pivots, and the successful finish. It celebrates the journey and the life lessons it teaches us.

Live demonstration of portfolio optimization using Dirac-3 quantum technology. We optimize Nasdaq-100 portfolios using expected returns, risk, and third-order terms (skewness), and compare results with classical optimization and historical market performance.

An agent that completes a task faster does not necessarily make an operation cheaper. Integration, supervision, exceptions and maintenance can absorb the savings promised by automation. Which workflows offer a credible return once the full cost of deployment is included? How should institutions redesign processes, allocate work between people and agents, and measure improvements in throughput, accuracy and service quality? This conversation examines the economics of agentic operations: where greater autonomy creates value, where a simpler approach is more effective, and how organisations can adapt their operating models to make the most of the technology.

The Global FinTech Hackcelerator (GFH) is SFF’s flagship innovation programme, organised by MAS and GFTN. Innovators from around the world answer real problem statements set by leading financial institutions, and up to 20 shortlisted teams are brought to Singapore to pitch live on stage. This opening starts an afternoon of three challenge finals on the Catalyst Stage, presented with GXS Bank, Julius Baer and Zurich Insurance. One winner will be crowned in each category and take home SGD 80,000 in cash.

Tokenization is moving real-world assets such as treasuries, funds and credit onto new digital rails. The technology is advancing quickly. The harder question is whether the legal and regulatory framework can keep pace. When an asset becomes a token, does it retain the same rights and protections? Who owns the underlying asset? Which jurisdiction's rules apply when the token crosses a border? And what happens when different markets take different approaches? This conversation brings regulators and market participants together to examine where the rules are clear, where they diverge, and what still needs to be resolved for tokenized assets to scale.

As the way we live, work and earn evolves, payment acceptance must evolve with it. This session explores how issuers, wallets, fintechs and acceptance players can widen economic participation — from people monetizing their skills to side hustlers to millions of micro-sellers and beyond. Plus, hear from a leading digital bank on the financial inclusion potential.

What does it take to build an AI bank? This session shares practical lessons from deploying AI agents for inclusive finance, including an agent that combines credit, bill discounting, accounting and tax to serve small businesses in real time. It also explores the governance and organisational change needed to scale AI-native banking.

Fraud and credit risk no longer sit in separate boxes, yet most banks still assess them as if they do. Static, siloed models leave blind spots that scammers exploit in real time. In this Global FinTech Hackcelerator final, shortlisted teams take on GXS Bank’s challenge: unify credit and fraud risk in a single framework that keeps learning and adapts as fast as the threats do. Watch solutions that could change how banks see risk, pitched live and judged on the Catalyst Stage, with SGD 80,000 going to the winner.

Something exciting brewing!

A trillion-scale cross-border e-commerce market still lacks fit-for-purpose credit assessment. Our AI risk engine turns fragmented seller data into digital credit assets. It replaces collateral with data and static review with dynamic monitoring, lifting asset matching efficiency by 80% while keeping NPLs below 0.2%, unlocking the market’s true financial potential.

Speaker: Alice Du, Brand Lead

Enterprise software procurement has reached an impasse where buyers are actively delaying third-party purchasing decisions. McKinsey's State of AI Survey reveals that while corporate adoption has expanded to 72% of organizations, less than a third have realized material bottom-line cost reductions, driving IT leaders to build custom internal workflows or freeze deployments. With internal developer efficiency rising, buying commercial software requires clear justification. This session brings enterprise procurement chiefs and CIOs together to uncover the cost benchmarks, integration constraints, and security liabilities that determine whether they buy, build internally, or wait.

Explore the growth of Global Dollar (USDG) and the role of Global Dollar Network (GDN) in expanding stablecoin adoption. This session will examine USDG’s regulatory structure, use cases, and the opportunities and challenges shaping its next phase of growth.

Over 500 startups and 200 investors from 50+ markets meet at Investor Hours annually for fundraising, deal sharing, investment and market expansion opportunities.

We invite startups across sectors and stages to request investor meetings, and investors to meet startups for deal opportunities and fellow investors for deal sharing.

Meetings are pre-scheduled within Investor Hours in SFF App and curated by GFTN team in 15min slots.

Registration is required: https://www.fintechfestival.sg/investor-hours

Most AI debates focus on training. For banks and insurers, the bigger risk sits in inference: every prompt, document and customer record a model sees at runtime. This session explains what inference is, why it breaks down for regulated enterprises, and what it takes to run any model, on any hardware, without data leaving the country. We close with how this works in practice in Singapore.

Not every country can build global-scale financial infrastructure alone. Across the world, groups of countries are pooling resources, coordinating oversight, and interlinking systems regionally, choosing collective action over waiting for a single global standard or going it alone.

This panel brings together three different models of that regional playbook. The discussion works through what it takes to build financial cooperation at the bloc level: how these regional mechanisms actually got built, what kept smaller or newer members willing to join in, and where this collective model succeeds — or strains — compared to a single institution building alone. Attendees leave with a practical view of when banding together beats going it alone, and what it costs to make that work.

Permissioned identity is emerging as critical infrastructure for trusted client relationships in an AI-powered financial ecosystem. This fireside chat explores how building this foundation can enable AI adoption at scale, deliver smarter client experiences, and strengthen risk controls. We’ll also discuss how established institutions and emerging ecosystem players can work together to build sustainable, trusted foundations for long-term success.

As financial institutions move agentic AI into core business, gains in growth, productivity and efficiency may bring consequences that are harder to see—and harder to contain. Within firms, greater autonomy could reshape jobs, decision-making, accountability and operational risk. Across markets and governments, it raises questions about oversight, stability and who is responsible when agents act across institutional boundaries. Closing this series, the session looks beyond the promised gains to ask who benefits, who bears the costs, and how leaders can recognise and govern outcomes they did not intend.

AI agents have made code cheap, but bank modernisation still stalls on requirements. Legacy rules sit in old code and people’s heads, and an agent cannot ask what a vague requirement means. It builds its guess into both code and tests, so the error passes every check. This talk presents a business-technology integrated toolchain that turns new processes and legacy rules into one business capability model: an unambiguous, traceable source for agents to generate code and tests.

What happens when a customer sends an AI agent to shop, and what should a merchant check about the payment flow? What changes when a business uses an agent to manage its own money? This 30-minute demonstration walks through both scenarios using Airwallex's Airi and Agentic Business Accounts.

It examines how a customer authorises a purchase, how a scoped payment credential reaches the merchant's existing checkout without a new merchant integration, and how a finance agent accesses account information and requests or carries out actions. Merchants will learn what to ask about integration, visibility, fraud and dispute handling, approval controls and human oversight.

Digital banking has largely been designed around customers visiting an app, comparing options and making a choice. If customers delegate those choices to agents, banks may have fewer direct opportunities to earn their attention and trust.

How will customers discover, select and remain loyal to financial providers when software mediates the relationship? Which interactions will people still want to handle themselves? This session examines how channels, service design and customer consent must evolve, and what institutions need to preserve a meaningful relationship with the person behind the agent.

Advice has always been sold on presence: the advisor who knows you and is there when it matters. Technology scaled transactions, not presence. Agentic AI changes that. An advisor backed by AI agents can continuously serve hundreds of clients. This session demonstrates agentic AI in wealth management beyond CRM and lead generation, empowering advisors holistically, and explores what it takes to deploy it in production.

In this session, Marlene Amstad, Chair of FINMA and Chair of the IOSCO SupTech Forum, whose members oversee jurisdictions covering roughly 90% of global securities markets, shows how international cooperation on technology can transform financial supervision worldwide: detecting risks earlier, working more efficiently and strengthening trust across borders.

Agentic payments need more than smarter models to go mainstream. They need a new money stack of real-time settlement rails, agent-level policy controls and governance that earns trust at scale. What will it take to move from pilots to everyday commerce?

An estimated US$84 trillion is about to change hands in the largest wealth transfer in history, and the heirs receiving it grew up digital. They expect their bank to feel the same. In this Global FinTech Hackcelerator final, shortlisted teams take on Julius Baer’s challenge: build an AI-powered private banking experience that is seamless and deeply personal, from first onboarding to portfolio advisory. See how the next generation of wealth could be won, pitched live and judged on the Catalyst Stage, with SGD 80,000 going to the winner.

Explore how Beyondsoft helps enterprises navigate VMware migration challenges and simplify multi-cloud operations. Through a real-world migration case, discover practical strategies to minimize downtime and migration risks. See how Beyondsoft’s Cloud Management Platform (CMP) enables unified management, monitoring, and cost optimization across cloud environments.

Tokenized deposits and conditional money take the programmability idea one layer deeper. They pilot whether settlement, eligibility and compliance can be embedded directly in the money rather than enforced around it. That raises a regulatory question few frameworks have caught up with: who is liable when the rule embedded in the transaction, not a human decision, turns out to be wrong. This discussion examines how the embedded-rules approach works in practice, and what it removes from the compliance function. It also looks at what new failure modes this introduces once the rule is baked into the transfer rather than checked afterwards. Attendees leave with a clearer view of where this model is genuinely ready, and where regulators are still working out how to hold it accountable. One key question the discussion will dive into: if compliance is embedded in the money itself, who is accountable when the embedded rule is wrong?

Financial services is entering a new phase where AI systems don't just assist, they act, orchestrating decisions across compliance, fraud detection, and customer engagement in real time. This session examines how the convergence of agentic AI with tokenization, stablecoins, and agentic commerce is reshaping payments infrastructure and core banking, and what FSI leaders need to consider as they move from generative AI pilots to autonomous systems operating at scale.

While early-stage seed activity persists, growth capital across Southeast Asia remains intensely concentrated and selective. PitchBook's 2026 Southeast Asia Private Capital Breakdown recorded VC deal value falling 33.9% in 2025, driven by tighter diligence and reduced cross-border participation. Investors holding dry powder are enforcing higher performance hurdles and stricter profitability milestones before committing follow-on capital. This session addresses how regional GPs are deploying funds, what alternative capital stacks are stepping into the void, and where funding will genuinely flow.

Financial institutions have begun crypto screening, built inventories, and launched pilots. The next question is how their progress compares with the market—and whether it is sufficient for the risks they face. Drawing on published banking-sector readiness data, this session explores how to benchmark progress, interpret peer comparisons, and assess the evidence behind readiness claims. From inventory coverage to migration capability and supplier dependencies, it examines why being ahead of the market can still leave critical gaps. Participants will gain practical questions to assess where they stand and prioritise their next steps.

AI agents are moving beyond answering questions to taking action, including initiating financial transactions. Unlike humans, agents have no personal stake in the outcome and bear no consequences for a poor decision. When an institutional client’s AI agent initiates a payment, how does a bank verify its identity, confirm what it is authorised to do and know when to intervene?

Featuring a client's AI agent interacting with a bank's AI agent in real time, this session explores how trust can be built into the infrastructure of autonomous transactions. From verifying identity and setting limits to preventing unauthorised actions and maintaining an auditable record, discover what is needed for banks to enable agents to transact autonomously and safely, at machine speed and without losing clear accountability or human oversight.

National instant payment schemes are proliferating around the world, yet most remain valuable only within their own borders. As domestic networks mature, the next source of value lies not in individual schemes, but in the bridges that connect them.

This session explores the emerging cross-border interoperability layer: who is building it, how common messaging standards and technical frameworks make it possible, and how governance, costs, revenues, and risks are shared among the parties involved. The discussion will examine the different models being adopted globally, from bilateral connections to multilateral networks and shared infrastructure platforms.

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of where payment interoperability is succeeding in practice, what challenges remain, and the trade-offs between different connectivity approaches.

One of the central questions the panel will explore is: when one country's instant payment scheme needs to communicate with another's, who builds the bridge, and who owns the toll?

What if everyone had an agent working to widen their options, finding better credit, stretching their money further and unlocking services once out of reach? That is the promise of agentic commerce, but abundance won’t arrive on its own. Trust has to move at machine speed. Speakers explore how verified human identities, cryptographically bound agents and delegated permissions can make every action attributable, authorised and auditable, and how the industry can build on that foundation to deliver shared prosperity. What must we get right for agents to truly multiply human potential?

Small businesses are the backbone of the economy, yet most lack access to the expertise available to larger enterprises. This session explores how AI-powered virtual CFO capabilities can help business owners manage cash flow, reduce expenses, uncover growth opportunities, and make better decisions using insights derived from trusted business, payments, and financial data.

Employee benefits, insurance and care often sit in separate silos. Through live demos of a broker renewal workflow and an employee benefits app, this session shows how they can be connected, where AI can cut manual work, and where human judgement still matters most.

Three forces are colliding at once—autonomous agents, programmable stablecoins, and real-time rails—and together they could rewrite how money moves entirely. As AI agents begin to transact independently and stablecoins gain regulatory footing, the boundaries between payments, settlement, and currency are dissolving faster than most institutions can react. Learn how agentic payments and stablecoins intersect to enable machine-speed money movement; what infrastructure and compliance shifts this convergence demands; and where the earliest commercial opportunities are emerging.

Small and medium enterprises power the economy, yet most are badly underinsured against the risks that now shape it: cyber attacks, supply chain shocks and asset exposure. Most only find the gaps after something has gone wrong. In this Global FinTech Hackcelerator final, shortlisted teams take on Zurich Insurance’s challenge: give SMEs AI tools that show real-time risk exposure and coverage gaps across the business. Watch ideas that could close the protection gap, pitched live and judged on the Catalyst Stage, with SGD 80,000 going to the winner.

AI isn't just rewiring "the economy": it's rewiring industries one at a time, unevenly and often invisibly. Granular economic data and analysis can uncover the true winners and losers: e.g., a firm poised to retain strong demand in the face of AI may still face workforce or workflow disruption. Spotted early, these factors reshape both risk and opportunity landscapes – often in surprising ways.

The JPQR Global enables interoperability between Japan’s JPQR and unified QR payment standards in countries around the world. Consumers from participating countries can simply use their familiar home-country payment apps to pay at participating merchants in Japan. Likewise, participating Japanese payment services can be used at merchants accepting the national QR payment standards of participating countries. JPQR Global already supports inbound payments from Cambodia through KHQR and from Indonesia through QRIS. Today marks another important milestone as Singapore joins the JPQR Global network, further expanding the cross-border QR payment ecosystem and bringing Japan closer to a truly connected global payment network.

*Priority access for merchants with an 'M' tag*
Join fellow merchants for networking over drinks at Merchant Zone Stage.

Beyond Borders: Connect with Innovation from Shanghai & Shenzhen
​Join us for a networking event at Beyond Borders — A GFTN SEGA Go-Global Pavilion, featuring innovation from Shanghai and Shenzhen.

​Who should attend?
FinTech leaders, financial services professionals, bankers, technology teams, entrepreneurs, and anyone curious about the technology coming out of China and how to apply it to their business or services.

​Alongside networking, we’ll host content sessions offering insights into China’s technology landscape and opportunities for collaboration.

Register to Attend: https://luma.com/gtq69zsx

As digital money, tokenized assets and next-generation financial infrastructures gain traction around the world, jurisdictions and institutions are adopting a growing range of technologies, infrastructure models and settlement systems. While this diversity is driving innovation, it also raises an important question: how can increasingly interconnected financial systems continue to operate seamlessly across borders — without waiting for a single global standard to emerge first?

This panel brings together the institutions alongside policymakers and innovators from Asia, Europe and the UK to discuss what regional cooperation actually requires in practice: unified ledgers, synchronisation mechanisms, privacy-preserving technologies, and the governance arrangements that let independently built systems trust one another.

The discussion will examine the technical, legal, operational and regulatory challenges involved in scaling these regional models, and explore how deeper connectivity between them — rather than a single unified global system — may be the more realistic path to an interconnected financial system.

What separates leading banks is not how many models or agents they deploy, but whether they can safely scale their own intelligence in core production at controlled cost. Models will keep changing; banks must stay in charge of how that intelligence is built, operated and evolved. This session unpacks the architecture behind it: open architecture and open source for freedom to choose; full-lifecycle Token management for controllable cost; knowledge and engineering assets for faster reuse; and an Agent marketplace with Skills for business-led assembly.

Expanding across fragmented regional markets forces digital finance startups into repetitive licensing cycles that multiply compliance costs and stall international scale. Recent agreements between Rwanda’s central bank and its counterparts in Ghana and Kenya to establish fintech licence passporting show that cross-border supervisory reciprocity is moving from principle to practice. A recent survey by TechCabal Research revealed that 62.5% of regional fintechs already operate internationally or plan to, with an identical proportion backing passporting frameworks. This session convenes financial regulators and founders to examine how central banks can align supervisory frameworks and establish mutual recognition standards without compromising financial stability or compliance oversight.

Explore how Beyondsoft helps enterprises navigate VMware migration challenges and simplify multi-cloud operations. Through a real-world migration case, discover practical strategies to minimize downtime and migration risks. See how Beyondsoft’s Cloud Management Platform (CMP) enables unified management, monitoring, and cost optimization across cloud environments.

Can AI effectively simulate markets and social systems and its agents out-reason human experts in specialized tasks? Two new global competitions aim to find out. Economic World Model Challenge tests how well participants can create digital twins for city planning, (onchain) financial markets, etc., on powerful platforms such as HoloBit, while Metacase challenge tests agents' ability to conduct complex analyses and draw sound inferences from business and business cases. Join this session for live demos, learn why economic world models and metacases matter for risk, policy and investment, and find out how your team can partake in an international community pushing the frontier of AI for business and social science.

Instant payments can reach millions of the unbanked but only if the economics work for everyone building the rails. Around the world, national real-time payment systems are proving that speed and inclusion can coexist, yet many struggle to balance universal access with commercial viability. Getting that balance right is now a defining test of payments strategy.

You will learn: how to design instant payment schemes that serve the underserved without eroding sustainability; which governance and pricing models drive long-term adoption; and what lessons successful national roadmaps offer to markets still building theirs. Miss this session, and you risk designing a system that scales in usage but never in value.

Every tokenised asset needs tokenised money to settle against, but what form will it be? Tokenisation promises to change how bonds, funds, private markets and real-world assets are issued, traded and settled. Yet without a trusted, programmable cash leg, it remains stuck at the pilot stage. Global banks are bringing deposits on-chain, and stablecoins have already reached some scale as internet-native dollars. Both are looking to be part of the settlement layer of the next financial system.

This session brings together leaders who will discuss which form of money corporates and institutions will trust for atomic settlement, collateral and liquidity, whether bank money and internet-native money will compete or interoperate, and what must be in place for tokenised markets to scale.

Payments move across borders in seconds. Building the technology to support them is a different challenge: connecting to local payment rails, adapting to market requirements, and scaling reliable products across regions. This panel looks at the infrastructure and product choices that help payment companies expand across the US, Europe, the Gulf and Asia—and where local licensing still shapes the roadmap. Founders leave with practical ideas for sequencing market entry, reducing integration friction and building payment systems that can scale globally.

AI has the potential to make the digital economy safer, smarter and more accessible, but only if innovation and inclusion advance together. This session will explore how governments and industry can harness AI, secure payments and digital public infrastructure to build trust, expand access and connect more people and businesses to the digital economy.

China built the world's most pervasive mobile payments system on a black-and-white square. But when nearly every transaction runs through a QR code, where does the next leap come from? With the e-CNY pushing into wallets and cross-border rails like mBridge testing new models for settling value between central banks, the architecture of Chinese money is being redrawn. The panel unpacks which layers (digital currency, embedded finance, AI-driven credit or cross-border settlement) will capture the next wave of value. It also looks at what interoperability means for incumbents and foreign players, and how China's choices could set the template for payments across Asia.

You don't want to miss this one-of-a-kind industry networking where founders, regulators, and business leaders will jam together on stage to wrap up and celebrate this milestone SFF with a BANG!

SFF After Hours is open to all SFF attendees. Unwind and connect with industry peers, thought leaders, and innovators. Flash your SFF speaker pass to enjoy complimentary drinks and exclusive discounts at bars and restaurants along Clarke Quay, by the Singapore River — a networking experience you don't want to miss!

Join us as we kick off the day's sessions on the Festival Stage, featuring insightful conversations, groundbreaking ideas, and inspiring voices shaping the future of FinTech.

Smart economies are beginning to make decisions and act across transport, energy, commerce and finance. Banking’s next shift may follow: AI agents could move from advising customers to initiating transactions, coordinating services and managing financial outcomes on their behalf. That prospect raises a structural question: can systems built around human instructions, batch payments and familiar forms of accountability support finance conducted at machine speed? The answer depends on more than a smarter interface. It requires new architecture, agentic compliance and risk controls that preserve human oversight where it matters. Banking 5.0 sets out the case for that transition and what separates structural change from a chatbot layered over legacy systems.

What happens to the economy when AI can act on our behalf?
 
AI agents already write code and handle many customer queries, and they are beginning to make purchases and payments. As they become more capable, they could change how businesses operate, how work is organized and how money moves, opening the way to new products, services, and sources of growth.
 
The spread of agentic AI also raises hard questions, especially about jobs. Which roles will change, what new kinds of work will emerge, and how can people build the skills to work alongside AI? In this fireside chat, IMF First Deputy Managing Director Dan Katz will discuss the economic promise of agentic AI, the concerns that come with it, and what policymakers can do to help workers and economies adapt.

This practitioner-led workshop explores how technology and AI are reshaping lending operations, grounded in current industry challenges and member insights.

APLMA, Finastra and Marketnode will examine where automation can genuinely add value, what good implementation looks like within existing lending environments, and where human judgement remains essential. Through practical examples and audience discussion, participants will gain a clearer view of how AI can be applied responsibly and effectively across the loan lifecycle.

This is presented by:
- Azizah Noor, Vice President, DBS
- Chandra Mohan MJ, Lead Solution Consultant, Finastra

Location: Level 2, Garnet 214

Imagine an economy where software doesn't just recommend decisions—it makes them, negotiates them, and settles them, all without a human in the loop. That future arrives when agentic AI meets programmable money. Autonomous agents that can transact, and digital money that can execute logic on its own, together unlock machine-speed commerce that today's financial rails were never built to handle. Learn how agentic AI and programmable money combine to reshape payments, settlement, and value exchange, what new risks emerge when agents transact autonomously, and how institutions should prepare for an economy that runs itself.

AI is moving beyond generating insights and assisting decisions to taking action — planning, coordinating and executing increasingly complex workflows. This shift towards agentic AI has implications far beyond technology, challenging the operating models, organisational structures and assumptions through which businesses have traditionally competed. As intelligence becomes more accessible, competitive advantage may depend less on who has the best AI and more on who can redesign their organisation, infrastructure and decision-making to turn intelligence into outcomes at scale. This session explores how agentic AI is reshaping the architecture of business from the systems that connect people, data and machines to the operating models that enable speed, adaptability and differentiation. In a world where AI can act, what will separate the leaders from the laggards and where will tomorrow’s competitive advantage really reside?

Chocolate Finance will discuss their AI journey across the organisation, focusing on the improvements made in the software engineering team. Listen to how they built a family of engineering agents on AWS Bedrock AgentCore, ensuring compliant, scalable and extensible AI-driven engineering.

Agent Provisioning starts by unfolding a manageable workflow, to find where time and cost concentrate. Each step is scored for agent fit, then marked Replace, Assist, or Hold. Regulated decisions default to human-assisted.

Agent Solution Design turns findings into a supervisor-and-specialist agent architecture. Every agent is specified like a role, with an allow-listed toolset, grounded memory, and built-in guardrails and a kill switch. A thin-slice prototype is dual-run against the human baseline.
Agent Engineering promotes proven agents through UAT, Pre-Production drills then Production, and a staged rollout: dark run, canary, assist mode, then replace mode.

Agentic Governance runs an Agent OS, the “HR system” for digital employees (Agents). A registry, a runtime hook gateway, and continuous testing track accuracy, efficiency, consistency, and token economics.
Agents that fail are replaced

Speaker: Tony Yue, Senior Solution Expert

The first wave of AI was about proving what intelligence can do. The next challenge is putting it to work at scale. For financial institutions, AI must operate across fragmented systems, distributed operations, regulatory boundaries, and decades of technology investments. Success is no longer determined by models alone, but by the ability to operationalise intelligence while maintaining Scalability, Sustainability and Security. This keynote explores how leading financial institutions are moving beyond AI experimentation by building the engineering capabilities, operating foundations, and integration frameworks required to deploy intelligence across existing systems, processes, governance structures, and talent. The goal is not to rebuild the enterprise, but to unlock the value of AI at scale.

As PayNow becomes more embedded in everyday commerce, attention is increasingly turning to the merchant experience across the payment journey.

This session explores how that experience can be made simpler and more predictable: how deep-linking can reduce friction at checkout and scale across the ecosystem; what protections and responsibilities are needed when payments go wrong; and how scheme-level standards can support more consistent outcomes while preserving flexibility in how banks serve their customers.

Money moves globally, but the rails beneath it don't speak the same language. Instant payment systems, stablecoins, card networks, correspondent banking, and CBDCs are all racing to define how value crosses borders—and no single winner is emerging. The future isn't one universal rail; it's many, and the real challenge is making them interoperate without friction, fragmentation, or lost trust. Learn how the competing rails of global money movement are converging and colliding, what interoperability actually requires across systems and jurisdictions, and where the next chapter of cross-border payments is really being written.

Every founder dreams of the exit. Far fewer plan for it.

In a funding cycle shaped by lofty valuations and layered rounds, many promising companies find their path to exit blocked by the very capital that fueled their growth. Complex cap tables, preference stacks, and misaligned shareholders can turn a willing acquirer into a walk-away, or a good outcome into a stalemate.

This session, co-hosted with Singapore Venture Capital Association, brings together investors for a candid conversation about what really stands between a startup and its exit. We’ll examine how high valuations and shareholder misalignment create friction when it matters most, and ask a harder question: how can founders and investors recognize early when to pivot or call time, before too much capital makes either option painful?

Expect frank views, real lessons, and practical takeaways for anyone raising or backing startups today.

Technology and capital are no longer neutral conduits of commerce; they are instruments and pressure points in geoeconomic competition. Yet fragmentation has not ended integration. It has made its terms more contested. The Asia–Middle East corridor crystallises the challenge: how to deepen financial and digital connectivity while managing exposure to strategic chokepoints, incompatible systems and concentrated dependencies. Its test is whether interoperable infrastructure and practical cooperation can turn interdependence into resilience and give shape to a more trusted architecture of finance.

Whether you're a student starting out, a finance professional planning a career pivot, or a startup founder facing a specific business challenge, Pay It Forward connects you with established industry professionals for face-to-face, one-to-one mentorship. It's a chance to get advice from people who have already worked through the challenges you're facing. Sessions are 15 minutes long and take place at the Pay It Forward Lounge in Hall 3, from 18 to 20 November, 12.30pm to 4.30pm. Come with one specific question or challenge, and leave with focused, practical advice.

Join us as we kick off the day's sessions on the Policy Stage, featuring insightful conversations, groundbreaking ideas, and inspiring voices shaping the future of FinTech.

PayPal helped make online checkout mainstream. But in a world where payments are becoming faster, more embedded and increasingly invisible, a famous button may be less of an advantage than it once was. Can the company turn its reach across PayPal, Venmo and Braintree into a broader role in people’s financial lives? At SFF2026, CEO Enrique Lores joins a candid conversation about the choices, trade-offs and execution required to move beyond payments, and how much reinvention a quarter-century-old fintech can really pull off.

Rewiring the Founder Playbook is where founders, investors, enterprise buyers and policymakers confront the decisions reshaping the next generation of financial companies: who gets funded, what buyers will pay for, which moats survive AI, and when growth should become an exit. Flagship Founders Peak talks reveal the personal stories behind those decisions.

Join us as we kick off the day's sessions on the FutureMatters Stage, featuring insightful conversations, groundbreaking ideas, and inspiring voices shaping the future of FinTech.

Join us as we kick off the day's sessions on the Catalyst Stage, featuring insightful conversations, groundbreaking ideas, and inspiring voices shaping the next wave of talent and ideas.

Join us as we kick off the day's sessions on the Ignite Stage, featuring insightful conversations, groundbreaking ideas, and inspiring voices shaping the future of FinTech.

Join us as we kick off the day's sessions on the Frontier Stage, featuring insightful conversations, groundbreaking ideas, and inspiring voices shaping the future of FinTech.

The way money moves is entering a new era, driven by real-time payments, digitalization, and tokenization. This transformation is reshaping not only payments, but also the role of banks and the broader financial ecosystem.
The session will explore how banking needs to evolve and what the future of finance could look like in this new era.

Agentic AI has moved from pilots to systems that touch real credit decisions, real client money and real compliance rules, and the institutions getting the governance right this year are setting the ceiling for the next decade. This session examines where accountability sits once an agent, not a person, initiates the action, across risk, audit and reporting lines — and then confronts the scenario most institutions would rather not discuss: what actually happens in the moments after an agent goes wrong.

An agent doesn't take a coffee break. When it fails, it can fail at machine speed, across every transaction it touches, before a human even notices. So the real test isn't whether agents fail, but how fast an institution can contain them when they do, and who is authorised to make that call. This discussion moves from the accountability question to the operational one: what real-time containment looks like in practice, where autonomous systems are most likely to break, and how to build the kill switches and safeguards that limit the blast radius before autonomy is extended any further.

Attendees leave with a sharper view of the controls that need to exist before autonomy is extended further. One of the key questions the panel will look to dive deeper into: Who is accountable when an autonomous agent makes a bad call, moves client money, or silently breaks a compliance rule?

Improving financial health takes more than better products. It requires regulators, financial institutions, fintechs, and policymakers to rethink how financial services are designed, delivered, and understood, particularly in emerging markets where income patterns, consumer behaviours, and financial needs can vary widely.

As a continuation from the ASEAN Financial Health Challenge, this panel brings together leaders across policy, fintech, banking, and insurance to examine how public-private collaboration can turn innovation into better financial outcomes. The discussion dives into how technology and human-centred design can address deep financial health challenges, where education needs to complement innovation, and how fintechs are developing and scaling new approaches across ASEAN.

The panel will conclude with an unveiling and the prize presentation of the 3 winners of the ASEAN Financial Health Challenge.

Bharat Connect is an interoperable bill payment system, the only platform across the globe to enable millions of customers for paying their utility bills. This session will cover the impact of the infrastructure and the effect it has on utility service providers.

For decades, financial innovation meant new products on old rails. That lens no longer explains where control is concentrating. Money 1.0 digitised value. Money 2.0 networked it. Money 3.0 makes it programmable — value that carries its own logic, constraints and compliance, settling toward atomic, with AI agents as first-class transactors. But is this a structural shift, or digitisation in new clothes? This opening session looks to separate architecture from hype and asks the question that matters: How far can programmable money along with tokenized financial products go?

Corporate technology leaders are increasingly rejecting per-user subscription licenses that divorce vendor fees from measurable client performance. Research from Deloitte’s Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey indicates that 58% of enterprise procurement executives are prioritizing shared-risk, outcome-contingent commercial contracts across new software implementations to curtail budget creep. However, structuring these arrangements without triggering legal disputes requires objective measurement standards. This session explores how enterprise buyers and vendors structure verifiable performance baselines, downside penalties, and margin-protected upside mechanisms to deploy sustainable, outcome-based software engagements across mission-critical enterprise systems.

How AI, customer intelligence, and new operating models are rewiring financial institutions to move beyond product-centric banking toward meaningful customer engagement and better financial outcomes.

Across APAC, millions of businesses already sell through messaging apps - until it's time to get paid, and the conversation stalls. Meta Business Agent closes that gap: an always-on assistant that greets customers, responds in local languages, showcases products, and collects payment, all within the chat. Join us to see how conversational commerce is reshaping how businesses in the region win and keep customers.

The conversation around AI in financial services has moved beyond experimentation. The challenge is no longer identifying promising use cases—it's deploying AI at scale in ways that deliver measurable business value. From payments and banking to fintech and customer engagement, leading institutions are embedding AI into core operations to improve productivity, strengthen risk management, personalise customer experiences, and accelerate innovation. Yet while some initiatives become enterprise capabilities, many others remain trapped in pilot mode.

Bringing together leaders from across the financial services ecosystem, this panel explores where AI is creating tangible impact today, what it takes to scale successful deployments across the organisation, and the operational, cultural, and governance challenges that determine whether AI delivers lasting value. The discussion will examine how institutions are prioritising AI investments, measuring success beyond productivity gains, and building the data, operating models, and organisational capabilities needed to move from isolated use cases to enterprise-wide transformation.

Tokenization is moving from pilots to production. In 15 minutes, we’ll share what corporates, asset managers, FIs and fintechs need to adopt on chain money movement: where value is real, what risks show up in production, and the operating controls that unlock scale, grounded in real-world tokenized payments and tokenized fund examples.

Most organisations have AI pilots, but few have AI at scale. This session unpacks what it takes to close that gap. That means rethinking how people and AI work together, building governance that enables rather than constrains, and making sure adoption delivers results that employees and customers can feel.

ASEAN's fintech industry is entering a new phase of maturity, shifting from rapid expansion towards sustainable business models, intelligent financial infrastructure and meaningful commercial impact. Artificial intelligence, digital assets, tokenisation and increasingly interconnected payment networks are transforming financial services and creating opportunities for greater efficiency and financial inclusion. Yet realising their potential requires navigating fragmented markets, evolving regulation, cybersecurity threats and growing expectations around trust and operational resilience. Against this backdrop, the FinTech in ASEAN 2027 report will examine how the region’s FinTech ecosystem is evolving, where investment and innovation are gaining momentum, and what it takes to scale across diverse ASEAN markets. It will explore the convergence of technology, capital and regulation, including the role of financial institutions, investors, regulators and technology providers in accelerating adoption and building a more connected financial ecosystem.

Stablecoins, tokenized deposits and tokenized MMFs are all racing to become the default form of institutional money, though none of them do the same job equally well. Three advocates, one per instrument get two minutes each to pitch to our moderator, who presses each on the trade-offs. Then the audience votes: what would you actually hold for payroll, for treasury, for cross-border? Come find out what counts as money when the answer depends on the job.

This session introduces next-generation Agentic Banking to banking audiences, covering three key areas:
• Agentic Banking architecture and its evolution roadmap
• The paradigm shift in banking interaction: from App-first to AI-first
• A real-world implementation case and measurable outcomes at a native digital bank in Southeast Asia

Speaker: Joseph Yeong，Country Managing Director

As TradFi moves on-chain, can ownership of regulated digital assets remain anonymous? Programmed Governance offers a new model where trusted identity, asset eligibility and policy rules are checked and validated before value moves. As money becomes programmable, this session explores the next frontier: rewiring policy for an era of programmable value.

Incentives are misaligned in global banking. Large banks run networks that cannot serve today's FI volume at a viable cost, so mid-market firms turn to challenger banks that fund lending with client float. Clearing, custody and liquidity are fiduciary and belong in a 100% reserve model. Attendees leave knowing where operational money should sit.

ASEAN offers significant opportunities for regional growth, but its diversity means that success in one market does not readily translate to another. For Singapore-based FinTechs, the challenge is not simply where to expand, but how to sequence that growth: build credibility with a major customer at home, or enter another market early to test whether the business can travel. Firms must also decide what to own, what to localise and where partnerships can provide faster access to customers, infrastructure and regulatory capabilities. AI may sharpen market insights and support experimentation, but its value depends on sound use cases, trusted data and effective governance. These choices ultimately determine whether expansion creates regional scale or merely complexity.

Core banking functions such as credit decisions, trade finance, fraud detection and KYC are shifting from pilot demonstrations into live, algorithm-driven workflows, and the institutions pulling ahead are rebuilding these processes end to end rather than adding AI on top of what already exists.

This session brings together the people actually doing that rebuild - the platforms it runs on, the institutions deploying it, and the regulators overseeing it - to work through what that rebuild actually requires: which controls move from human sign-off to automated checkpoints, and where the audit trail needs redesigning rather than retrofitting.

Banks have spent a decade buying products like Cash management, Trade Finance, Supply Chain Finance, Lending; and stitching them together afterwards. The cost isn't just efficiency; it caps growth: fragmented data, duplicated workflows, and change that moves at the pace of the slowest system. This session argues that banking's next competitive advantage is architectural, and shows what institutions building on one foundation do differently.

Tokenization pilots keep succeeding technically and failing to scale, because liquidity fragments across a dozen new rails instead of moving as one. This session makes the case that fragmentation, not technology, is the real risk institutions face next, and shows what banks moving past the pilot stage are actually doing differently to solve it. 

Enterprises have piloted AI. In production, budgets run out within months as inference costs outgrow outcomes. In this presentation, we run a bank's recurring fee disputes at scale and show why: agents resend excess context and re-reason solved cases on every call. We then route them through an independent control layer and compare cost per case, accuracy and audit trail, with learning kept in-house.

As ASEAN's fintech ecosystem matures, a bigger question emerges: will the region's technological progress translate into lasting competitive advantage in the global financial system? The rules of competition are changing. AI is reshaping financial services, digital assets are challenging traditional infrastructure, and geopolitical realignments are redirecting capital, talent and financial flows. Meanwhile, regulatory divergence and competing national priorities are testing ambitions for greater regional integration. These shifts will create winners and losers. Some markets will emerge as centres for next-generation financial innovation and infrastructure, while others risk losing relevance. Established financial centres and business models may find their traditional advantages increasingly challenged. Bringing together presidents of leading fintech associations across Asia, this candid discussion moves beyond familiar calls for regional collaboration to examine the difficult strategic choices facing individual markets. Which competitive advantages will endure? Where will the next financial champions emerge? Can Asian economies strengthen their collective influence while competing for the same opportunities?

RWA tokenisation has a surplus of vision and a shortage of honest post-mortems. This session is the latter. Which asset classes are seeing real traction, and which are stuck in pilot theatre? How much settlement has actually been compressed and what breaks in the transition? Tokenised collateral promises mobility the legacy system can't match, but only if the legal frameworks hold. The question for banks, financial institutions and asset managers: who are the new investors, and what do they need to see before they allocate? Practitioners who have shipped and carry the scars, separate the working from the wished-for.

As trade corridors shift and USD liquidity tightens, SMEs are moving into new markets faster than financial institutions can keep up. This session explores what's changing on the ground and how banks can support SME growth across emerging-market corridors and beyond. 

Commerce no longer stops at borders, but much of the infrastructure behind it still does. As commerce becomes increasingly digital, cross-border and interconnected, we are seeing greater convergence across payment networks, technology and local ecosystems. What will it take to bridge these divides and build payments infrastructure that is secure, scalable and capable of supporting the next generation of commerce?

Demo by Google Deep Mind

Moving from real-time connectivity to tokenized settlement is not merely about “issuing tokens”; the biggest challenge is dismantling the old set of rules built around end-of-day settlement. When traditional clearing windows, reconciliation cycles, liquidity scheduling, and regulatory reporting cut-off times are completely disrupted, how should bank payment systems be re-architected?

This session will explore this in practice along the bank payment chain and focus directly on three core challenges: how a unified gateway can connect SWIFT, RTGS, fast payment systems, and mBridge; how tokenized deposits can support delivery-versus-payment (DvP) while retaining their deposit attributes; and how, once the end-of-day anchor is gone, the timing and data boundaries of regulatory reporting should be redefined.

Speaker: Ryan Ho, Director of Business Development

Financial regulation has always assumed that decisions can be traced through a clear chain of human accountability. But as AI agents begin directing other agents, that assumption starts to break down. Agentic AI won't just automate tasks—it has the potential to reshape how financial institutions are organised. Decision-making may shift between people and AI systems, reporting lines become more fluid, and the traditional structures underpinning governance, accountability and supervision begin to evolve. In that world, who is ultimately responsible for a decision? What exactly is a regulator supervising?

Bringing together senior policymakers and regulators, this session explores how supervisory frameworks—from senior manager accountability regimes to board oversight and the three lines of defence—need to adapt for organisations where humans increasingly govern systems that, in turn, govern other systems. The discussion will examine how institutions can demonstrate accountability, maintain effective oversight, and provide regulators with meaningful traceability in increasingly agent-driven operating models. Rather than focusing on individual AI decisions, the panel asks a broader question: how should governance evolve when the organisation itself becomes dynamic?

As digital assets become increasingly integrated into the financial system, trust is becoming a competitive advantage. What does it take to build digital-asset infrastructure that consumers, businesses and institutions can rely on?

Tokenised deposits are now live for corporate clients in Hong Kong, settling in central bank money on the HKMA’s EnsembleTX infrastructure. This fireside chat explores what it takes to bring regulated bank money onchain, how corporate treasurers are using it, and why connecting banks to digital asset platforms is key to adoption.

Over 500 startups and 200 investors from 50+ markets meet at Investor Hours annually for fundraising, deal sharing, investment and market expansion opportunities.

We invite startups across sectors and stages to request investor meetings, and investors to meet startups for deal opportunities and fellow investors for deal sharing.

Meetings are pre-scheduled within Investor Hours in SFF App and curated by GFTN team in 15min slots.

Registration is required: https://www.fintechfestival.sg/investor-hours

Your next customer won't be human. AI agents are becoming first-class transactors — browsing, deciding and paying with no person in the loop. When software initiates the payment, the contest shifts from the rail to the moment of intent: who owns it — the wallet, the platform, the merchant, or the agent's operator? What does an agent need before it can spend: identity, mandate, limits, recourse? Why do stablecoins and programmable money fit machine-initiated commerce better than card rails built for humans? And when an agent pays the wrong party on the wrong instruction, who is liable? The checkout is being rebuilt for machines. This session is about who gets to own it.

AI is changing software testing, but can financial institutions trust what it generates? Using a live demonstration of AI-assisted test generation, human review and automated execution, this session explores how to accelerate banking QA while managing errors, coverage gaps and accountability. Attendees will learn practical controls for adopting AI in critical financial systems.

Launched in May 2026, the Young Talent Programme for AI in Finance (YTP-AIF) is a pilot initiative that builds a pipeline of future-ready talent for an AI-enabled financial sector. By combining formal education with structured industry exposure, the programme equips students with in-demand AI and financial sector skills through hands-on learning and real-world industry challenges. As part of the programme, students will work in teams to develop and pitch practical solutions to problem statements contributed by industry partners, with guidance from industry mentors. The top five teams will showcase their ideas on the Catalyst Stage on 19 November.

Panel of Judges:
1. Deep Thomas, Chief Data and AI Officer, JP Morgan
2. Chen Wei, Group Head of Data and AI, Great Eastern
3. Medhi Bechinam, Head of Digital Solutions- Distribution. Prudential
4. Wu Wei, Executive Director and Data Scientist Team Lead, DBS
5. Queiroz Batista Da Silva Carlos Alexandre, Managing Director, Technology Architecture, OCBC
6. Ng Hsiao Piau, Head of Innovation Research, UOB
7. Wacdany Rojas, Head of Business Platforms APAC, Schroders
8. Satish Krishnan, Regional Head of APAC Global Markets Operations Engineering and Global Co-Head of Securities Post Trade Engineering. Goldman Sachs
9. Jessie Cheing, Chief People Officer, Manulife

A hotel concierge earns trust by arranging the journey, not owning the car. This session asks what banks and wallets can learn from that model. Through examples from super-apps, digital banks and behaviour-based rewards programmes, it explores how embedded mobility can drive revenue and loyalty. Participants will leave with a practical framework for testing the economics and safeguarding trust when partners deliver the service.

As supply chains shift and trade corridors evolve, companies expanding across Greater China and ASEAN face increasing complexity in liquidity, payments, FX and treasury management. This session explores how banks can help corporates navigate fragmented markets through connected financial infrastructure, enabling treasury teams to operate seamlessly across borders while focusing on business growth rather than operational complexity.

No bank can or should build every AI capability itself. The real strategic question isn't build versus buy; it's whether institutions retain meaningful choice over the technology they depend on. As agentic AI begins making decisions that affect customers, capital, and risk, financial institutions must ask: How much digital dependency is acceptable? Can they trust and explain the decision of models they didn't build? What happens when the AI underpinning critical operations is controlled by a single provider?

The panel explores what digital autonomy should look like in the AI era. Rather than arguing for complete self-sufficiency, the discussion focuses on optionality: the ability to choose between providers, maintain control over sensitive data, satisfy regulatory expectations for explainability, and preserve resilient fallback options when business or technology priorities change. The conversation will examine how banks can adopt AI at scale without sacrificing transparency, governance or strategic independence - and why genuine optionality may become one of the industry's most important competitive advantages.

Payment networks sit at the heart of commerce, generating transaction insights that can unlock value for businesses. This session examines how payment intelligence can help businesses better understand customers, identify growth opportunities, unlock new value-added services, and accelerate merchant growth.

Embedded finance puts banking, payments, credit and insurance inside the platforms people already use, turning everyday moments into revenue, loyalty and new routes to financial access.

As AI reshapes productivity, enterprises are evolving from human-centered workforce to Human+AI collaboration. In such an agent-driven economy, what business needs is not only more and better models, but new intelligent financial infrastructure. This speech will explore why and how we can build it, driving payment from connecting capital to intelligence.

The Philippines has more e-wallet users than bank account holders, yet only about 2% of Filipinos own stocks. That is well behind Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Mynt’s IPO tested whether the wallet could close that gap. GCash users could buy 100 shares for ₱660 without leaving the app. This session looks at who became a shareholder for the first time, what made it work, and how Southeast Asia can widen ownership while still protecting first-time investors.

Tokenization doesn't fail on vision. It fails on plumbing. Behind every live corridor sits an unglamorous stack that decides whether it scales. Which settlement layer — L1, L2 or private and at what trade-off? How do you achieve legal finality across jurisdictions that don't agree? Which interoperability standards actually matter, and who is driving them? This session decodes the replicable components behind the case studies — the decisions that separate a production system from an expensive proof-of-concept.

Explore how Beyondsoft helps enterprises navigate VMware migration challenges and simplify multi-cloud operations. Through a real-world migration case, discover practical strategies to minimize downtime and migration risks. See how Beyondsoft’s Cloud Management Platform (CMP) enables unified management, monitoring, and cost optimization across cloud environments.

The venture doctrine equating organizational headcount with enterprise valuation has permanently broken down. After Klarna leveraged AI automation to trim its workforce from 5,000 toward 2,000 employees, its annual revenue per employee surged over 70% alongside a return to profitability. Meanwhile, ultra-lean software firms like Linear capped their full-time team under 50 while scaling past tens of millions in ARR. This session explores the operational balance of deep workforce restructuring: identifying which functions to automate permanently, where human domain expertise is indispensable, and which specialized hires must be recruited immediately.

For decades, payment systems have been designed around human behaviour. AI agents could upend those assumptions. Unlike humans, agents do not care about rewards, interfaces or brand loyalty. They optimise for speed, cost, reliability and programmability. As agents begin making payments on behalf of users and businesses, they may transact at a scale and frequency never seen before — and they will do so without the friction, loyalty, and psychology that payment systems have long relied upon to manage risk and drive behaviour.
 
This raises three questions. Can machines be trusted to make payments using our rails — and who is accountable when something goes wrong? Can agents genuinely serve users and merchants better than today's systems, or do they simply add a layer of opacity between people and their money? And what does the next generation of payment infrastructure need to look like to make agentic commerce safe, inclusive, and scalable? As PayNow Generation 2 considers capabilities relevant to agentic commerce, this session tackles all three.

CFOs face outcomes shaped by operations, supply chains, markets and regulation, yet the data to connect them sits fragmented across silos. Building on years of work from CFO Dashboards to a natural-language CFO Agent, Dynamic Ontology Alignment links financial and operational signals to business scenarios. It turns fragmented information into trusted, explainable insights, which lays the foundation for AI-powered Decision Intelligence as the CFO office moves from reporting performance to orchestrating decisions.

Trade, capital and talent are flowing along new South-South corridors, and the fintech map is being redrawn across the Gulf, Asia and Africa. This podcast-style conversation unpacks what scales across these markets, what must be rebuilt locally, and how to build the trusted networks that make emerging corridors work.

Driving growth through acceptance, solutions, and service

Agents that resolve conversations save you money. Agents that pursue outcomes make you money. This session covers how long-horizon agents work a job from start to finish over days or weeks, and what it takes to trust them with revenue-critical work like originating loans or onboarding customers.

Emerging markets will add 930 million middle-class adults by 2036, with Asia driving 75% of that growth. These consumers will fuel demand across retail, gaming, SaaS and digital services, but reaching them starts with how they pay. This session explores how local payment methods can turn rising demand into global commerce growth.

The PolyFinTech100 API Hackathon is organised by PolyFinTech100, a pan-poly initiative comprising all five local polytechnics in Singapore, and supported by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), to develop and nurture fintech talent.

The five category champions will be pit against each other in this exciting Grand Finals to win the title of Grand Champion.

PayTech by NETS: Team Finovate (Ngee Ann Polytechnic)
ESG by CGSI: Team FINGIRLS (Ngee Ann Polytechnic)
Customer Experience by SCI: The Dream Team (Ngee Ann Polytechnic)
InsurTech by Prudential: Team Aptus Solutions (Ngee Ann Polytechnic)
Intelligent Banking by OCBC: Team CMIO (Singapore Polytechnic)

The PolyFinTech100 API Hackathon is organised by PolyFinTech100, a pan-poly initiative comprising all five local polytechnics in Singapore, and supported by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), to develop and nurture fintech talent.

The five category champions will be pit against each other in this exciting Grand Finals to win the title of Grand Champion.

PayTech by NETS: Team Finovate (Ngee Ann Polytechnic)
ESG by CGSI: Team FINGIRLS (Ngee Ann Polytechnic)
Customer Experience by SCI: The Dream Team (Ngee Ann Polytechnic)
InsurTech by Prudential: Team Aptus Solutions (Ngee Ann Polytechnic)
Intelligent Banking by OCBC: Team CMIO (Singapore Polytechnic)