Author: Izzat Najmi Abdullah

PayNow already leads Singapore’s card-based peers on digital payment adoption, yet the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Association of Banks in Singapore are still studying how to redesign it. Digital wallets and account-to-account payments now hold 48% of Singapore’s retail consumer-to-business wallet share, compared with a 37% average across other card-led markets such as Australia and the United Kingdom, according to the PayNow Generation 2 Phase 1 report. Strong adoption usually gives a payment scheme room to slow down, but PayNow is taking the opposite route. MAS and ABS launched the two-phase PayNow Generation 2 study to work out…

Searches for the highest-paid bank CEOs in Singapore usually start with a simple question. How much does it take to run one of the country’s biggest banks? A bank CEO’s annual remuneration usually goes beyond fixed salary, with cash bonuses, deferred shares, share-linked awards and benefits often making up a much larger part of the final figure. The headline number becomes more useful when readers can also see how the package is structured. Recent changes in disclosure have made the comparison more transparent. SGX-listed issuers with financial years ending on or after 31 December 2024 must disclose the names, exact…

Meta is ready to invest US$900 million in CRED as Kunal Shah prepares to become WhatsApp’s global head, bringing one of India’s most recognisable consumer fintech founders into one of Meta’s most important products. Reuters reported that the deal gives Meta a 20% stake in the Bengaluru-based startup and values CRED at US$4.5 billion. Shah, who founded CRED in 2018, will succeed Will Cathcart, who is moving into another role inside Meta after seven years running the messaging service. CRED, however, has said Meta will not get access to its customer data through the investment, a point likely to receive…

Checking someone’s ID at the door of a nightclub tells you who they are, but it does not tell you how they will behave once they are inside. Lionel Grosclaude, CEO of Fime, used that analogy to explain a challenge emerging in agentic commerce, where AI agents are beginning to search, shop and make payments on behalf of consumers. The comparison comes as agentic commerce moves rapidly from concept to live infrastructure. OpenAI has introduced Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT, Google launched its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), while just recently, Visa and Mastercard joined in, with their Intelligent Commerce and Agent…

Even the people who study fake faces for a living are no longer comfortable trusting what they see on screen. Dominic Forrest, Chief Technology Officer at iProov, said that he has spent more than a decade studying manipulated faces and the ways attackers try to fool identity systems. But right now, the problem he’s facing is that the old visual clues are disappearing. “I have spent the last 13 years looking at fake faces, and I can no longer tell the difference,” Dominic told the webinar hosted by Fintech News Network. Coming from someone with that much experience in the…

Agentic payments are having a moment, and honestly, where do we even start? It has been hard to avoid the topic lately, partly because some of the biggest names in the industry are starting to bring agents closer to checkout. OpenAI has introduced Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT, Google with its Agent Payments Protocol, while Visa and Mastercard have also entered the space with Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay. Not in a boring way, to be fair. There is something genuinely interesting about the idea of a personal robot shopper that can understand what you want and eventually press…

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…

“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,…

“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…

Recent talks around the block have made it clear that banks do want AI, but the latest news has now asked them, should we? In May 2026, HSBC CEO Georges Elhedery said generative AI will “destroy certain jobs” and create new ones, while urging employees not to fight the change. Standard Chartered has gone further, saying it plans to cut 15% of its corporate function roles by 2030 as it uses AI and automation to slim operations, improve productivity and lift returns. But those examples of how AI is affecting companies do not necessarily mean banks in Southeast Asia will…

Banking once sat in that comfortable corner of the career world where stability felt like part of the package. Ask around, and someone will probably remember being told that a bank job was a sensible choice, the kind of career that came with a proper title and a proper future. It had the salary, the structure, the prestige and the sort of career ladder that made parents feel reassured. Even as finance moved online, banks still looked solid from the outside. They could just change their apps and close some branches without losing the old impression of safety. Then came…

Agentic commerce has started to move into live use, and the payment industry is beginning to confront a problem it has not had to solve at this scale before. When an AI agent acts for a customer, the transaction is no longer only about verifying the person behind the account. The system also has to understand the authority given to the agent carrying out the task. Zac Cohen, Chief Product Officer at Trulioo, believes that gap is where the industry needs to focus. “I think the industry is ready, but the trust framework isn’t,” Zac said in an interview with…

Risk and compliance departments across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) have spent years tackling financial crime as isolated hurdles, a strategy completely upended by the escalating and growing fraud trends in 2026. Most, if not all, often treat each threat as a separate challenge that was divided across departments. Something like when document forgery is sat with onboarding teams, while suspicious cross-border transfers fall under anti-money laundering units. But such a siloed defence strategy does make sense, especially when attackers were largely opportunistic, and the threats themselves were as disconnected as the institutions. In the year 2026, however, trends show that criminal…

It is a very unfortunate week to talk about speed, but Coinbase had quite the week. First, the crypto exchange told employees it was cutting about 14% of its workforce as part of a plan to become “faster and more AI-native”. CEO Brian Armstrong said AI had changed how work gets done, with engineers now shipping in days what used to take teams weeks, while non-technical teams were also beginning to ship production code. Then, just days later, Coinbase went offline for around seven hours. You do not need to be Einstein to see the comedy in that. To be…

Database infrastructure has rarely been the most visible part of Asia’s fintech boom, but it is increasingly becoming one of the most consequential. For much of the past decade, the industry’s attention has sat mostly on the customer-facing layer, as consumers grew more comfortable managing money through digital channels and financial institutions raced to make everyday transactions feel faster and less visible. That front-end progress is now placing heavier demands on the systems underneath it. As digital finance becomes more deeply woven into daily life, the infrastructure behind transactions, account balances, reconciliations, fraud checks and customer activity has to do…

What is stopping businesses from fully tapping a US$336 billion cross-border payments opportunity? Ask the merchants trying to sell beyond their home markets, and the answer often comes back to infrastructure. They would say that payments may look simple at the point of sale, but the work behind it is not. They grow heavier with every new corridor. Each market adds another layer of work behind the payment itself, and those hidden demands can narrow margins long before a business reaches meaningful scale. Kozen Tan, CEO, Singapore of LianLian Global, sees the consequences of this fragmentation firsthand, particularly as businesses…

Digital banking in Southeast Asia was once built on speed. For quite some time, they held on to the formula of launch first, refine later, and it did work, especially during their early stages when their volumes were much lower, and regulators were still patching and adapting to digital models. But the stale recipe seems to show cracks as these banking institutions grow, particularly when artificial intelligence moves from experimentation into their core operations. That pressure is especially visible in larger ASEAN markets such as Indonesia and the Philippines, where things such as digital wallets and QR payments are becoming…

MariBank Singapore Private Limited and its subsidiary reported total assets of S$4.23 billion in FY2025, as the Group pushed deeper into lending and recorded sharp growth in deposits, loans and income. The consolidated results include MariBank Philippines, Inc. (A Rural Bank), which was listed as the Group’s subsidiary in the audited accounts. The balance sheet grew at speed, supported by higher customer deposit balances and a much larger loan book, while income rose as more assets were deployed into interest-earning activities. The pace of expansion also brought a heavier risk bill, with credit loss allowances rising sharply as lending accelerated.…

Digital payments have become more of a routine for most Malaysians.  You can use it to clear tolls, parking, meals and even use it to pay your bills. The transaction completes almost instantaneously.  It is so seamless that almost all of the users do not even think about the technology enabling those moments. TNG eWallet started as a digital payment solution for everyday transactions, particularly offline QR payments across transport, retail and small merchants.  Today, it has evolved into a broader financial and lifestyle platform that integrates payments, financial services and everyday services within a single app, operating at a…

Stablecoins have spent the past few years building momentum on the edges of finance, powering crypto trading, remittances, and a growing range of Web3 use cases. The industry is now entering a new phase that looks less like a parallel system and more like an extension of existing infrastructure. A Thredd report, in collaboration with Reap and Fireblocks, points to this shift already taking shape. Payment providers are integrating stablecoins into card infrastructure, allowing users to spend them like fiat within familiar payment experiences. Rather than replacing existing systems, the market is steadily merging new settlement rails with established payment…