Agenda

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

AI 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. 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 make digital growth genuinely inclusive.

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.

Need to rethink the title

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 progress by Kenya and Rwanda’s central banks in establishing mutual licence-passporting demonstrates that cross-border supervisory reciprocity is workable in practice. A recent survey by TechCabal Research revealed that 62.5% of regional fintechs already operate internationally or plan to, with an identical proportion backing passporting frameworks. This session convenes financial regulators and founders to examine how central banks can align supervisory frameworks and establish mutual recognition standards without compromising financial stability or compliance oversight.

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.

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

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

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

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

The 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.

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

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

How is AI changing the work behind credit decisions? Drawing on cases from Southeast Asia and Latin America, this session explores AI execution and AI-assisted oversight across feature engineering, modelling and credit strategy. Attendees will see a practical workflow, its evaluation results, and where human judgement remains essential.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History shows how breakthrough scientific discoveries can reshape the world. From Edgar F. Codd’s relational databases and Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web to Mark Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing, pioneering technology research has transformed industries, economies and everyday life. Today, Artificial Intelligence presents a similarly transformative opportunity. A new generation of scientist-entrepreneurs in AI has the potential to translate frontier research into breakthrough technologies, products and ventures that redefine industries and address humanity’s greatest challenges. Their journey is not simply about commercialising discoveries, but about turning bold scientific ideas (developed through years of research) into innovations driving deep tech enterprises. The challenge is to create a sustainable pathway for academic innovations and scientist entrepreneurs to cross the bridge from science to enterprise seamlessly.

Universities are some of the most productive IP engines in the world. Researchers and students build new technology, file patents and often ship working prototypes. Then too much of it stalls. The people who invent are rarely the people who raise money, price a licence or find a first customer. Tech transfer offices work to academic timelines while capital works to market ones, so good IP sits on the shelf.

This panel asks two questions. First, what should universities change so their IP becomes investable: spin-out terms, founder support, equity and licensing models, and incentives for faculty? Second, should investors stop waiting for deals to show up and go into campuses to find them? We'll look at what each side gets wrong about the other, and what a working lab-to-market pipeline looks like.

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