Tokenisation, cyber threats top agenda at Singapore FinTech Festival Day 2

MAS unveils pilot for tokenised MAS Bills as leaders warn of rising AI-enabled cyber risks.

Industry heads and regulators converged at Singapore FinTech Festival 2025 (SFF 2025), Day 2, unveiling new digital finance infrastructure and confronting inherent risks. The key focus remained responsible innovation powered by trust and next-generation technology.

A leading point of discussion came from top financial leaders who unanimously rejected the term “Global South,” arguing that the label no longer reflects the region’s growing influence. Michael Schlein, President and CEO of Accion, highlighted that emerging markets now enjoy a unique competitive edge: freedom from legacy infrastructure.

“They are not bogged down by historical infrastructure, so they’re capable of taking advantage of new technologies,” Schlein said, underscoring why innovation in financial inclusion is accelerating most rapidly in these markets.

Richard Verma, Chief Administrative Officer at Mastercard, further reinforced this view, citing India’s remarkable progress—surpassing many of the targets originally set for 2030. 

He noted that developed economies are now grappling with the same inclusion issues once associated with developing nations.

“That makes everyone equals in the discussion of financial inclusion,” Verma said, reframing the global narrative entirely.

In one of the most significant announcements of the day, MAS Managing Director Chia Der Jiun revealed that Singapore will pilot tokenised MAS Bills, to be settled using a wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC). The trials mark the next major step in Singapore’s bid to operationalise digital financial infrastructure at scale.

Chia highlighted notable progress: financial institutions have already issued and settled bonds natively on blockchain networks.

But he cautioned that industry adoption remains uneven. Standardising readiness across institutions will require not just policy guidance but also technological uplift.

Banks continue to face a stubborn obstacle—legacy systems that inhibit innovation. Akio Isowa, senior managing executive officer and group chief digital innovation officer at SMBC, stressed that old methods of building massive data platforms “for years and at huge cost” no longer work.

“We need a different mindset, starting from the use case, not from the technology,” he said.

Leaders from Tencent, Thought Machine, Perflos, and the IMF expanded on this theme, highlighting that modern core banking demands both agility and accountability. Responsible AI—especially for compliance, fraud detection, and real-time payments—was identified as critical to this transformation.

Regulators from MAS, the BIS, the European Commission, and IIF noted that emerging digital asset technologies—stablecoins, tokenised assets, and DeFi—are reshaping market structure. 

Ho Hern Shin, MAS deputy managing director, emphasised that global regulators are increasingly aligned in their objectives: promoting innovation while managing risks.

International bodies such as IOSCO and the Financial Stability Board have already issued guidance on how crypto assets and stablecoins should be regulated, but the pace of implementation still varies across markets.

At the panel on global value chains and AI-powered payments, one word dominated the conversation: trust. Livia Benisty of Banking Circle reminded participants that technological innovation is meaningless if the payment flows themselves aren’t secure.

“You have to have trust in the payment flow. You also need to have trust in the AI, the explainability,” she said. The future belongs to institutions that can unite innovation, trust, and compliance.

As financial services become more digital, the cybersecurity threat landscape has escalated. During the Frontier stage's session on AI risk management, leaders warned that AI-enabled scams and cyberattacks are rising across Asia. 

UOB CISO Tobias Gondrom captured the shift: with customers now relying almost entirely on mobile devices—and soon perhaps only wearables—security must evolve accordingly.

Institutions are responding with AI-powered fraud analytics, layered authentication, and deeper public–private cooperation. The goal is not merely defence, but sustained trust.

Additionally, payments and digital asset firms urgently need shared, internet-native standards to power the next phase of digital money, as current systems remain disconnected and difficult to connect across providers, industry leaders said.

"There needs to be a standard for sending and receiving money, regardless of whether it’s in stablecoins or traditional currency," said Erik Reppel, Head of Engineering, CDP, Coinbase.

Addressing the lack of common protocols, Reppel noted, "Some verticalised players have their own application programming interfaces (APIs), but there’s no interoperability between different payment service providers with their own proprietary payment stacks,"