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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This session shows how AI and model-driven engineering can revive black-boxed COBOL core systems. GienTech will demonstrate how its BTI approach extracts business logic from legacy code, creates human-readable models, and generates traceable modern systems. Attendees will gain a practical, phased path to reduce maintenance costs, key-person risk, and migration uncertainty.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 a new country 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

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, 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

Korea has instant bank transfers, near-universal mobile payments, and superapps built into everyday life. So where does onchain infrastructure add value? Fireblocks and KakaoPay take on the won stablecoin question, regulation as a design enabler, and what it takes to move from MoU to proof-of-concept, with candid, practical takeaways for banks and fintechs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Interoperability is widely recognised as a goal, but connecting one country’s payment system to another takes more than technology. It requires alignment on regulation, standards, governance and commercial incentives — as well as negotiation over how costs, risks and benefits are shared. This panel brings together the networks, national payment schemes, policymakers and multilateral hubs working to make cross-border payments more connected, examining where regulatory and commercial frictions persist, how different payment ecosystems can connect and scale across markets, and what smaller or newer markets need to participate on viable terms.

The discussion will explore where cross-border payment cooperation is working in practice, what it takes to make connections sustainable, and whether the biggest barriers to greater connectivity are technical, regulatory or commercial.

Rate wars and reward wars have run their course. The next battleground for banks, networks and fintechs is the experience economy: travel, lifestyle, wellness and access that customers value and remember. This session examines how financial services are moving into experiences, the technology that makes it possible at scale, and the partnership models it demands.

Discovery is shifting from ads to AI agents, and those agents now pay. Get a front-row seat: live on stage, an agent on popular AI platform finds a product, waits until its conditions are met, then completes a real purchase on a storefront. What banks and enterprise merchants need to get there: agent-ready catalogues, rules agents act on, and guardrails that keep every payment authorised.

Fraud is costing financial institutions billions. Every abandoned login, forgotten password, or failed OTP is a missed opportunity, leading to lost revenue, eroded trust and loss of customers. As phishing threats grow more sophisticated and customer expectations rise, banks and fintechs are under pressure to deliver secure, seamless authentication experiences. As a result, the industry is shifting toward passkeys - a passwordless, phishing-resistant solution built on FIDO2 standards. In this session learn about passkeys, why they’re more secure than traditional methods, and how financial institutions can implement them to grow revenue, increase fraud, and build lasting customer trust without adding friction.

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

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.

Marine assets are a trillion-dollar global asset class, yet ownership and financing have long been concentrated in a few geographies and a narrow pool of investors, with the top 10 nations controlling more than US$1.25 trillion in vessel value. Tokenization is changing that. This session explores how on-chain products are opening marine assets to family offices, accredited investors, alternative and yield funds, and retail investors, and showcases the solutions making this access possible.

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.

Millions of viable small businesses remain underserved not because they lack economic activity, but because traditional financial systems struggle to see, assess and serve them efficiently. As AI, alternative data, digital lending and transaction-banking infrastructure improve, can financial institutions build a fundamentally different model for SME finance?
This session explores how financial institutions can use richer business data to understand SMEs, automate credit and working-capital decisions, and build scalable digital infrastructure that lowers the cost of serving smaller businesses. It will examine what is already working, what still prevents these models from scaling, and whether the next phase of financial inclusion will come not from creating more financial products, but from making previously invisible businesses visible and bankable.

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.

Enterprises are moving beyond agent demos to make agents work reliably in production. This conversation explores how to bridge that gap: what must change in operating models, architecture and workflows; how cloud infrastructure can support deployment at scale; and how to manage orchestration, guardrails and human oversight without slowing progress. It will also examine where agents deliver real efficiency today, where returns remain uncertain, and why so many projects struggle to scale.