Thunes is expanding its US footprint with a new New York office to support cross-border payouts for American businesses. The new hub, located in Union Square, adds to Thunes’ existing US operations in San Francisco and Atlanta. The company is using capital from its US$150 million Series D funding round announced last year to support its expansion in the market. Thunes provides cross-border payment infrastructure for enterprises including gig economy platforms, marketplaces, payment service providers and financial institutions. Its network connects members to billions of endpoints across more than 140 countries and 90 currencies. Thunes said its US expansion is supported by its 50 money transmission licenses. Simon Nelson Simon Nelson, Chief Commercial Officer at Thunes, said, “The opening of our New York office is a pivotal moment for our team, but it is just one piece of a much larger picture. Our investment into the US market this year is a direct response to the massive demand from American businesses looking for faster, more transparent ways to move money globally.” Kyle Rosen Kyle Rosen, Head of Americas at Thunes, said “What truly sets Thunes apart in the US is that we own and operate our licenses in every state. This total control over our regulatory footprint is a huge differentiator for us and guarantees the highest level of reliability and speed. Our growth in New York is a testament to the hard work of our global team and our commitment to building a world-class presence in the U.S.” Thunes expects the New York office to support regional growth, closer industry engagement and hiring. The company is currently recruiting for several roles, with a focus on business development.     Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by DevStudio_D via Magnific The post Thunes Opens New York Office as It Expands US Payments Business appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

Grab is reportedly in discussions to join a funding round for Atome Financial, as the company looks to deepen its exposure to buy now, pay later and consumer lending in Southeast Asia. DealStreetAsia reported that the round could raise more than US$100 million, citing people familiar with the matter. The structure has not been finalised and may proceed in tranches. Atome Financial is part of Singapore-based Advance Intelligence Group and operates BNPL platform Atome and Indonesian digital lender Kredit Pintar. Lending Push Continues The talks come as Grab grows its lending and banking operations across consumers, merchants, drivers and SMEs. The segment remains loss-making. In the first quarter of 2026, Grab’s financial services unit recorded an adjusted EBITDA loss of US$17 million, while its gross loan portfolio reached US$1.44 billion, up from US$625 million a year earlier. Grab expects the unit to reach breakeven in the second half of 2026. The company has also expanded through deals. GXS Bank completed its acquisition of Validus Capital, the Singapore business of SME lender Validus Group, in April 2025. Grab also signed an agreement earlier this year to acquire US-based digital investing platform Stash Financial. Advance Intelligence Group last raised US$80 million in May 2023 from investors led by Warburg Pincus and Northstar Group, bringing its total funding to more than US$700 million.     Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by Grab The post Grab Reportedly in Talks to Join Atome Financial’s Funding Round appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

DBS will launch tokenised physical gold for customers in Singapore, with retail access expected through DBS digibank in the second half of 2026. The DBS Physical Gold Tokens will allow customers to access, hold and trade gold-backed tokens through a single platform. The bank described the service as a way to widen retail access to physical gold, which has traditionally been more readily available to institutional and accredited investors. Each token will be backed by one gram of physical gold held by DBS in a dedicated vault in Singapore. Customers will also have the option to redeem their tokens for physical gold. DBS is exploring plans to list the token on DBS Digital Exchange for accredited investors and institutional partners, with further details to be announced later. The offering is intended to make physical gold investment more accessible by allowing customers to buy smaller fractions of the asset in token form. Transactions are expected to be available around the clock, with near-instant settlement supported by blockchain technology. DBS will tokenise, issue, distribute and manage the gold tokens in-house. Li Zhen Li Zhen, Head of Foreign Exchange, Precious Metals and Digital Assets, Global Financial Markets at DBS, said, “Our ability to deliver DBS Physical Gold Token is built on DBS’ fully in-sourced, end-to-end institutional capability – physical vaulting, tokenisation engine, digital custody and digitised distribution. Through the secure and compliant deployment, underpinned by robust risk management and governance, we are able to minimise operational friction and streamline physical gold access and management for our clients.” The launch adds to DBS’ existing gold investment products in Singapore, which include funds and physical bullion. James Tan James Tan, Group Head of Investment Product and Advisory at DBS, said, “While our retail investors have been able to buy gold funds, access to physical gold has been largely available to only institutional and accredited investors. DBS has offered physical gold investments to wealth clients since 2013, and we are now leveraging tokenisation to broaden access, enabling more retail customers to invest in gold in a safe and meaningful way.”     Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by halalstock via Magnific The post DBS to Launch Tokenised Physical Gold for Retail Customers in Singapore appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

Conversations revolving around digital asset finance often return to the blockchain, but Shaun Chen’s concern sits closer to the point where value actually moves. Behind every transaction sits a private key, and Shaun, AVP, APJ Advisor – Quantum and AI Security at Thales, sees that key as the authority behind the asset. When someone compromises a private key, the institution faces more than a security breach because a validly signed transaction can move value before anyone fully understands what went wrong. Security around those keys helps determine whether digital asset infrastructure can move from experimentation into real commercial activity. Banks and fintechs may build new models around tokenisation or blockchain-based settlement, but those models still depend on how they protect the keys behind those services. Shaun makes a clear distinction between ordinary credentials and private keys. A password can be reset, while a compromised private key can authorise the movement of assets, making software-based handling harder to defend as digital asset activity scales. The risk also changes once institutions move beyond pilots. Controlled projects may run within a narrow environment, while production places more systems around the signing process and puts more pressure on internal controls to hold. Shaun’s answer points toward hardware-based protection. Institutions trying to secure digital asset keys need a clear separation between the systems that request a transaction and the infrastructure that protects the private key. The Limits of Keeping Private Keys in Software Software-based key storage may feel convenient during early experimentation because it helps teams move from concept to testing without adding too much operational weight. Shaun’s point, however, is that production changes the conversation. Once digital asset activity moves into real commercial use, the surrounding environment becomes harder to control. Private keys can become exposed when they are handled too closely by software systems, especially when access rights, workloads and operational processes begin to expand. Loose administrator controls, malware and more targeted cyber attacks can then turn software-based key handling into a serious vulnerability for institutions managing these assets. Shaun draws a firm boundary around that risk. Shaun Chen “Private keys should not be exposed to software environments.” His view reframes how institutions should think about securing digital asset keys. Strong application security remains necessary, alongside a key protection model that prevents private keys from being extracted in usable form when the surrounding software environment comes under pressure. A storage decision therefore becomes a control decision. If a private key can be taken out of its environment and used elsewhere, the institution has not really secured the authority behind the asset. Hardware Changes the Security Model Hardware security modules, or HSMs, address the software exposure problem by moving sensitive cryptographic work into dedicated hardware. Inside an HSM, institutions can generate and use cryptographic keys without handing them over to the wider software stack. The benefit becomes especially clear when institutions think about digital asset key security, because the private key can remain inside the HSM instead of sitting close to the application environment that supports the transaction workflow. Shaun described the distinction clearly when he said, “The private key does not need to leave the HSM to sign a transaction.” These systems still need to use the key because transactions must be signed before value can move. An HSM allows that to happen without giving the application direct possession of the private key. When the application sends a signing request, the HSM performs the cryptographic operation inside its secure boundary. After producing the signature, the HSM returns it to the transaction workflow while keeping the private key inside the device. In practice, a compromised application server should not automatically expose the private key, and system administration should not create a route to key extraction. Cryptographic authority stays inside dedicated hardware rather than spreading across software environments. Transaction Signing With the Key Kept Inside Blockchain transaction signing makes private key protection visible because the institution still needs to authorise movement without exposing the key that makes authorisation possible. A typical HSM-backed flow starts when the hardware module generates the keys. When a transaction needs a signature, the transaction data moves to the HSM, and the institution can route the request through policy and authorisation checks before the HSM signs it. After signing, the HSM returns the signed transaction to the application or transaction workflow, which can then submit it to the blockchain network. The private key stays inside the secure boundary throughout the process. The flow may sound simple, but it addresses one of the biggest risks in digital asset finance. Blockchain transactions often become difficult, or impossible, to reverse once someone validly signs and broadcasts them. An attacker who obtains the private key and signs a transaction may cause damage before anyone detects it. Shaun’s responses make clear that HSMs play a specific role in this chain. They protect the signing authority itself and keep the most sensitive part of the process away from ordinary software exposure. Control Over Key Usage Becomes the Real Test HSMs often get described as secure storage for keys, but Shaun’s answers point to a broader role. “The goal is not simply to store private keys securely,” he explained. Banks and custodians also need a clear record of how their systems use those keys. At the point of signing, the institution needs to know who triggered the request, whether the request followed policy and whether the sequence can be proven later. HSMs become part of the digital asset key security model when they place stronger controls around signing authority and transaction authorisation. A mature setup can enforce governed access, approval rules and key usage controls while keeping the private key away from the wider software environment. Such controls matter because they connect digital asset security directly to operational risk and governance. A bank needs to answer questions that go beyond cyber defence. Who initiated the transaction? Who approved it? Which key did the system use? Did the transaction follow policy? Did the system record the signing event? Can the institution prove what happened later? Shaun framed this around the need to govern the way an institution uses a private key, rather than treating protection as the end of the story. As these services involve more teams and counterparties, manual oversight becomes harder to rely on. This governance becomes even more critical as institutions begin exploring AI-driven financial workflows. When an autonomous agent or algorithmic system initiates a transaction at machine speed, manual oversight is impossible. The institution must rely entirely on the HSM to enforce policy, ensuring that every machine requested action is cryptographically authorized and bounded by strict hardware controls before value moves. Internal pilots may work with tighter human control, while regulated custody, tokenisation or settlement businesses need systems that can withstand audit, scale and scrutiny. Audit Trails Become Part of the Trust Layer Regulated institutions need a clear record of how they use private keys once these activities move into production. For institutions operating across fragmented regulatory environments in APJ, this level of control is also a matter of digital sovereignty. By anchoring private keys in dedicated hardware, an institution ensures it retains absolute, sovereign control over its assets and audit trails—regardless of which cloud environments or third-party platforms the surrounding applications run on. A signing event should show the key involved, the policy behind the approval, the authorised process that triggered it and the context around the decision. Without that record, an institution will struggle to explain how it controlled the authority to move value. Shaun’s answer places HSMs within the control plane behind institutional digital asset finance. HSMs help institutions determine how they generate keys, who can use them, which transactions they allow and what evidence they keep. The custody use case makes the issue easier to see. A custodian safeguards assets for clients, so these asset custody security ultimately depends on how well the institution protects and governs private keys. Once attackers gain control of the key, the custodian’s control over the asset is weakened. Tokenisation creates the same pressure around signing authority. As more financial instruments move into tokenised form, the systems behind those assets need stronger controls over actions that create, move or administer value. Those actions can carry direct financial consequences, so institutions need to govern them with the same seriousness as other high-impact financial operations. Hardware-rooted trust also gives institutions a model they already understand. Banks have long relied on HSMs in sensitive financial environments, and tokenised finance extends that model into a newer setting where value can move through programmable systems. Crypto Agility Moves Into the Planning Room The conversation does not stop with today’s private key risks. Digital asset systems still rely on cryptographic algorithms such as Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA).  Those algorithms remain widely used, but financial institutions are beginning to look further ahead as post-quantum cryptography enters long-term planning. Quantum computing may eventually threaten some public-key cryptographic algorithms used today. Moving every digital asset workflow to quantum-safe algorithms will take time because the wider blockchain ecosystem still has to mature around new cryptographic standards. Shaun’s answer avoids treating post-quantum readiness as an overnight switch. Institutions should avoid brittle key architectures that become difficult to govern or change later. The infrastructure behind signing authority should be treated as a long-term trust architecture rather than a one-off implementation. HSM-based architectures can support crypto agility by centralising key control and giving institutions a governed path to introduce new algorithms, hybrid mechanisms or updated signing approaches as standards mature.  C-level leaders should see the link between current key security decisions and future resilience. HSMs protect private keys now, while also helping institutions prepare for cryptographic change without rebuilding their trust architecture from scratch. Securing Digital Asset Keys Becomes a Strategic Decision Digital asset markets are maturing, and the infrastructure behind them has to keep pace. Blockchain protocols, custody frameworks and compliance processes will continue to matter, but weak private key protection can still undermine the whole model. Shaun brings the discussion back to the signing authority behind digital asset finance. Institutions that want to scale these services need infrastructure that protects that authority, governs its use and leaves evidence when questions arise. HSMs help provide that foundation by keeping the signing authority inside dedicated, tamper-resistant hardware. Cryptographic operations can still take place while the keys remain out of software environments, giving institutions a stronger base for governance today and crypto agility over time. As Shaun put it, “In digital asset finance, the private key is not just a credential. It is the authority to move value.” Institutions now have to protect that authority with infrastructure that can hold up as these tokenised asset finance becomes more institutional. Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore based on an image by mrsiraphol via Magnific. The post Are HSMs Becoming the Standard for Institutional Digital Assets? appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

Generative AI is making fraud more convincing and easier to scale. Reports of Gen AI-enabled scams rose 456% between May 2024 and April 2025, while deepfake activity is also rising sharply in APAC. Banks and fintechs across APAC are under growing pressure to tighten fraud controls and strengthen identity checks. This webinar brings together fraud and risk leaders to discuss how financial institutions are responding, including the use of stronger biometric checks and advanced liveness detection. The growing impact of deepfakes in Singapore and across APAC Exploring advanced technologies as fraud prevention grows more complex Striking the right balance between biometric checks and a smooth customer journey How regulators in APAC are responding to AI-driven scam risks and rethinking legacy authentication Speakers: Catherine Paleracio, Chief Information Security Officer of Tonik Gan Kee Lim, Head, CyberSecurity & Tech Risk, GXBank Julius Rajeswaran, Chief Operating Officer, Ryt Bank Dominic Forrest, Chief Technology Officer, iProov Moderator: Izzat Najmi Abdullah, Senior Writer, Fintech News Network The post Webinar: The Deepfake Threat and What APAC Financial Institutions Are Doing About It appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

“Where is your key?” Asked in everyday life, the question might sound like a small inconvenience. When asked inside a financial institution handling digital assets, it becomes a test of whether the organisation truly knows how assets can be moved and protected. Ray Law, Senior Security Solution Architect at Thales, placed that question at the centre of any serious discussion on institutional digital assets, especially as banks and financial institutions move from experimentation into more operational use cases. As stablecoins, tokenised money and digital assets move closer to institutional workflows, private key control becomes central to how institutions move assets, protect them, audit activity and respond when something goes wrong. Much of the institutional conversation around blockchain and tokenised finance used to carry a cautious tone, with banks and regulators trying to understand where the technology could fit without weakening the trust that underpins the financial system. The conversation has since moved into more practical territory. Stablecoins are being considered for payments and treasury use, while banks are looking at tokenised forms of money and assets as part of a broader shift in how value could move through the financial system. As these use cases move closer to day-to-day financial operations, security becomes much more than a technical consideration. It becomes part of the business model. During the webinar, The Blueprint for Institutional Digital Asset Security at Scale, speakers from Visa, UOB Group, Rakkar Digital and Thales discussed how institutional adoption is changing, what risks are becoming more urgent, and why the next phase of digital asset growth will depend on more than technical controls alone. Stablecoins Are Moving Beyond the Crypto Conversation Sanchit Mall, Director of Digital Currencies, Asia Pacific at Visa, said the company has seen strong demand for stablecoin-related payments across both consumer and institutional use cases. “We have been seeing tremendous growth in the demand for stablecoin-related payments,” he mentioned. Consumers holding digital assets can link them to cards and spend through Visa’s acceptance network, while institutions are looking at stablecoins for money movement and treasury use. “Stablecoins can let you move money seven days a week instead of five days a week,” Sanchit said, adding that Visa’s stablecoin settlement activity had reached a run rate of almost US$7 billion this year. Stablecoin adoption is pushing the discussion beyond crypto as an investment product. Treasury use cases, especially those involving money movement outside traditional banking hours, make security harder to treat as a back-end technical issue. Institutions now have to show that they can control and monitor these use cases safely as digital assets become more embedded in financial operations. Sanchit framed it clearly. “It is no longer that the technology needs to be safe. It is also the governance. The technology and the governance should merge and tackle together.” Digital Assets Are Becoming Part of the Financial System Yip Kah Kit, Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets at UOB Group, made a similar point from the banking side, describing digital assets as having moved closer to the core of the financial system. UOB is looking at digital assets as part of a broader shift in how value moves, including tokenised money and investment products. Kah Kit was careful, however, not to frame this only as a technology build. Institutions also need to rethink the operating model around digital asset activity, especially how existing risk frameworks and internal processes cope with new forms of value movement. “We look at it from three perspectives. One is the infrastructure layer. Secondly, the processes and policies would need to be augmented. Last but not least would be the culture of the people,” he stated. His emphasis on culture carried through the wider discussion, especially as several speakers returned to the same underlying concern. Even with cryptographic controls and secure wallet infrastructure, the weakest point often remains human behaviour. The Weakest Link Is Still Often Human Arthit Sriumporn, Founder of Rakkar Digital, spoke from the perspective of a custodian who had held significant client assets. The company was founded in 2022, headquartered in Singapore, licensed in Hong Kong and Thailand, and at its peak had around US$700 million under custody. Holding that level of client assets made security much broader than technology, he explained. “It was not just technology in terms of security. In fact, most of the time technology is not compromised. People [are the ones who] compromise [it],” said Arthit. Rakkar responded by building multiple layers of control around its custody operations. Private key shards were kept on offline, air-gapped devices, while access to signing processes involved secure facilities and biometric checks. Client-side governance controls also determined transaction limits and approval requirements. Arthit also highlighted that a single transaction could require multiple people from both the client and custodian side before it could move forward. Layered controls also help institutions deal with attacks that begin away from the core system, such as a compromised employee device or a social engineering attempt. Rakkar’s founder shared one incident where one of the company’s developer devices was compromised around Token2049. The bad actor remained in the network for some time, but luckily, he said: “No asset got stolen. That is the real benefit of having multiple safeguards in place.” Private Keys Are Now Institutional Infrastructure Ray’s earlier question about where an institution keeps its key comes back into focus here. “The first question every institution needs to answer is, where is your key? How is it generated, stored and used?” Ray remarked. The question goes straight to the heart of digital asset security because private keys control the movement of assets. Once institutions start handling digital assets at scale, key protection becomes one of the most important parts of the institutional blueprint. Ray said insecure key storage and private key compromise remain among the root causes of major losses. Some institutions, he noted, still manage keys in software, databases or configuration files, which can create serious exposure. “Software keys can be copied and stolen silently,” said Ray. “By the time you know a key is compromised, the damage is already done.” Thales sees the answer in hardware-backed protection, policy-based access controls and a lifecycle view that covers how keys are generated, stored, used and recovered. Ray also stressed the need for multi-party authorisation, where no single person or compromised credential can move assets alone. “Beyond prevention, audit trail matters,” he added. A strong audit trail matters because institutions need to prove what happened, who approved an action, where it came from and whether controls operated as intended. Security Has to Move Beyond Perimeter Defence Kah Kit pushed the discussion beyond perimeter defence, arguing that institutions should not rely only on building higher walls around their systems as attack surfaces widen. Instead, they should consider an “assumed breach” approach. Institutions still need to secure their perimeter, but they also need visibility into activity inside their ecosystem. “In addition to securing your perimeter, we should also look at how we use transaction analytics or even AI to monitor what is happening within our ecosystem,” Kah Kit stated. Digital asset security also cannot just depend on one perfect wall. Institutions must be alert and need to always assume that something, somewhere, could fail, and design controls that can contain the damage before it reaches the assets they are trying to protect. AI Is Becoming Both the Threat and the Defence AI brings its own complications. Like blockchain, it can strengthen both attackers and defenders. Bad actors can use it to make fraud and social engineering move faster, while institutions can use AI-driven analytics to review activity at a scale that would be difficult for human teams to manage on their own. “The timeless truth is that we should always use technology to fight technology,” said Kah Kit. Yet he also warned against relying on automation alone. In his view, human oversight remains critical, especially when AI agents begin operating inside financial workflows. Kah Kit also raised the need for “cognitive brakes.” If AI agents are given authority to act within financial operations, institutions need clear boundaries and circuit-breaker-style checks before any mistake scales too quickly. Ray then brought the discussion back to the security of AI systems themselves. Institutions offering AI-powered tools must also protect those systems from manipulation, including attacks that try to trick models into exposing sensitive data. AI security, in other words, has to cover both sides of the equation: how institutions use AI to monitor threats, and how they protect the AI tools they deploy. Compliance Is Only the Starting Point Regulation is also evolving, but the panel made clear that compliance alone cannot be the ceiling. Ray said regulatory frameworks often mandate outcomes, such as securing private keys, without always specifying the exact technical model. “Do not just wait for regulations to tell you the answer,” he told. Institutions still need to treat regulation as a baseline and think carefully about whether their controls can withstand real scrutiny. After a breach, the harder question will be whether the institution did enough. Kah Kit, who previously worked with the Bank for International Settlements, offered a more regional perspective. He responded by saying that regulators in this part of the world have generally done a good job balancing trust, resilience, innovation and market development. But he also observed a shift in regulatory scrutiny. Previously, having the right policy and process may have been enough. Now, quoting Kah Kit: “It is not just enough that you have a nice policy that you file in the cabinet. [Regulators would want to know] How well do you implement them?” Digital Asset Risk Does Not Stop at Borders Effectiveness becomes harder to prove when digital assets cut across sectors and borders because criminal networks do not operate neatly within one jurisdiction, but financial institutions and regulators often still do. Kah Kit said the industry needs stronger collaboration models, including public-private mechanisms and cross-border intelligence sharing. He pointed to examples such as Singapore’s COSMIC platform and Malaysia’s national fraud portal in the traditional finance space, but said similar mechanisms need to develop in the tokenised world. “Criminals operate in networks, and as financial institutions, we cannot operate in silos,” he said. Sanchit also noted that regional consistency matters. In fragmented markets, bad actors can exploit weaker jurisdictions or regulatory gaps. “Inter-regional, inter-country collaboration is very important,” he said. Interoperability also becomes important once digital assets move beyond isolated use cases. Sanchit gave his thoughts that institutions will need ways to work across different networks and digital asset ecosystems if they want these models to scale. Security Should Be the Reason Digital Assets Can Scale Taken together, the discussion showed that institutional digital asset security cannot be reduced to a single tool, control or compliance checklist. Private key protection, hardware-backed security and multi-party approvals all matter, but they need to sit within a broader operating model that also accounts for governance, people and real-time monitoring. The institutions that move ahead will be the ones that design security into the operating model from the start, rather than adding it after the product is built. Arthit summed up the opportunity well. “Do not let security be the barrier,” he said. His point lands neatly at the end of the discussion. Security should not slow institutional adoption by sitting outside the business. Done properly, it becomes the reason digital assets can move into the financial system with trust and scale. Watch the full webinar, The Blueprint for Institutional Digital Asset Security at Scale, right down below. Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore based on an image by user4894991 via Magnific. The post Institutional Digital Assets Are Growing Up, And Security Must Grow Up With Them appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

Reap has tapped Sumsub to support onboarding and compliance checks as it expands its stablecoin-native cards and payments infrastructure beyond APAC. The Singapore-based fintech will use Sumsub’s platform to automate verification for business customers and end cardholders. The partnership is aimed at helping Reap manage onboarding across markets with different regulatory, anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism requirements. Darryl Wan Darryl Wan, Head of Legal, Risk and Compliance at Reap, said, “Onboarding is often the first real experience a customer has with Reap and it needs to be fast, simple, and compliant no matter where they are located. With the right infrastructure in place, we can scale into new markets and give businesses seamless access to stablecoin-powered cards, payments and financial tools. We are delighted to partner with Sumsub to enhance our verification and KYC processes.” Sumsub’s platform lets Reap configure verification flows by customer type, market and risk profile. It also supports reusable KYC, which reduces repeated verification steps for users who have already completed checks through Sumsub. According to Sumsub’s internal data, one in three applicants has previously been verified on its platform before starting a new onboarding process, although many are still asked to upload the same documents again. Sumsub’s platform can verify more than 14,000 types of identity documents from over 220 countries and territories. Its Liveness Detection technology is also used to verify individuals during onboarding. Penny Chai Penny Chai, Vice President, APAC at Sumsub, said, “Our platform is designed to address fragmented regulatory environments across jurisdictions while enabling seamless user experiences through reusable digital identity. By verifying users once and extending that trust across the ecosystem, we help fast-growing fintechs like Reap reduce unnecessary onboarding friction without compromising on compliance.” Reap is exploring further automation of onboarding processes as it enters new markets and rolls out more products.     Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by mangpor2004 via Magnific The post Reap Taps Sumsub to Support Compliance Checks Across New Markets appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

Credit Bureau Singapore and Experian Malaysia are working on a cross-border credit reporting service to help lenders assess borrowers with financial footprints in both markets. The proposed service will allow individuals to apply for consented credit reports across Singapore and Malaysia. It is intended to help lenders assess credit risk more accurately and improve access to financial products for consumers who live or work across both markets. The companies will explore a framework for the secure exchange of individual credit information. This will cover each bureau’s role in handling applications, consumer consent, data protection, governance and commercial arrangements. The service could benefit workers, entrepreneurs and professionals whose financial records span both countries. It may also help lenders avoid treating cross-border applicants as new-to-credit customers when they already have verified credit histories in the other market. For financial institutions, the data could provide a fuller view of an applicant’s financial obligations. This may support digital underwriting, reduce cross-border fraud risk and help lenders assess customers with financial ties to both markets. Credit Bureau Singapore and Experian Malaysia noted that consumer consent, regulatory compliance and data protection will be central to the initiative. Both parties will work within their respective legal and regulatory frameworks and engage relevant authorities as the project develops. William Lim William Lim, Executive Director of Credit Bureau Singapore, said, “As individuals and businesses operate more seamlessly across Singapore and Malaysia, credit information systems must evolve to reflect cross-border realities. This collaboration represents an important step towards enabling more seamless and responsible access to credit for consumers.” Dawn Lai Dawn Lai, Chief Executive Officer of Experian Information Services Malaysia, added, “Trusted data collaboration is key to strengthening digital financial ecosystems. By working together, we aim to enhance financial inclusion, improve risk transparency and support sustainable growth across both markets.”     Featured image: (From left) Dawn Lai, Chief Executive Officer of Experian Information Services Malaysia and William Lim, Executive Director of Credit Bureau Singapore The post Credit Bureau Singapore, Experian Malaysia Plan Two-Way Credit Reporting appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

Nuvei is in advanced discussions to acquire cross-border payments firm Payoneer for roughly US$2.7 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, as reported by Reuters. The potential transaction aims to merge Nuvei’s merchant payment capabilities with Payoneer’s extensive global payout network. The proposed US$2.7 billion purchase price incorporates Payoneer’s cash reserves, placing the enterprise value at approximately US$2.3 billion. Nuvei could finalise an agreement in the coming days, though talks remain ongoing and plans could still change. An acquisition would grant Nuvei deeper access to emerging markets and large online marketplace clients, including Amazon, Walmart and eBay. The move reflects a broader trend among payment companies seeking scale through acquisitions, particularly in the cross-border and business-to-business sectors amid slower growth in traditional payment processing. Nuvei has actively pursued expansion since private equity firm Advent International, alongside Novacap and CDPQ, took the Montreal-based company private in a US$6.3 billion buyout in 2024. Payoneer holds a market capitalisation of around US$1.7 billion at the time of reporting. The company generates much of its revenue from emerging market businesses selling into the United States and Europe. The firm has exposure to geopolitical and trade-related risks stemming from tariffs and trade tensions between the US and China. Customers in greater China accounted for 34% of Payoneer’s revenue in 2025, according to company filings. While the company increased its revenue by 8% to US$1.05 billion last year, its net income dropped 40% to US$73.2 million due to declining interest income and rising operational costs.     Featured image credit: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by John Caplan via LinkedIn The post Nuvei in Advanced Talks to Acquire Payoneer for US$2.7 Billion, Sources Say appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

“We’re not ready for this to be very clear,” warned Rajay Rai, Chief Information and Operations Officer at Trust Bank, during a Singapore AI CxO roundtable hosted by Fintech News Network and Alteryx. His warning landed because the room was not debating some distant version of banking. AI is already working its way through financial institutions globally, and the examples around the table showed how quickly it is becoming part of daily banking work in Singapore. Trust Bank has live chatbots and fraud use cases, while Tyme has brought manual KYC down from around 24 hours to 22 minutes with the help of AI. UOB is currently exploring agentic AI across areas such as AML and KYC, and DBS is measuring AI use cases through economic value. Still, the discussion did not feel triumphant. As the roundtable moved on, the concern that kept coming back among the speakers was whether Singapore banks can turn AI adoption into real readiness across the structures that support it. All of them agreed that adoption alone will not be enough if banks cannot make governance more practical and train people for the work AI is starting to change. Customer trust also remains a live question among them, especially as AI moves deeper into real banking workflows across Singapore. @fintechnewsnetwork After 35 years in banking, Rajay Rai, CIO Trust Bank says the industry has never faced a pace of change like AI. And it isn’t ready. He explains why. Here’s Rajay Rai’s take on AI in banking. fintech Digitalbanking AI banking @Trust Bank Singapore ♬ original sound – Fintech News Network – Fintech News Network Singapore Banks Are Already Past the Starting Line The roundtable showed a market where the technology has already moved into real workflows, with leaders from incumbent banks, digital banks, payments firms and technology providers all comparing lessons from live deployments and internal experiments. Much of the banking conversation last year still revolved around generative AI and productivity tools. This year, attention is moving toward agentic AI, where systems can take on more of the work across a process. As those systems become more active, banks have to decide how much autonomy they are comfortable giving them, and where human judgement must remain firmly in place. Luckily, Singapore’s regulatory environment is moving in the same direction. IMDA launched its Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI in January 2026, while MAS announced an AI risk management toolkit for the financial sector in March 2026. Both developments point to a wider industry concern over how financial institutions should manage responsibility and oversight as AI becomes more embedded in daily work. The same concern is showing up beyond Singapore as well, with Gartner warning that more than 40% of agentic AI projects could be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to weak business cases or risk controls. The warning matched the tone of the discussion as the leaders around the table were not dismissing AI, and many were already using it. Their concern was however, whether the institution around the technology can adapt quickly enough. AI Is Turning More Bankers Into Builders One of the stronger themes from the roundtable was the rise of citizen coding inside banks, where AI is changing who gets to participate in the build process. “The coding language is English,” Rajay said. He was pointing to a reality where more people inside the organisation can now easily translate business needs into working outputs without waiting for every change to pass through a traditional technology queue. But Rajat Malhotra, CTO of GXS Bank, looked at the same change from another angle. “Humans are evolving into full stack humans,” he mentioned. “It’s no longer, oh, I am an engineer. I am an operations person. I am a backend engineer.” Rachel Freeman, Chief Growth Officer at Tyme, saw a similar change inside teams that would not usually be placed at the centre of technology transformation. She considers that one of the biggest changes in 2026 was the “unleashing” of people across the organisation to build and improve processes themselves. Staff in areas such as operational risk and internal audit are now using AI to digitise manual work and rethink how those processes should run. Céline Le Cotonnec, Chief Data and Innovation Officer at Bank of Singapore, described a similar move toward business users becoming more hands-on with data and prototyping. She elucidates some examples happening in the private bank, where bankers and assistant relationship managers are already querying data from a single source of truth, while teams across the organisation build applications and prototypes before handing them to technology teams All of this gives Singapore banks a wider pool of people who can solve problems closer to where the work happens, although their readiness for AI becomes harder to manage when more employees can build. When more people can build, who decides what is ready to scale? More Output Means More Pressure on Senior Reviewers The speakers also believe that productivity gains in software development are already showing up inside banks, although the gains are also shifting pressure onto the people who have to review the work. Jackson Oh, CTO of ANEXT Bank, for instance, explained that the speed of engineering work had changed dramatically. “Our engineers are giving us feedback faster than the product guys can come up with,” he said. He told that junior engineers can now generate far more output with the help of AI, while senior reviewers on the other hand, need some time to review it properly. But Jackson noted that more code and faster iterations can only create value if experienced reviewers have the capacity to assess and approve the work. The review layer may therefore become one of the harder constraints as AI-enabled teams move faster. Banks can increase production speed, but senior judgement is much harder to scale at the same pace. Céline then pointed to the longer-term talent problem created by this new way of working. “There’s no job for fresh grad, but we need people with 20 years of experience to review codes and systems,” she uttered. Her comment captured one of the more uncomfortable workforce issues in the discussion. If early-career roles become thinner, banks may struggle to develop the people who later need to exercise judgement over AI-generated work. The industry now will have to rethink how it trains critical thinkers before the traditional apprenticeship path starts to weaken. AI Will Only Be as Good as the Bank Behind It A sharper point emerged as the discussion moved into software development and internal workflows. The faster banks want AI to work, the more discipline they need around what they feed into it. Rajay argued that productivity gains depend on the quality of the inputs before code generation even begins. “Your LLM is going to be a reflection of how good you are,” he noted. A bank with messy documentation or too many versions of the same process will see those weaknesses surface again in the model’s output. Other speakers arrived at the same issue through the data layer. Songhua Zhang from DBS Bank said one of the bank’s major initiatives this year is to tackle long-running data challenges, including the difficulty of giving data professionals reliable sources for modelling and reporting. Agentic workflows, in his view, could help because they can browse internal sources under proper access controls and make institutional knowledge easier to retrieve. Céline made a similar point from the wealth management side, where she believes that unstructured data and metadata quality matter if LLMs are expected to interpret information properly. Without that foundation, even a powerful model will struggle to produce output that teams can trust, because AI readiness for Singapore banks starts much earlier than deployment. A bank now has to make its own knowledge usable before it can expect a model to use it well. Governance Has to Move Into the Workflow Once AI becomes part of daily banking work, governance has to sit closer to the tools people actually use. GXS Bank representative, Rajat, described about building governance into its AI platform so employees do not have to make every judgement on their own about whether they are using the technology correctly or exposing information to the wrong tools. Revolut’s Raymond Ng also stressed the need for first, second and third lines of defence, especially when younger teams have powerful AI tools and more room to make decisions. Céline added another important point where she pointed out that control functions must become more technical. “We can’t have people doing AI governance that don’t know what they’re talking about,” she warned. Her point speaks to the practical side of AI readiness for Singapore banks. Governance cannot sit only in policy documents if the people reviewing AI use do not understand how the systems work. Banks still need formal policies, but those controls have to show up in the tools and review processes that teams use every day. Ross Morpeth, Director of Customer Experience for EMEA and APAC at Alteryx, brought the conversation back to trust and accuracy. Data quality still matters because, as he noted, even the smartest model becomes worthless if it is trained or fed with poor data. He also warned that the trust problem cuts both ways. “There’s also a danger that people trust it too much, and just take what AI tells them as gospel,” he said. The point lands because much of the AI debate in banking tends to focus on whether people will trust the technology enough. Overtrust may become one of the quieter risks for banks using AI because a confident answer can still be wrong, and in a regulated environment, speed is not much help if people stop questioning the output. Will Banks Still Look Like Banks? As the conversation moved from current use cases to the future of financial institutions, the discussion became less about AI tools and more about what kind of bank survives in a more programmable world. Rachel Freeman pointed out that Tyme is already thinking about who the financial institutions of the future will be, and how smaller players can avoid being displaced by newer, more programmable banking models. Vincent Fong, Chief Editor of Fintech News Network and moderator of the roundtable, then pushed the idea further and asked whether the future bank could be built with 10 or 15 people rather than hundreds. The idea sounds extreme at first, yet it follows naturally from the wider discussion. AI changes the economics of building and running financial services, which means the future bank may not look like a slightly more efficient version of today’s institution. Atul Bhuchar, Head of Transaction Banking Product APAC at SMBC, offered one of the most memorable ways to describe that choice. “Are we aspiring to be a faster caterpillar, or are we aspiring to transform into a butterfly?” he asked. Incumbent banks may find that question harder to avoid as AI moves deeper into the institution. Faster processes and better productivity can take banks only so far if AI begins to change the structure of banking itself. Banking Is Still a Trust Business Even after the discussion moved into 10-person banks and more programmable financial institutions, Arun Muraleedharan brought the conversation back to why banks may still matter. “Ultimately, banking is a trust business,” he said. Customers may welcome faster journeys and smarter tools but when money is involved, they still expect a bank to stand behind the decision, because AI can speed up the work without carrying institutional responsibility on its own. AI’s larger role will force banks to define trust more carefully. Banks will need clearer lines around human judgement and accountability when the technology influences decisions. After all, if banking is still a trust business, what does trust look like when more of the work is being done by machines? There was far more in the room than could fit into one article. Watch the full roundtable to hear how Singapore’s banking leaders are thinking through AI, trust and the future shape of financial institutions. The post Singapore Banks Are Moving Fast With AI, But Can They Actually Keep Up? appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

The Singapore High Court has issued a notice to seize shares held by Capital A subsidiary Move Digital in digital wallet operator BigPay and logistics firm Teleport, the Edge Malaysia said. The enforcement action aims to recover a US$14.7 million (RM59.85 million) arbitration award owed to BigPay co-founders Christopher Davison and Navin Rajagopalan, as reported by The Edge Malaysia. The order mandates the seizure of Move Digital’s 99.56% stake in BigPay alongside its 11.45% stake in Teleport. This development highlights the strict enforcement capabilities within Singapore’s legal framework for fintech disputes resolved through arbitration, impacting regional corporate structures. The conflict traces back to 2021 when the co-founders initiated arbitration under the Singapore International Arbitration Centre. They alleged minority oppression, wrongful termination, and a breach of agreements after AirAsia Digital (now Move Digital) cancelled its 2017 shareholder agreements. While the founders initially sought a buyout between US$140 million and US$183 million, the arbitration tribunal issued a partial award in December 2024. The tribunal directed the Capital A unit to buy out their minority shares for the much lower figure of US$14.7 million, according to The Edge Malaysia. Move Digital prepares legal response The current court order also covers unpaid interest on legal cost orders related to the Singapore enforcement proceedings. Move Digital stated that it intends to file a written objection, maintaining that it has legitimate grounds to challenge the asset seizure. BigPay remains a key digital financial service component for Capital A. In May 2026, the parent company advanced RM24.13 million to the fintech firm to support its ongoing operations and financial management. Meanwhile, Teleport serves as the largest revenue driver for Capital A, generating RM308.65 million in the first quarter of 2026. Despite the legal action, Capital A shares closed higher on Tuesday (9 June), raising its market capitalisation to RM1.86 billion.     Featured image credit: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by somemeans via Magnific The post Singapore Court Orders Seizure of Capital A Stakes in BigPay and Teleport appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

AI is getting better at helping us shop. The next step is much bigger: making payments on our behalf. That sounds convenient, but it also raises some important questions. Who is really in control? What happens when an AI agent makes a mistake? And how can banks, merchants, and regulators trust transactions that are no longer initiated directly by humans? In this episode, Lionel Grosclaude, CEO of Fime, joins Fintech News Network to discuss the rise of agentic commerce and why trust may become the most important layer in AI-driven payments. The conversation explores Fime’s recently launched FACT (Framework for Agentic Commerce Trust), a neutral trust layer designed to help verify, monitor, and govern autonomous transactions. What Lionel shares his thoughts on in this conversation: Why agentic commerce is moving from concept to reality The trust gap emerging as AI agents begin making payments How the FACT Framework works Why independent oversight matters in AI-driven commerce The difference between one-time checks and continuous verification How banks and merchants can handle disputes involving AI agents The role regulators and central banks may play in governing autonomous transactions Why businesses should start preparing for agentic commerce now The post Agentic Commerce and the Trust Problem Nobody Has Solved appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

HSBC has tested B2B agentic commerce transactions in Singapore with Mastercard as banks look for new ways to automate business payments. The pilot was completed on 29 May 2026 and involved a multinational corporate buyer, Singapore-based procurement platform SourceSage and e-commerce supplier FortyTwo. The transaction was built on Mastercard Agent Pay and used tokenised payments, merchant discovery and referral capabilities. The proof of concept shows how digital agents could help businesses manage purchasing and payments with controls, transparency and risk management built into the process. HSBC framed the pilot as part of its wider push to support payment ecosystems through Global Payments Solutions, including commercial cards and digital merchant acquiring. The bank is looking to connect buyers, procurement platforms and suppliers through payment, liquidity and reconciliation services. Winnie Yap Winnie Yap, Head of Global Payments Solutions, HSBC Singapore, said: “This pilot demonstrates how B2B transactions, can be executed end-to-end with control, transparency and risk management from the start. In Singapore, where many businesses centralise regional procurement and treasury, we are seeing strong demand for solutions that connect buyers, platforms and suppliers seamlessly across payments, liquidity and reconciliation.” Minsook Cho Minsook Cho, Country Manager, Singapore, Mastercard, said, “For businesses in Singapore managing procurement and payments across the region, complexity has always been the challenge. Agentic commerce, when powered by Mastercard and delivered with HSBC, addresses this directly — and this pilot establishes that the building blocks are in place. Scaling this requires partners who bring both the institutional depth and the appetite to do things differently, and that is what working with HSBC has demonstrated.” HSBC has also expanded its Digital Merchant Services to India and Singapore, following an earlier rollout in Hong Kong. The service allows digital merchants and marketplaces to accept cards, digital wallets and real-time transfers through a single contract and interface. It supports 14 payment methods across the three markets. The agentic commerce pilot used Juspay’s technology stack, extending HSBC’s existing Digital Merchant Services partnership with the payments infrastructure company. HSBC and Mastercard have also launched HSBC’s first mobile virtual cards for corporate customers in Singapore. The cards allow businesses to set spending limits, apply usage rules and assign cards to specific teams, suppliers or projects. The cards can be used at physical point-of-sale terminals, as well as for in-app and online purchases. HSBC Mobile Virtual Card will be available to Singapore-based corporate clients by end-June 2026.     Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by jamesteoh1976 via Magnific The post HSBC Pilots B2B Agentic Payments in Singapore with Mastercard appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

yuu Rewards Club members in Singapore can now convert their points into Max Miles under an expanded partnership with HeyMax. Under the new arrangement, yuu members can convert points at a ratio of 3.6 yuu Points to 1 Max Mile. HeyMax said this allows members to earn up to 10 miles per dollar. The feature gives members another redemption option through HeyMax’s network of more than 20 airline and hotel loyalty programmes. The move builds on the existing partnership between both companies, which already allows HeyMax users to convert Max Miles into yuu Points at a ratio of 1:3. HeyMax is expanding its loyalty and travel partner network across Asia Pacific. Joe Lu Joe Lu, Co-Founder and CEO of HeyMax said, “At HeyMax, our mission has always been to make aspirational travel more accessible to everyone. Partnering with yuu Rewards Club is a natural next step. For the first time, yuu members can convert their everyday points into a reward currency that opens the door to a whole world of travel opportunities.” yuu Rewards Club members earn points across supermarkets, convenience stores, pharmacies and other lifestyle merchants in Singapore. Lee Yik Hun Lee Yik Hun, Head of Commercial at yuu Rewards Club, said, “With leisure travel increasingly becoming a priority for Singapore residents, this expanded partnership with HeyMax gives yuu members greater flexibility to convert their points into flights or hotel stays, extending the benefits of everyday spending into overseas travel.”       The post yuu Points Can Now Be Converted to Max Miles Under HeyMax Partnership appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

OpenWay and Visa are working together to help banks, processors and fintechs in Asia Pacific bring new payment products to market faster. The collaboration will support selected Visa payment products on OpenWay’s Way4 platform, which is used for card issuing, digital wallets, merchant acquiring, real-time payments and other payment services. Earlier coordination between Visa and OpenWay on selected product requirements and implementation frameworks could simplify rollouts and reduce deployment work. Way4 can be deployed on premises, in the cloud, through dedicated SaaS or in hybrid models. The collaboration builds on recent Visa payment products supported on Way4, including Visa Flexible Credential and Visa Fleet 2.0. Visa Flexible Credential lets cardholders access multiple funding sources through one credential, while Visa Fleet 2.0 supports fleet-related payment use cases. More Visa products and services are expected to be added under the same framework. Rudy Gunawan Rudy Gunawan, Managing Director of OpenWay Asia, said, “Asia Pacific continues to lead global payment innovation, and banks are looking for ways to deliver new customer propositions faster and more efficiently. Our collaboration with Visa strengthens our ability to support financial institutions with faster implementation of new payment capabilities on Way4.”     Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by ghiska via Magnific The post OpenWay, Visa Work to Speed Up Payment Product Launches for APAC Banks appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

Backbase is bringing Mastercard Move into its Banking OS as banks look for faster ways to launch cross-border payment services. The integration gives Backbase customers access to Mastercard’s global money movement capabilities through a pre-built connector, reducing the need for custom integration work. The collaboration is aimed at helping financial institutions roll out international payment services more quickly, while managing the payment flow from customer initiation to settlement and reconciliation. Mayank Somaiya Mayank Somaiya, Global Vice President and Head of Ecosystem Partnerships at Backbase, said, “The Backbase Ecosystem extends the AI-native Banking OS with best-of-breed capabilities across payments, fraud management, open banking, dispute management, and end-to-end banking services. With Mastercard Move accessible directly through the Banking OS, banks can deliver trusted international payments within the same digital journeys their customers already use – competing with digital-first and non-traditional players on experience, pricing, transparency, and speed.” The integration will initially focus on the European Union, Middle East and North Africa, targeting banks that are looking to improve their cross-border payment capabilities. Mastercard Move supports money movement across more than 200 countries and territories, connects more than 17 billion endpoints, and supports transactions in 150 currencies. Pratik Khowala Pratik Khowala, Global Head of Transfer Solutions, Mastercard, said, “By making Mastercard Move available through the Backbase AI-native Banking OS, we’re accelerating banks’ ability to bring cross-border services to market. This collaboration helps financial institutions deploy trusted, transparent international payments faster and with far less complexity.” The pre-built connector is now available to Backbase customers through a pre-integrated setup, with support for planning, technical assessment and delivery guidance.     Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by smartmalik6384 via Magnific The post Backbase Taps Mastercard to Simplify Cross-Border Payments for Banks appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

Payment processes have always operated according to rules set in advance, with someone accountable when things go wrong, and the same instruction producing the same outcome every time. This was precisely the promise that kept trillions of dollars moving across card networks, real-time settlement systems and every other rail. It is also what autonomous AI agents are now starting to test. Agentic AI payment systems, rather than executing instructions a human has already approved, reason, plan, and initiate transactions on their own at machine speed, possibly even with limited human intervention at each step. Technology giants and fintech startups alike are already piloting agent-mediated commerce, and a new layer is being built to support it. A new generation of technical standards, like the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication frameworks, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), is emerging swiftly to wire autonomous agents into existing payment rails. A recent International Monetary Fund note titled “How Agentic AI Will Reshape Payments” goes deep into these developments, covering facets like authorisation, liquidity management, settlement, compliance, and operational resilience. It offers insights into “key design questions, architectural tensions, and risk channels” that could require attention as adoption evolves. From Humans Click-to-Pay to Agents Decide-to-Pay The rapid rise of agent-mediated payments raises design and policy questions that existing payment frameworks have not been built to address, the paper indicates. Instead of users initiating each transaction themselves, settings hand the work over to software agents operating under delegated mandates. These include agents that anticipate when a payment is necessary, as well as ones that weigh the available options and coordinate execution across multiple instruments and rails. Under certain conditions, AI agents may even be authorised to make the payment decision outright. This evolution can be read as a shift from explicitly human-initiated transactions, or click-to-pay, towards agent-mediated decision processes, or decide-to-pay, in which execution increasingly unfolds at speed and across several layers of the payment value chain. These are all done within predefined objectives, constraints, and governance arrangements. Although most current agentic AI payment implementations still centre on helping people find and compare products, experimentation is quickly expanding across a much broader landscape of payment-related use cases. These range from fraud detection and compliance monitoring to treasury optimisation and cross-border payment orchestration, reflecting the widening scope of agentic AI pilots across the payments ecosystem. One crucial architectural challenge, the IMF note shares, is coming into focus. Core payment infrastructures are built on deterministic logic, demanding predictability, auditability, and legal enforceability at every step of the transaction’s lifecycle. Agentic AI systems work the other way, relying on probabilistic reasoning and adaptive decision making that can produce different outcomes under otherwise similar conditions. Where Does Risk Lie in Agentic AI Payments? Diving deeper, the IMF note indicates that the primary risk with agentic payments comes from letting adaptive systems “make irreversible payments without proper controls, checks, or accountability.” The key issue here is not whether AI should be used in payments, as it has already been deployed for over four decades. Source: IMF The note showcases a three-layer model to clarify these roles and architectures. The note highlights a design principle, which is to concentrate probabilistic, adaptive reasoning upstream, while preserving deterministic authorisation and settlement where legal finality and systemic stability are required. In simpler words, it means letting AI handle the judgment calls early on, while leaving the actual approval and movement of money to fixed, reliable rules, so the unpredictable part never sits at the point where a payment becomes final. The First Layer: Intent and Orchestration This layer holds the probabilistic agentic systems and protocols that translate high-level user objectives, or intent, into structured, machine-readable instructions. The technologies here enable reasoning, planning, search, negotiation, and multi-agent coordination, without carrying out any authorisation or execution. Among the most consequential standards is Google’s UCP, which gives agents a shared grammar for discovery, comparison, and the creation and management of post-purchase logic. Source: Google Industry pilots are already drawing on these standards. Visa’s Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard’s Agent Pay, for instance, test agent-initiated shopping and payment flows in which agents build purchase intent on their own, within predefined limits, the note shared. The Second Layer: Control and Authorisation This layer enforces the deterministic constraints that decide whether an action proposed or initiated by an agent may proceed to execution. The technologies here ensure that authorisation rests on deterministic policy rules, even when those rules draw on upstream probabilistic systems. Research in the field is increasingly focused on protocols that shift trust away from human oversight and towards technical safeguards, by way of verifiable claims, authorisation constraints, and identity frameworks, the note indicates. The note shares that the core mechanism for this particular layer is the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), which binds an agent’s actions to cryptographically verifiable mandates that set out scope, limits, actor identity, and permitted conditions. Having these mandates could ensure that downstream authorisation reflects explicit user consent rather than something the model has inferred. Recent industry work shows how mandate-based authorisation can be put into practice in agent-initiated payment flows. The note also indicates that select payment service providers like Stripe have introduced tokenised authorisation mechanisms that let AI agents initiate transactions using a user’s pre-approved payment methods, both card and non-card, without accessing the underlying credentials. Approaches like these show how structural authorisation and payment-method choice can be preserved while maintaining deterministic control over execution. Still, there is deeper tension here. Most payment regimes require that a payment order be traceable to an authorised instruction from an account holder or its legally recognised agent. Agent-initiated payments strain that model, because individual transactions may not map to explicit, transaction-level instructions. Authorisation instead becomes structural and mandate-based, which raises hard questions about traceability, consent, and liability under existing legal frameworks. As agentic payment models mature, the field will need broader and legally workable concepts of authorisation, grounded in verifiable mandates, scope limitations, and auditability. The Third Layer: Settlement This layer comprises the traditional deterministic settlement infrastructures, such as RTGS systems, instant payment networks, and card network clearing engines, alongside newer settlement systems such as central bank digital currency platforms and distributed ledger-based rails. Layer 3 is where payment instructions are executed with irrevocable legal finality. In contrast to the adaptive nature of Layers 1 and 2, the technologies here are built deliberately for predictable, rules-bound execution, operational resilience, and strict auditability, keeping with the principles that govern financial market infrastructures. Source: IMF Execution at this layer also draws on settlement-native technologies such as programmable wallets and token standards. Within this architecture, Layer 3 is the final, non-probabilistic endpoint of the payment chain. It accepts only those instructions that have cleared the deterministic controls in Layer 2, and it executes them without modification, optimisation, or reinterpretation. Agentic algorithms typically do not operate here, the note indicated. That distinct separation could preserve legal certainty, contain systemic risk, and keep the foundations of the payment system stable, synchronised, and trustworthy, even as the processes upstream grow steadily more automated. Managing the Risks of an Automated Payment System The note narrates that containing agentic AI payment risks will call for coordinated action from private and public stakeholders. Financial institutions must invest in governance structures, cybersecurity safeguards, and technical architectures that keep agentic reasoning separate from payment execution. Next, payment networks and technology providers will need trusted identity frameworks and interoperable standards for Know-Your-Agent (KYA) verification, as well as delegated authority. Regulators, for their part, may need to adapt their supervisory approaches, including monitoring frameworks, testing environments, and governance standards for AI-mediated financial activity. To that end, the path of agentic AI payments will be shaped by what the technology can do and by the institutional design and governance choices made around it. The question facing policymakers and industry alike is therefore not whether to adopt agentic technologies, but how to fold them into payment systems in a way that preserves trust, stability, and accountability across an increasingly automated financial ecosystem. Featured image edited by Fintech News Singapore based on an image by Frolopiaton Palm on Magnific The post IMF Lays Out How Agentic AI Could Reshape Payments While Preserving Stability appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

Tazapay is putting US$36 million behind agentic payments and cross-border stablecoin rails, betting that AI agents will soon be paying for software by transaction. The Singapore-based payments company closed a Series B extension led by Circle Ventures, with Coinbase Ventures and CMT Digital joining as new backers, taking its total Series B to US$36 million. The fresh capital is earmarked for licensing, corridor expansion across Asia, Latin America, the Americas, and the Middle East, and infrastructure for AI-driven payments. In an interview with Fintech News Network’s Chief Editor Vincent Fong, Chief Product Officer Aayush Singhania unpacks how Tazapay onboards customers across 70+ countries through its partnership with Sumsub, the governance challenge standing between AI agents and unsupervised payments, and what the company is building next. Why Is So Much Investor Money Flowing into Stablecoins? In March 2026, four Singapore startups raised a combined US$150 million for stablecoin-related ventures. When asked about why capital is pouring into stablecoins now, Aayush said it mirrored how far domestic payments have already come. Real-time networks run in 80+ markets, from FAST in Singapore to PromptPay in Thailand and PIX in Brazil. All these networks move volume at scale, yet cross-border payments have kept pace. Money still travels through correspondent banks, hopping across two or more intermediaries and taking two to three days to land in the beneficiary’s account. Aayush Singhania “According to UN estimates, moving $200 across borders still costs 6.2% in 2026,” Aayush shared. “To compound the problem even further, there is $30 trillion stuck in nostro and vostro accounts, which is just dead capital to facilitate settlements.” Aayush believes that this is where stablecoin comes in; as a game-changer. Stablecoins can be moved 24/7 across the border, is instant and irrevocable, and crucially, they do not require pre-funding. He explained further, @fintechnewsnetwork How Stablecoins Solve a $30 Trillion Problem Roughly $30 trillion sits idle in the global banking system just to keep cross-border payments moving. Aayush Singhania, CPO of @tazapay, on how stablecoins free that capital, settling across borders instantly with no pre-funding. fintech banking stablecoins payments ♬ original sound – Fintech News Network – Fintech News Network Tazapay, for its part, is building the fiat bridge for stablecoins and in doing so, making stablecoins usable to consumers and clients. “From the user’s perspective, they don’t realise that crypto is involved. The experience layer continues to be in fiat, whereas the magic happens in the money movement with stablecoins as the transport layer. That is what is really driving investor interest,” Aayush said. The Messy Part of Onboarding Friction Points Tazapay onboards customers globally, and Aayush shares that the organisation splits this process into two parts. The first part involves identity verification, and the obstacle here, he explained, is fragmentation. Every market authenticates people differently: in Singapore, a customer might be verified through SingPass, but in India, it may involve an Aadhar card or passport. Business verification is just as uneven. Some markets maintain databases where a company’s identity can be confirmed directly, while others have no API to reach them. The challenge for Tazapay is to absorb those different variations of fragmentation and still present a single, unified experience to every client. To resolve this, Tazapay partnered with Sumsub, which Tazapay a single pane of glass to onboard customers uniformly. Aayush shared, @fintechnewsnetwork Onboarding Across 70 Countries Is Harder Than It Looks Every market has its own rules for verifying who a customer is, and the complexity is often underappreciated. Aayush Singhania, CPO of Tazapay, on how a partnership with Sumsub simplifies a problem many fintechs hit when they expand. Fintech Banking finance ♬ original sound – Fintech News Network – Fintech News Network The second check is messier, as Tazapay has to confirm if a client will actually use the platform for the purpose they claimed it is for. Aayush explained, “To solve this, we do a variety of checks when we onboard a customer. We verify the kind of terms and conditions which are on their platform. Are they licensed to sell those products in the market?” As these checks were previously tedious and heavily manual in nature, Tazapay has invested heavily into AI-based stacks running in real-time. “This enables us to onboard any business in minutes instead of days,” he shared. AI Agents Will Soon Need Their Own Way to Pay Aayush shared that over the past three to four months, the capability of AI models have moved quickly, and that changes what is possible in payments. He pointed to B2B flows where citing a McKinsey study, almost 60% of payments still require manual intervention. Agents could soon take these on. Within a year or two, Aayush anticipates that businesses can lean on agents to book travel, manage procurement and more. Once agents do the work though, they would also need to settle the bill. “When agents start running this, they will need ways to pay, and that’s where agentic payments comes in,” he explained. Tazapay is approaching the opportunity from two directions at once, building for both the acceptance side, where merchants take payments from agents, and the payer side, where businesses provision and control what their agents can spend. To learn more about Tazapay and how AI agents are already paying for API calls and data using stablecoins, watch the short video below. Featured image by Fintech News Singapore The post Tazapay Is Preparing for a World Where AI Agents Pay the Bill appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

OCBC is expanding its gold offering with allocated gold bars held in a Singapore-based vault. Institutional clients of OCBC, as well as high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients of Bank of Singapore, will be able to buy, sell and custodise physical gold from 10 June 2026. The service covers large gold bars of about 400 troy ounces, or 12.4kg, and 1kg kilobars. The trading and custodial chain will be based entirely in Singapore. Bank of Singapore’s client holdings in physical gold have grown by more than 40 percent since the end of 2025, with most of these holdings belonging to ultra-high-net-worth clients. Jason Moo Jason Moo, CEO of Bank of Singapore, said, “By leveraging OCBC Group’s strengths, we will be able to deliver a secure, trusted and differentiated physical gold offering that addresses our clients’ risk concerns.” Previously, Bank of Singapore clients transacted in physical gold through a US-based entity. They will now be able to transact through OCBC in Singapore instead. Kenneth Lai Kenneth Lai, Head of Global Markets, OCBC, said, “Our Singapore-based physical gold trading and custodian capabilities represent a strategic expansion of our market-making capabilities in precious metals. While we have started with private banking, over time we are looking to expand to institutional as well as other client segments, and offer them a comprehensive range of physical gold investment and hedging solutions.” The gold bars will be identifiable by serial numbers and allocated to clients. This gives clients ownership of specific bars, rather than a stake in a pooled reserve under an unallocated gold arrangement. The physical gold service adds to OCBC’s existing gold-related offerings. OCBC Singapore clients can already invest in fractional gold or silver through the OCBC app. Lion Global Investors, OCBC’s asset management arm, launched the LionGlobal Singapore Physical Gold Fund last year. The fund is backed by physical gold that is insured and vaulted in Singapore. The LionGlobal Singapore Physical Gold ETF was listed on the Singapore Exchange in March 2026. OCBC describes it as Singapore’s first home-grown physical gold exchange-traded fund. In April 2026, OCBC and Lion Global Investors launched the OCBC-LionGlobal Physical Gold Fund Token, or GOLDX token, for institutional investors and corporate accredited investors.     Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by mkmult via Magnific The post OCBC Moves Into Physical Gold Trading, Custody for Wealth Clients appeared first on Fintech Singapore.

FXC Intelligence, a financial data company specializing in the payments and e-commerce sectors, has released its annual Cross-Border Payments 100 list. The list identifying this year’s 100 most influential players in global payments and recognizing them for their operational scale, market significance, and sustained growth over the past year. Among the 2026 honorees, 16 companies hail from Asia-Pacific (APAC), an increase from 13 in 2025 which underscores the region’s rising prominence in the global cross-border transaction arena. Released on May 28, the list reveals that Singapore leads the APAC representation with six entries, followed by Mainland China with five, and India with three. The roster also features companies from Bangladesh, and the Philippines. This year’s lineup includes several returning firms such as Airwallex, Ant Group, DBS Bank, Nium, Sunrate, Thunes, LianLian Global, PingPong, Tencent, XTransfer, and Airtel Money. Complementing these established players are new APAC entrants: UnionPay International, PhonePe, Razorpay, bKash, and GCash. APAC’s top 16 cross-border payment firms in 2026 Airwallex (Singapore and US) Dually headquartered in Singapore and the US, Airwallex provides cross-border payments and financial services to businesses through a proprietary banking network and its application programming interface (API). It also offers services and products to businesses such as accounts, expense cards, and payroll. Airwallexʼs payment network allows businesses to send payments to more than 200 countries and regions across more than 60 currencies. Annually, its infrastructure processes over US$266 billion in transactions, serving over 250,000 customers globally. Ant International (Singapore) Founded by Ant Group in 2023 as its international business unit, Ant International owns and operates key global brands including Alipay+, Antom, and WorldFirst. Ant International’s global payment services support more than 300 payment methods in over 220 markets, including all card schemes, 50 mobile payment partners and more than 10 national QR systems, including Singapore’s SGQR, Malaysia’s DuitNow, South Korea’s ZeroPay, Thailand’s PromptPay, Indonesia’s QRIS, and Sri Lanka’s LankaPay. It claims an average of over 20 million transactions daily. DBS Bank (Singapore) DBS Bank is a Singaporean multinational banking and financial services corporation, and one of the city-state’s “Big Three” local banks. It’s a major provider of consumer, small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) and corporate banking services across Asia, enabling transaction banking, remittances, digital payments and cross-border payments connectivity for consumers. DBS Bank operates across 19 markets, with more than 12 million customers. Its DBS Globesend solution for cross-border payments spans 132 currencies and 190 countries, utilizing smart routing and real-time exchange rates to facilitate seamless global money transfers. Nium (Singapore) Headquartered in Singapore, Nium offers cross-border pay-in and pay-out infrastructure, including multi-currency accounts, card issuance and global foreign exchange (FX). The company facilitates real-time payments across 100 corridors and payouts across more than 190 markets. Backed by more than 40 licenses worldwide, Nium’s extensive network powers money movement for banks, fintech startups, and money transfer operators. It currently serves over 1,000 clients, including Mastercard, Booking.com, Air France, and Payoneer, with support for 125 currencies. Sunrate (Singapore) Founded in 2016, Sunrate is a leading global payment and treasury management platform for businesses worldwide. It enables companies to operate and scale both locally and globally in more than 190 countries and regions with its infrastructure, global network, and unified solutions. Sunrate’s platform supports payments in over 130 currencies and is licensed or registered in countries and jurisdictions including Singapore, Hong Kong, Mainland China, Australia, Indonesia, the US, Canada and the UK. Thunes (Singapore) Founded in 2016, Thunes is a Singapore-based payments network aggregator that has built a global network of connections to local payment rails. Its proprietary Direct Global Network allows members to make payments in real-time in over 140 countries and more than 90 currencies. It connects directly to 12 billion mobile wallets, stablecoin wallets and bank accounts worldwide, as well as 15 billion cards via more than 220 different payment methods, including GCash, M-Pesa, Airtel, MTN, Orange, JazzCash, Easypaisa, AliPay, and WeChat Pay. Members of Thunes’ Direct Global Network include gig economy giants like Uber and Deliveroo, super-apps like Grab and WeChat, telecommunications firms, fintech startups, payment service providers (PSPs), and banks. LianLian Global (Mainland China) Founded in 2023, LianLian Global is a cross-border payments fintech based in China that provides accounts, payment acceptance and disbursal, virtual credit cards, as well as end-to-end payment infrastructure solutions for merchants and financial institutions. LianLian Global has served 7.9 million companies worldwide, supporting more than 100 countries and regions, over 70 e-commerce platforms and more than 130 currencies. The company holds over 65 regulatory approvals and licences globally. PingPong (Mainland China) PingPong is a cross-border payments and financial infrastructure provider enabling global money movement services for enterprises, merchants and SMEs, including global collections, payouts, FX, virtual accounts and B2B payments. It covers more than 200 countries and regions, and allows users to hold and convert 30 currencies. To date, PingPong has facilitated US$350 billion in transactions, and has secured over 60 financial licences across major economies. Tencent (Mainland China) Tencent is a major Chinese multinational technology company and the owner of Weixin, Chinaʼs biggest messaging platform and super-app, as well as the international version of the app, WeChat. The platform offers a range of services, including a digital wallet, peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers, merchant payments, wealth management and investment products, lending services, and cross-border payments. As of December 2025, Weixin Pay has secured the second-largest share of China’s mobile payment market. Combined, Weixin and WeChat claim more than 1.4 billion monthly active users worldwide. UnionPay International (Mainland China) UnionPay International (UPI) is a subsidiary of China UnionPay, providing cross-border payment services and enabling card acceptance in 183 countries and issuance in 84 countries. It also provides Moneyexpress, a cross-border remittance service enabling people in 80 countries and regions to send money to cardholders in China, who can directly collect money in their local currency. Outside of Chinaʼs mainland, UPI has issued over 250 million cards and launched more than 200 UnionPay-powered wallets in 36 countries and regions. XTransfer (Mainland China) Founded in 2017, XTransfer is a leading business-to-business (B2B) cross-border trade payment platform. The company provides a a cross-border, group-level global multi-currency unified settlement platform, and anti-money laundering (AML) and risk control infrastructure tailored to SMEs. XTransfer serves more than 897,000 SME customers, offers payments across over 200 countries and regions, and has partnerships with 171 financial institutions worldwide. It is licensed and is registered in major global financial hubs including China Mainland, Hong Kong, the UK, the US, Singapore, the Netherlands, Australia, and Canada. In 2025, XTransfer processed more than US$60 billion in transaction payment volume. Airtel Money (India) Airtel Money is the mobile financial services arm of Bharti Airtel, a leading telecommunications company based in India that offers wireless connectivity, prepaid and postpaid mobile and broadband services to consumers and businesses. Airtel Money offers real-time payments, wallet services, money transfers, savings accounts, merchants payments, and more. The service claims a customer base of more than 54 million users across over 10 countries in Africa and South Asia. It processes an annualized transaction volume of over US$210 billion. PhonePe (India) Headquartered in India, PhonePe builds digital platforms for payments, digital distribution services and financial services. Its portfolio includes consumers payments, merchant payments, lending and insurance distribution services, and specialized fintech platforms, including Share.Market, a stock broking and mutual funds distribution platform, and Indus Appstore, an Android-based mobile app marketplace. Backed by majority owner Walmart, PhonePe ranks as one of the largest payment and wallet apps in India, surpassing 700 million registered users and 50 million registered merchants. In March 2026, it crossed 10 billion real-time transactions for the first time, maintaining its position as the UPI leader with a 46.4% share of total volume. Razorpay (India) Razorpay is an Indian fintech platform enabling businesses to accept, process, and disburse payments through online payment gateways, UPI, cards, wallets, bank transfers, and recurring payments. It also offers banking, payroll, lending, fraud prevention, and business finance solutions for startups, SMEs, and enterprises. Razorpay claims more than 5 million business customers, and processes over INR 50 trillion (US$590 billion) in annual payment volume. bKash (Bangladesh) bKash is a leading mobile financial services platform in Bangladesh, providing digital payments, money transfers, cash-in and cash-out, remittances, merchant payments, and other everyday financial services through mobile phones. It also operates a network of more than 350,000 agents and 900,000 merchants across the nation, integrated with banks, financial institutions, merchants, and service providers. A joint venture of BRAC Bank, US-based Money in Motion LLC, International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group, Gates Foundation, Ant International and SoftBank, bKash claims over 82 million users. GCash (Philippines) GCash is a leading finance app in the Philippines, allowing users to purchase prepaid airtime, pay bills via partner billers nationwide, send and receive money, make purchases from over 6 million partner merchants and social sellers. Beyond payments, it offers access to savings, credit, loans, insurance products, and investment opportunities. GCash is operated by Mynt, an affiliate of Globe, Ant Group, Ayala Corporation, and other global shareholders specializing in mobile financial services. It claims 94 million Filipinos have used its app, and says its ecosystem includes over 3 million borrowers on GLoan, GGives, and GCredit, as well as more than 9 million active GSave customers.   Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by Who is Danny and Creative_hat via Magnific The post 16 APAC Companies Named Among World’s Top Cross-Border Payment Firms of 2026 appeared first on Fintech Singapore.