Technology Rewiring

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

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

As 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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.