Agenda

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 isn't a sixth rupture. It's speeding up all five. Technology, geoeconomics, capital, talent and policy were already changing at the same time. Now AI is redrawing compute supply chains, pulling capital into data centres, changing what skills are worth and pushing regulators to make rules as it happens.

In this keynote, Ravi Menon traces where AI deepens each rupture and where it pushes against one, from compute corridors built on trust to workforces reshaped by automation. The audience comes away with a clearer sense of which shifts will last and which are hype, and of where to place their bets.

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. Yang Peng, CEO of Ant International, and Surendra Rosha, Co-CEO, APAC, HSBC, explore 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.

Across financial services, institutions are competing for scarce AI, cybersecurity and data talent while simultaneously reskilling existing staff and redesigning how work gets done. This panel works through what it takes to grow that talent locally, from training pipelines to public-private partnerships, rather than relying on imported expertise. It gives attendees practical models for building capacity that stays where it is built. One of the key questions the panel will look to dive deeper into: How do you build local capacity rather than importing or offshoring it?

Governments now face a dual bind: rising unemployment alongside a widening skills shortage that education and training systems are struggling to close fast enough. This panel turns to how reskilling, job redesign and workforce planning can be shared across employers, educators and public institutions rather than left to any one of them. Attendees come away with a sharper view of where responsibility for building an AI-ready workforce actually sits. One of the key questions the panel will look to dive deeper into: What is the right split of responsibility between employers, universities, governments and multilaterals for closing the skills gap?

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.

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 Policy 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 FutureMatters 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?

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.

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.

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.

Every institution now has access to the same AI models, so durable advantage no longer comes from the technology itself—it comes from how deeply you rewire the business around it. This is the strategic half of a two-part conversation: where the growth, the margin, and the moat actually come from once agentic AI is table stakes.

The panel tackles the questions in the boardroom right now: What must you commit to in the next 12 months? What does a rewired financial institution look like in 2027—and what happens to those who wait? Where do you build proprietary advantage versus buy off the shelf?

Walk away knowing where agentic AI creates real competitive separation for your institution—and the strategic bets you need to place now to capture it before rivals do.

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.

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.

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.

AI agents will not only serve customers and execute payments. They will also be used to impersonate customers, automate fraud and probe financial infrastructure at unprecedented speed. Traditional controls built around human behaviour and manual intervention may no longer respond fast enough. This session examines how financial institutions can deploy autonomous defence, distinguish legitimate agents from malicious ones and contain threats without blocking genuine transactions.

Tokenisation 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 tokenised assets to scale.

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.

The strategy is only as good as the operating model beneath it. This is the second half of the conversation—the same agentic rewiring, seen from the engine room, where COOs and CTOs turn ambition into lower cost and higher efficiency at scale.

The panel gets specific about execution: What has to change in your operating model, architecture, and workflows now? What does a production-grade, agent-run operation look like in 2027? How do you handle orchestration, guardrails, and human oversight without stalling between demo and deployment?

Walk away knowing what it actually takes to run agents in production—and where the efficiency and cost gains are real today versus still hype.

Tokenised 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?

As agentic AI reshapes routine decisions, what happens when low risk and high frequency decisions are more easily be delegated to agent? The interface that defined digital banking for a decade is quietly fading, as autonomous agents transact, compare, and choose on the customer's behalf. When humans step back from the screen, the entire logic of customer engagement must be rebuilt.

Learn how the customer touchpoint transforms when agents become the primary user; what it takes to stay visible and preferred in an agent-mediated world; and how to prepare your channels, data, and brand for an interface-light future.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

As digital money, tokenised 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.

Expanding across fragmented regional markets forces digital finance startups into repetitive licensing cycles that multiply compliance costs and stall international scale. Recent progress by Kenya and Rwanda’s central banks in establishing mutual licence-passporting demonstrates that cross-border supervisory reciprocity is workable in 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.

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.

The Agentic Bank opens Day 2 by zooming out, geopolitics, energy retooling, dark factories, autonomous transport, before zooming in on the reckoning inside finance. Autonomous banking cannot run on 1960s core systems, fiat rails, or batch payments, it demands infrastructure built for agents that act, not advise. This keynote strips away the interface to unpack what's underneath, architecture, governance, and risk controls. The key question it looks to answer: what actually separates genuine transformation from a rebranded chatbot?

By 2027, most financial institutions will have adopted the same AI tools—and discovered that tools alone change nothing. The real divide is opening between firms that bolt technology onto legacy structures and those bold enough to rebuild how they actually operate. Org charts, decision rights, and the boundary between human and machine are all up for grabs. Learn how leading institutions are redesigning operating models around AI and agents, what structural changes turn transformation into durable advantage, and where incumbents most often stall.

Banks are racing toward agentic infrastructure. Few can rebuild core banking, payments and risk management at once without the upgrade itself becoming the systemic risk. As autonomous agents move from pilots into production, institutions face a real choice: accelerate the rebuild, or slow down until controls and supervisors catch up. The panel pressure-tests both paths: what a credible migration sequence looks like, where legacy risk controls break under autonomous decision-making, and when deliberately slowing down is the smarter strategic call rather than a failure of nerve.

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.

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.

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.

Fragmentation is now the operating condition for global banking. Geopolitical realignment, diverging regulation, shifting rate cycles and technological disruption are splitting a once-integrated system into competing blocs and rulebooks. For some banks these ruptures are existential; for others, they are the opportunity of a generation. The difference lies in who reads the shifts early and moves decisively. For bank leaders, the session pinpoints which ruptures are reshaping banking's risk and growth map, how leading institutions are turning geopolitical and regulatory headwinds into strategic tailwinds, and where the next sources of advantage are emerging in 2027.

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 Policy 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.

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?

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.

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.

Stablecoins, tokenised deposits, tokenised MMFs and CBDCs are all racing to become the default form of institutional money, though none of them do the same job equally well. Four 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.

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.

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. 

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?

Investor conviction has shifted decisively away from TAM projections and charismatic narrative pitching. According to Carta's Private Market Round Diligence Metrics, institutional closing timelines expanded by 45% as investment committees demand audited proofs: net revenue retention above 120% and gross profit margins exceeding 70% before term sheets are issued. The threshold to secure lead capital requires verifiable customer engagement rather than pilot commitments. This session convenes prominent venture partners to reveal the specific retention cohorts, contract architectures, and defensibility milestones that genuinely command high-conviction checks in the current market.

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?

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.

As GenAI reshapes finance, the decisive constraint isn't the technology—it's talent. Do institutions have the skills, and the pipeline, to keep pace? This session pairs a candid industry dialogue on the widening GenAI capability gap with a showcase of YTP-AIF finalist projects, where students present real AI solutions built for finance.

You will learn: where the most urgent skills shortfalls are emerging, how institutions are building GenAI-ready talent, and where the next generation is already placing its bets. A look at both sides of the talent equation—the gap, and the people who will close it.

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.

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.

Tokenisation 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.

For decades, payment systems have been designed around human behaviour. AI agents play by different rules. Unlike humans, agents do not care about rewards, interfaces or brand loyalty. They optimise for speed, cost, and reliability.

As agents begin making payments on behalf of users and businesses, they may transact at a scale and frequency never seen before, paying for everything from AI services and digital content to machine-to-machine interactions. The result could be millions of low-value transactions that challenge the economics and design of today's payment infrastructure.

Are our payment rails ready for this future? As PayNow Gen2 considers capabilities relevant to agentic commerce, this session explores whether existing payment rails can adapt, what role programmable money could play, and how payment infrastructure must evolve when machines start choosing how to pay.

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.

The more money behaves like software, the more the decisive questions become legal and political rather than technical. Who is liable when a smart contract executes exactly as written and wrongly? How do sanctions and AML function when compliance is embedded in code rather than checked after the fact? What does systemic resilience mean when value moves at machine speed and a flawed rule can propagate across the system in a single run cycle? We will close the track with the question programmable money must answer to earn its licence: governance-by-design or not at all.

Every institution talks about the need for interoperability but few speak honestly about what it actually costs, in regulation, in pricing, and in the multilateral negotiation it takes to connect one country's payment system to another's. This panel brings together the messaging networks, reserve-pooling mechanisms, national schemes and multilateral hubs doing this work in practice, to work through the frictions: which regulatory frameworks still block genuine interoperability, how the economics of a cross-border link actually get split between the parties that build and operate it, and what a smaller or newer market needs in place before it can plug into a bigger one.

This panel aims to present a grounded view of where multilateral payment cooperation is actually working today, what it costs to get there and dive deeper into whether the real barrier to cross-border payment connectivity is technical, regulatory or commercial.

For CFOs and treasurers, programmable money is not a thesis, it's an allocation decision. Where does settlement risk really sit when value moves in real time, and who carries the exposure? How does tokenisation rewrite collateral management and intraday liquidity? What does the yield/risk trade-off look like across deposits and other forms of money, and what happens to deposit insurance and the lender of last resort when money is code? The question boards are starting to ask: whose balance sheet does each instrument sit on, yours, your bank's, or nobody's? And are balance sheet light banking models the safer answer? A working session for the people who answer with real money.

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

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

With conventional IPO pathways narrowed and growth-stage liquidity constrained, many companies must re-evaluate what a successful outcome looks like. Crunchbase's 2026 M&A Outlook recorded 36 unicorn M&A exits worth a combined $67B in 2025, and EY-Parthenon reports teams under 100 people landing $100M+ acqui-hire exits. An early acqui-hire or IP sale can preserve talent and technological value, but requires careful negotiation. This session outlines the operational indicators and timing indicators founders need to weigh a structured exit against continuing to build.

Cross-border tokenized corridors are moving from proof-of-concept to production. Hear from the people who made the crossing: what broke first - tech, legal or liquidity; what the operating model actually looks like when someone has to issue, settle and supervise; what they would never build again; and the honest timeline from pilot to scaled corridor. This discussion will be around the gating factors, the requirements, and what it really takes to move live value across borders on tokenised rails.

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.

Capital is on the move like never before. As geopolitical fault lines harden, monetary regimes shift, and private markets swell past public ones, the old channels for allocating capital are breaking—and trillions are being redirected in the process. Where money flows, who controls it, and how quickly it can be deployed are all being rewritten. This isn't a market cycle; it's a structural rupture. Learn how capital is being reallocated across regions, asset classes, and public-private lines, where the breakages in traditional deployment are creating risk and opportunity, and what it takes to move decisively in a fractured landscape.

We built payment systems for humans—accounts, cards, and checkout flows designed around people clicking "buy." But AI agents don't shop that way. As autonomous systems begin to transact, negotiate, and settle at machine speed, they expose how much of our economic infrastructure simply wasn't built for them. Payments are just the surface; identity, trust, contracts, and settlement all need reinventing. Learn what economic infrastructure AI agents actually require beyond payment rails, how identity and trust must evolve when machines transact autonomously, and who is building the foundational layers of the agentic economy.

Policy rewiring is about who moves fastest inside the gaps between rules. Regulatory strategy is now a competitive advantage, not just a compliance requirement, as sandboxes and new frameworks spread unevenly. This panel looks at how institutions manage that multiplicity, from cross-border cooperation to interoperable supervision. The key question it looks to answer: can regimes never designed to talk to each other coordinate fast enough to keep up with innovation?

For years, payments competed on the rails—faster, cheaper, more reliable ways to move money from A to B. But as transactions become instant, ubiquitous, and nearly free, the rails themselves are commoditizing. The value is migrating elsewhere: to data, embedded experiences, working capital, fraud intelligence, and the software wrapped around every transaction. Moving money is table stakes; the real margin lives above it. Learn where payments value is genuinely being created as core processing commoditizes, how leading players monetize data, software, and embedded finance beyond the transaction, and what it takes to climb the value stack.

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.

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 Policy 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.

For all the talk about sustainability, businesses have rarely gotten a satisfying answer to one question: what's in it for me? Launched in May 2026, Singapore's Green 100 National Movement set out to change that—tying sustainability directly to tangible business value. As it accelerates towards its next milestone at the Singapore FinTech Festival, this session convenes market leaders across procurement and finance to unpack the commercial propositions forming around Green 100 Badges.

You will learn: how earning a Badge can unlock preferential procurement and supply-chain access, what financing incentives and recognition follow, and how Singapore's largest players are attaching real value to going green. This is where the business case for sustainability gets rewritten.

As AI in finance shifts from advising to acting, institutions face a speed–trust paradox. Using MAS' Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime (SAFR) framework as a lens, this discussion explores why the data moat must evolve from volume to an operational foundation that carries trusted identity, mandate, disposition and audit data across agents, workflows and jurisdictions.

Venture survival depends on cash distributions, yet public listing routes remain narrow for Southeast Asian tech firms. Bain & Company's SEA Venture Capital Report highlights that while public IPO pipelines remain stalled across domestic bourses, secondary transactions, corporate consolidations, and private equity buyouts generated over $6 billion in regional exit value. With institutional LPs demanding realized DPI over unrealized paper gains, fund managers are redesigning liquidity timelines. This session analyses how leading allocators and founders are engineering secondary sales, structured earn-outs, and strategic trade sales when public capital markets stay constrained.

What if corporate treasury didn't need banks, borders, or business hours to move money? This session imagines a future where corporates hold, move, and grow liquidity globally on their own terms, and what it would take to get there.

Much of Asia's 2050 building stock already exists today. So the real question isn't just how to build greener—it's how far we can push the buildings we already have. The Re:Building Innovation Challenge puts that to the test, launching at the Singapore FinTech Festival as a collaborative sandbox where building owners, technology providers and built environment experts identify high-impact retrofits and model them against green building benchmarks.

You will learn: which interventions across energy, cooling and resource efficiency deliver the greatest real-world impact, where the economics still fall short, and what it takes to move from pilots to scale across Asia's existing assets. The future of green building may already be built.

Capital hasn't left emerging-market fintech. It has just stopped funding the napkin. In the first half of 2026, Southeast Asian fintechs raised US$682 million and MENA fintechs raised US$617 million. In both regions a single round took a third or more of the total, and the number of deals fell sharply. Investors now want real revenue and a short road to profitability before they commit. Investors from the Gulf and North Asia sit alongside two Southeast Asian fintechs to compare what each market rewards, which metrics get a term sheet signed and what founders should ask of the investors they bring onto their cap table.

For years, the global payments industry has shared the same ambition: make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, more transparent, and more inclusive. Progress has been made—but the hardest challenges remain. The barriers are beyond technological ones. Fragmented regulation, inconsistent standards, limited interoperability, and persistent first- and last-mile frictions continue to slow progress. Even where modern payment infrastructure exists, coordination across jurisdictions often lags behind.

Bringing together central bank governors at a pivotal moment ahead of the 2027 G20 Presidency, this session examines what will take the greatest collective effort to solve over the next phase of payments transformation. What bottlenecks matter most? Where should policymakers, central banks, and the private sector focus their attention? What forms of international cooperation are needed to translate ambition into measurable outcomes? Rather than asking what the future of cross-border payments could look like, this discussion focusses on what it will actually take to get there.

As geopolitics redraws trade, capital and data flows, trusted payment infrastructure is becoming a strategic priority for nations. Drawing on experiences from India and ASEAN, the session will explore how countries can build resilient, inclusive and locally governed payment foundations while staying globally connected and examine practical approaches for linking domestic payment systems across bilateral and regional payment corridors.

Financial crime doesn't operate in silos, yet most fraud detection tools do. Today's landscape is filled with point solutions: KYC platforms that stop at onboarding, AML engines focused on transaction monitoring, and network graph tools that excel technically. Fraud signals are everywhere, but data remains fragmented. AI Fraud Surveillance unifies financial, qualitative, and network signals into a single view, enabling fraud detection before it happens, not after.

As sustainability requirements expand across Asia, trusted sustainability data—collected, exchanged and acted on across value chains—is fast becoming critical economic infrastructure. Early moves by regulators, central banks and development institutions already hint at how shared digital platforms can power sustainability reporting, enable green finance and unlock new commercial value. This regional policy dialogue convenes the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Bank of Thailand, the Securities and Exchange Commission Philippines, and the Asian Development Bank to ask what a national digital infrastructure for sustainability looks like.

You will learn: where green digital infrastructure creates the greatest value, what it takes to move from early initiatives to broad adoption, and how public leadership and private innovation can build the foundations for Asia's transition.

Emerging markets have built some of the world’s most innovative models for financial inclusion. This panel explores what Africa and Asia can learn directly from each other — from digital public infrastructure and payments to regulation and public-private partnerships — and whether a new South–South playbook can accelerate the next phase of financial inclusion.

In a world of synthetic everything, proof is becoming the scarcest commodity in finance. As AI-generated identities, deepfakes, and convincing digital deception become routine, institutions can no longer assume authenticity; they have to verify it. This session frames the problem and then works through the answer.

It opens with the shift underneath the shift: once trust can no longer be assumed, the burden moves from catching fakes after the fact to proving authenticity before a transaction happens at all. That reframes what needs to be provable rather than assumed, and who is positioned to build the systems that prove it. The discussion then gets specific about the different bets being placed on how to solve this: catching synthetic fraud at the point of verification, proving identity cryptographically without exposing the underlying data at all, and building the credential infrastructure that ties it together.

Attendees hear where each approach actually holds up against a motivated forger, and where the gaps between them still leave room for one to slip through.

Adding conversational wrappers and light automation layers over third-party models provided quick early ARR, but enterprise buyers are cutting through the veneer. Carta’s State of Private Markets analysis reveals that software companies driven by signed enterprise workflow contracts trade at a median 11.8x revenue, whereas startups reliant on pilot or usage-based AI features clear at just 5.2x. Furthermore, McKinsey’s enterprise AI research highlights that fewer than 20% of adopting companies report bottom-line EBIT impact. This session equips founders to construct defensible domain data integrations and proprietary workflows that survive upstream platform commoditization.

Billions of people and small businesses remain outside formal credit because financial institutions cannot reliably identify, assess or price their risk. This panel examines how payment infrastructure, digital identity, transaction data and AI can change that — turning previously invisible economic activity into a basis for lending and investment.

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

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

AI's real blocker isn't the model, it's unstructured data. This live demo shows an agent that scans external market signals, matches them to an advisor's book, and turns a headline into a qualified proposal, so advisors arrive don't just walk in prepared, they proactively create the next opportunity. See Microsoft's Work IQ, Foundry IQ, Fabric IQ and Web IQ orchestrating as one platform to make this a reality.

Europe and Asia have capital, investment products and increasingly global investors, but the infrastructure connecting them remains fragmented. Different regulations, fund structures, data standards and distribution systems continue to limit access and raise costs. This session examines what it would take to create a trusted wealth corridor between the regions, from regulatory interoperability and digital fund distribution to common data and identity rails. It asks how governments, financial centres, asset managers, banks and fintech platforms can reduce friction without weakening investor protection.

The question is no longer whether organisations should prepare for post-quantum cryptography, but how they can do so together. With NIST's standards finalised, global regulators setting migration timelines, and supervisory expectations rapidly emerging, financial institutions are moving from planning to execution.

Yet cryptographic migration is fundamentally a coordination challenge. Financial systems depend on interconnected institutions operating across borders, where security is only as strong as the least-prepared participant. Divergent regulatory timelines, legacy infrastructure, and uneven adoption risk creating fragmented trust across payment networks and financial ecosystems.

Bringing together central banks, financial institutions, and technology leaders, this session explores how the industry can coordinate one of the largest cryptographic transitions in history—balancing resilience, interoperability, and regulatory alignment while avoiding a patchwork of incompatible migrations.

While most payments conversations focus on consumer rails, the real bottleneck may be commercial: B2B and merchant payments across Asia, the Middle East and Africa remain fragmented and cash-heavy. This panel unpacks what it takes to build commercial payment corridors that actually work and where the friction still lies.

Talent rewiring is redrawing the map itself, institutions now follow people first, capital and headquarters second. Financial institutions increasingly decide where to build based on where the talent already is, not just where capital or headquarters sit. This discussion looks at how that dynamic is redrawing where banks locate technology and operations, and what it means for markets competing to become talent hubs rather than just financial centres. The key question it looks to answer: is tomorrow's bank shaped more by where the talent is than by where the capital is?

The boom-era playbook of subsidizing unprofitable top-line expansion with venture equity now leads directly to insolvency. Industry data from Bessemer Venture Partners shows the benchmark efficiency metric—net new ARR divided by net burn—has shifted from a tolerable 0.5x in 2021 to a mandatory 1.5x+ for top-quartile financings today. Investors are actively penalizing management teams that burn cash on vanity marketing campaigns and premature geographic expansion. This session brings institutional venture allocators to detail the exact operating controls founders must implement immediately, alongside the growth habits they must permanently eliminate.

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

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

Fraudsters didn't wait for a governance framework. Autonomous agents are already probing payment rails, spinning up synthetic identities and running social-engineering scripts at machine speed, while many institutions still triage alerts in batches. With instant payments and agentic commerce scaling fast, the window between attack and response is now measured in milliseconds. The panel looks at where real-time controls are keeping pace and where they are structurally behind. It also covers how to tell a legitimate customer's agent from a malicious one, and what defending with agents looks like when regulators still expect a human in the loop.

The protocol race is over faster than anyone expected. Visa, Google, Mastercard, OpenAI, Stripe and Ant International have all shipped agent-initiated payment infrastructure, while countries such as Korea alone recorded over 100 million AI-to-AI payments in seven months. This discussion will be around where machine will transact first, at what granularity, and on whose stack.

That question does not have a global answer, because agentic commerce is gated by four preconditions that are unevenly distributed or agreed upon.

Identity: can an agent be issued a provable, scoped, revocable mandate.

Acceptance density: is there enough merchant coverage for an agent's choice to be meaningful.

Settlement granularity: can value move at machine speed and sub-cent size.

Customer trust and value: will people actually delegate? Does the result make everyday finance simpler, more transparent and more accessible, including for customers that conventional banking has overlooked?

The first three are being solved on the rails; the fourth is decided in the customer relationship. This panel puts both views on one stage: the platforms building agentic infrastructure, and a digital bank that rebuilt banking around customer needs. Together they map the next eighteen months by looking look at where AI creates practical customer value first and how institutions should balance automation with human judgment and accountability.

Payments are becoming faster and cheaper, but where will the industry make money next? This panel looks at where new revenue pools are emerging across the payments value chain — from data and embedded services to cross-border flows and new forms of money — and which business models can capture them from 2027 onwards.

Cheap venture funding has evaporated, leaving founders facing demanding structural terms. According to PitchBook deal terms data, over 25% of late-stage financings have priced flat or down, while Cooley's Venture Financing Report recorded liquidation preference multiples above 1.0x climbing to 22% in growth rounds. Investors holding dry powder are enforcing aggressive participating preferences, redemption schedules, and board vetoes that strip founder control. For leadership teams navigating single-digit runway, survival requires understanding which covenants preserve long-term agency and which turn founders into salaried operators on their own cap tables.