Author: Izzat Najmi Abdullah

What does someone entering financial services need to know today? Finance still matters, of course, even as the work surrounding it has changed. Banks and fintech companies increasingly run more of their operations through software, with data and AI shaping how many of those systems work. A lending model, for example, is only useful if the people building or using it understand the credit decision behind it, and similar dependencies appear in other parts of financial services. Digital payments rely heavily on security expertise, while quantitative teams use modelling to test how financial systems could respond under different conditions. Specialists…

Four payments executives, from TNG Digital, NETS, Thunes and Nexus Global Payments, spent an hour on a Fintech News Network webinar picking apart what still doesn’t work in cross-border payments. Their verdict was consistent across the panel where the four of them concluded that more rails have arrived over the past decade than ever before, and making them work together, not adding new ones, is what will actually shape the future of cross-border payments. Cross-border payment flows are projected to reach US$290 trillion by 2030, up from roughly US$190 trillion today. None of that growth matters much to a migrant…

Stablecoins and tokenised real-world assets are pulling banks, neobanks and other regulated institutions deeper and more willingly into digital markets. According to Blair Canavan, Director of Alliances for the Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Portfolio at Thales, digital assets are moving out of niche pilots and into supported financial infrastructure. As he explains, stablecoins are being tested for various things from payments to treasury operations, while tokenisation is opening new ways to issue, manage and transfer traditional instruments. Blair attributes the shift to evolving business demand rather than novelty. Institutions are looking to improve settlement efficiency and build new value-based services…

AI-linked layoffs across fintech and financial services were relatively modest in 2025, with seven announcements affecting around 8,200 roles over the entire year. Quite a number, but not that eye-opening. Now, roughly seven months into 2026, the tally has made the figure seem a little dwarfed. Between January and July, our Fintech News Network AI Fintech Layoffs Tracker recorded 20 announcements affecting 70,415 roles, more than eight times the number reported throughout 2025. Measured month by month, the acceleration is even more pronounced. The tracker recorded an average of 683 affected roles per month in 2025, while the monthly average…

What if, by 2030, you barely notice that you are dealing with a bank at all? Say you are looking to buy a home. Instead of opening a banking app, comparing mortgage products and filling in forms just to find out what you can afford, the bank could already be helping in the background. It may know enough to estimate your borrowing capacity and offer financing when you actually need it, without making you figure out which product or channel to start with. Connie Leung of Microsoft described it during one of our webinars as a future where “the bank…

Tap a multi-currency card in Tokyo, and the payment looks no different from any other card transaction. Behind the tap, however, is a different story as the issuer has to identify the purchase currency, find the matching wallet, decide whether another balance should cover a shortfall and apply foreign exchange where required.  The transaction must then be authorised, settled and reconciled across the programme’s records and external partners. More customers are making the kind of payments that expose this complexity.  Cross-border transactions on Asia-Pacific-issued Visa cards grew at more than twice the rate of domestic transactions in 2025, while spending…

Digital asset security used to be treated as a wallet problem. Protect the private key and the asset stays safe; lose it, and the asset is gone. The logic still holds, but it no longer reflects what digital asset key management now demands of exchanges, custodians, banks and other platforms. Banks are exploring digital asset services while custodians build platforms for institutional investors. Regulated assets are also starting to move onto digital rails, supported by blockchain infrastructure providers operating behind the scenes. Daniel Toh, VP of Systems Engineering, APJ at Thales, said the shift has changed how organisations think about security.…

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…