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

Hosted by GFTN, AWS, and Singapore Global Network (SGN), SFF Day 0 Mixer welcome founders, venture capital investors, and partners, to connect ahead of Singapore FinTech Festival.

Registration opens soon.

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. 

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Join us for a curated networking session at Investors Lounge for Series A to C founders and investors over drinks on tap.

Registration link opens soon.

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.

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

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.

Join us for a curated networking session at Investors Lounge for early-stage founders and investors over drinks on tap.

Registration link opens soon.

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 first decade of fintech was about proving that technology could disrupt financial services. The next is about building companies that can survive scale: navigating regulation, capital intensity, increasingly crowded markets, global expansion and the shift from payments products to full financial platforms and/or geographic expansion. Five founders and CEOs who have built fintech businesses across Asia and beyond debate what really separates a fintech that gets big from one that becomes indispensable.

A new map of opportunity is being drawn. As geoeconomic fault lines harden, monetary regimes shift and private markets outgrow public ones, trillions are on the move. Valuations are resetting, new corridors are opening and high-growth companies are seeking partners to scale. The advantage lies with those who move early, backed by trusted cross-border networks and well-regulated markets that give investors confidence and growth companies a clear path to raise, list and expand.
 
Drawing on securities regulation, banking and fintech investment, this session asks where the strongest returns lie, how markets and regulation can help growth companies scale, and how Artificial Intelligence is changing the way deals are sourced and financed. Learn how to turn uncertainty into opportunity and lead the next wave of growth.

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?

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.

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.

Every quantum conversation drifts toward the 2030s. This one stays in the present tense. Quantum builders explain what their machines and methods are doing this year for financial institutions: what is in production, what is in pilots, where classical computing remains essential, and what an institution can test in the next quarter. A bank moderator keeps the discussion commercially and technically honest. 

Several jurisdictions are now laying the legal and regulatory foundations for Islamic finance, from their first sukuk issuances to Islamic banking pilots in regulatory sandboxes. Unlike established markets, they can embed transparency into market infrastructure from the start, rather than retrofit it later. This panel discussion brings together central bank leaders and the global standard-setter for Islamic finance. They will explore how tokenization and digital verification can make Shariah compliance more auditable and consistent across institutions and borders, while keeping scholarly judgment at its core. The panel will also consider what shared standards emerging markets need so their frameworks connect with global pools of Islamic capital.

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.

Sustainability data is no longer just a reporting requirement. As the impacts of climate change become more pronounced, trusted data on ESG performance will increasingly shape who companies buy from, who banks finance, and where capital flows. · But sustainability data remains difficult to generate, difficult to exchange, and difficult to translate into the commercial decisions it ought to inform. SMEs, which make up the overwhelming majority of businesses across Asia, often lack the motivation, time, resources and financial capacity to get started. Those that do face fragmented requirements, limited guidance and repeated requests for similar information from different customers, financiers and regulators. Across Asia, governments, development institutions, and major private-sector fintechs are rising to the challenge. o In Singapore, the public and private sectors are collaborating on common digital infrastructure that underpins nationwide activation of “queen bees” and their supply chains, under the Green 100 movement. o The Philippines is similarly exploring how publicly listed companies can mobilise suppliers for Scope 3 reporting, ahead of their mandatory Scope 3 timelines; o India is examining how inclusive and simplified disclosures can enhance SMEs’ access to green marketplaces globally and strengthen access to green trade financing from banks. A common ambition cuts across these efforts – the shared desire to move from reporting towards reusable economic infrastructure, in which trusted sustainability data is generated once, but put to work repeatedly across compliance, supply chain, procurement, and financing use cases. · This dialogue brings together the SEC Philippines, ADB, and RXIL to explore the steps needed to make this transition real. Who builds the rails? What gets businesses onto them? Where does public infrastructure end and private innovation begin? And can these emerging national approaches ultimately connect to forge a more interoperable green economy across Asia?

As APAC financial institutions scale AI, leading firms are moving beyond siloed tools to capture a true AI Dividend. Grounded in new Atlassian & Mandala research, learn how frontier institutions are unifying business teams and using AI capacity gains to accelerate incident response, automate audit-readiness, and achieve operational resilience.

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

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.

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.

For businesses, particularly SMEs in value and supply chains, the case for sustainability is often difficult to translate into action. Costs and complexity are immediate while commercial benefits tend to feel distant and uncertain. · Singapore’s Green 100 movement seeks to change the equation. By converging government agencies, trade associations, financial institutions and the private sector around common pathways, Green 100 makes sustainability simpler to start, scale, and unlock value for businesses that take action. The launch of Green 100 Bronze marks an important shift from recognition to reward. Procurement is singled out as the first major “value unlock”, with Singapore’s public and private sectors working to harmonise recognition of Green 100 in supplier selection and incentivisation. What will it take to translate such recognition into sustained market demand? And how can green procurement be reinforced by green financing, market access, grants, and other economic incentives? Singapore’s 2027 ASEAN chairmanship also raises a wider opportunity. Are there Green 100 learnings that other ASEAN Member States can leverage? Which elements – common pathways, trusted credentials, “queen bee” mobilisation, or value unlocks – can be replicated in other markets? And could these different national approaches become increasingly interoperable over time? This panel brings together leaders from the government, business, procurement and finance sectors to examine the choices, challenges, and next steps for Green 100; and how Singapore’s experience might contribute to broader activation of the ASEAN green economy.

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.

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.

Delinquency patterns shift faster than models can be retrained, and labeled examples of emerging risks are scarce. This session shows how a Tabular Foundation Model purpose-built for lending detected approximately 33% more early-delinquency cases than a quarterly-retrained ML model, without retraining. The speakers will explain how the model, relevant historical examples and an AI agent work together to support lending decisions, share lessons from development, and demonstrate the practical workflow.

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.

What would it take to transform today’s built infrastructure into tomorrow’s Super Low Energy buildings? The RE:Build Innovation Challenge brings together building owners, technology providers, industry partners and project financiers to answer this question. Powered by BCA and Hitachi’s Super Low Energy Building Smart Hub (SLEB-SH), RE:Build will see developers and building owners volunteer existing projects for innovative solution providers to model how their technologies could improve energy performance and bridge the gap between buildings’ current and potential future Green Mark performance. Getting the technology right is only half the equation. RE:Build will simultaneously explore the business case for retrofits – examining how improvements in energy and emissions performance translate into measurable economic value through operating savings, financing benefits, enhanced asset value, incentives, and emerging avenues for monetising green performance. Announced at the 2026 Singapore FinTech Festival, RE:Build will launch in 1H 2027 with building owners coming onboard this common innovation sandbox. Promising solutions and value-unlock models can subsequently progress towards validation, funding and deployment, with a view to demonstrating pathways for broader industry adoption. The ambition – developing replicable models for accelerating green building retrofits across Asia; and in doing so, demonstrating how the economics of going green can work for the owners investing in them.

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.

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.

AI agents are already executing workflows and making decisions at machine speed across financial systems and digital markets. Supervisors are being asked to oversee them with tools built for a slower world.

The Cambridge Digital Innovation and Regulation Initiative (C:\>DIR), hosted by Financial Innovation for Impact launched the Global 'Agentic Regulator' Hackathon in September this year.

The hackathon brought together multidisciplinary teams from the public and private sectors to work on that gap, building explainable, deployable prototypes across six priority areas:
- Agentic Financial and High Stakes AI Advice (supported by Moneybox)
- Agentic Payments, Commerce & their Oversight (supported by Ant International)
- Decentralised Market Infrastructure, Smart Contracts & AI Agents (supported by the Ethereum Foundation)
- AI-Driven Fraud and Scams
- Know Your Agent (KY-A), Digital Verification and Digital Public Infrastructure
- Market Manipulation, Agentic Herding & Stability

The winning teams now bring their work to the Catalyst Stage at the Singapore FinTech Festival. Come and see what the future of supervision could look like.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Live demonstration of CVQBoost, a quantum-powered machine learning algorithm for financial fraud detection using Dirac-3. We demonstrate fast model training, competitive accuracy, and scalability to millions of transactions compared with classical XGBoost.