Dispatches from a Policy Dialogue: Insights from the Point Zero Forum 2026

Policy findings from Point Zero Forum 2026: five conclusions for policymakers, regulators and central banks from 48 stage sessions and 26 closed-door roundtables.

By Maha El Dimachki, CEO, GFTN Solutions

Foreword

To our policymaker, regulatory, and supervisory community,

It is obvious that we live in an era of technological change advancing at a rate that we are only beginning to understand and, in many ways, wondering if we will ever catch up to.

It is often quoted that Albert Einstein said: "it has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded humanity." I can't help but wonder what he would make of the extraordinary times we live in and the advances we are bearing witness to. Here's the interesting part: after a little investigation (I never take what the web tells me at face value), I found that while this quote is attributed to him by reputable organisations such as Forbes and UCLA, there is no evidence that he ever said it; it seems to have gone unchecked because it resonates. I agree with that part at least. I also see a small but poignant lesson here. Technology, however sensational and impressive, is not reliable in its raw form.

It is one of the reasons that sustained policy-technology dialogue is crucial now more than ever. How the new era of financial services, inflected by the opportunities and risks presented by emerging technology, will be shaped is in our hands.

We have had a number of these dialogues around the world this year, the latest being the Point Zero Forum in Zurich this June. Allow me to extend a personal thank you for your time, candour, and expertise you brought. Your contributions made a real difference to the depth of conversations at this year's conference.

Forums like this only earn their place on a crowded calendar when participants are willing to move past prepared remarks and wrestle with the hard questions together through sustained dialogue and debate. This year, you and your peers did exactly that. When Agustín Carstens opened the forum by warning that a room full of institutions running the same AI models on the same data could produce the same decision at the same moment — with no human judgement in between — you didn't nod politely and move on.

Our community kept pushing the conversation forward in the roundtables and working groups, where participants transformed insights into actions and practical paths forward. Long after the stage lights came down, you explored how this observation relates to agentic commerce, the deployment of LLMs within financial services, and the adoption of AI across finance. Likewise, Carolyn Rogers' observation that only a crisis has ever reliably forced fragmented regulators to converge stayed with a lot of people in the room, us included, precisely because it was a challenge as much as an observation.

A few numbers from this year, because they matter too: 2,000+ attendees from 66+ countries, with 62% travelling in from outside Switzerland; 300+ speakers on stage; and 80+ regulators and central banks represented, including yours. But what we'll remember from this edition isn't the numbers — it's the five themes that kept resurfacing across 48 stage sessions, 26 closed-door roundtables, and working groups almost regardless of the nominal topic:

• Accountability gaps are surfacing at the interfaces between institutions and technology as AI agents begin acting on their own.
• Regulatory principles are converging globally while implementation still diverges sharply on the ground.
• Tokenisation has proven itself technically viable but is running into real scaling constraints on standards and settlement.
• Money is turning plural, even as public money remains the anchor everyone still reaches for under stress.
• Sovereignty is increasingly measured in resilience and strategic autonomy rather than declarations of intent.

The thread of these themes will carry through to our next set of gatherings, notably at the Insights Annual Meetings held in Singapore on 16 & 17 November. The fuller set of findings and policy insights can be found below — I think you'll recognise a lot of your own thinking in it.

Entrepreneur and innovator Matt Mullenweg once said, "Technology is best when it brings people together." That is a quote I have verified and can wholeheartedly agree with. It's exactly what I hope November in Singapore brings, in person.

I hope to see you there.

Introduction

Once software can initiate a payment, execute a trade or apply a compliance rule to a transaction, policy must address more than technical performance. Authorities need to establish who authorised the action, which legal claim remains enforceable when a transaction fails, and whether supervisors can reconstruct what occurred.

These questions, and more, framed much of Point Zero Forum 2026, which took place against the backdrop of MiCA moving into enforcement, the AI Act approaching further implementation milestones and Europe's reckoning with how its financial system could support greater competitiveness, resilience and strategic autonomy.

Policymakers, central banks, financial institutions and technology providers examined how artificial intelligence, tokenisation and digital money are entering operational use. The discussions ranged from agent-led payments and programmable compliance to wholesale central bank money, stablecoin regulation, quantum readiness and payment-system resilience.

The stage sessions established the policy and market context. The roundtables tested operational readiness, including where current frameworks remain unclear, where technical dependencies are accumulating, and where institutions are encountering practical barriers to implementation.

Five insights emerged consistently across different subjects, speakers, and formats.

Roundtable discussions were held under the Chatham House Rule. Their substance is reflected without identifying any participant or organisation. Speakers are named only where they participated in on-stage sessions, to which the Chatham House Rule does not apply.

The five insights

1. Accountability is weakest at the interfaces between institutions and technologies

The most consistent concern of the forum was the growing difficulty of locating responsibility in financial systems which increasingly involve more participants, more technical layers, and more automated decisions. The gaps sit at the joints, where authority, data, and value pass from one party to another.

The policy task

The task is broader than assigning liability after an incident. Authorities will need to define how responsibility travels across the full chain, including minimum requirements for mandate verification, third-party assurance, auditability and customer redress. That points towards supervising the interfaces through which authority, data and value move, alongside the entities on either side of them. No jurisdiction represented in Zurich claimed to have resolved what happens when the actor is an agent, and whether a human should remain the final point of authorisation is still openly contested.

What was said

Agustín Carstens, the former General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements, put the problem at the centre of his welcome address. When dozens of institutions run AI built by the same vendors on the same data, he warned of the same signal producing the same response across the system at the same moment — systemic groupthink — with no human judgment in between. The harder issue, he argued, is what he called the accountability gap: when an AI-driven decision causes real harm, it remains unresolved whether the institution that deployed the model, the vendor that built it or the engineers who assembled the training data should answer for it.

Singapore's Minister of State Alvin Tan reached the same point from first principles: trust cannot be coded into a machine, so it must be built through the human structures around the machine, beginning with who owns the decision and who is held accountable.

The Financial Conduct Authority's Ian Phoenix provided the arithmetic that makes this an urgent question. Invoking Gartner research on agentic AI orchestration, he illustrated the risk this way: a single agent operating at 80 per cent accuracy is already questionable for payments — Phoenix noted he wouldn't accept that from his own bank account — but chain three such agents together, each independently operating at 80 per cent, and by the end of the chain, accuracy has dropped to 52 per cent.

Likewise, Member of European Parliament Brando Benifei, one of the lead architects of the EU AI Act, noted that while the financial sector is relatively well positioned to address the risks of AI systems, uneven readiness across institutions means supervisory authorities still have work to do collaborating with industry to translate AI Act requirements into everyday governance. He pointed to the compliance timeline as a sign of that same gap: the EU's newly approved AI Omnibus pushes back high-risk obligations to December 2027 and August 2028, a delay he argued should be treated as an implementation window, not a reprieve.

The view from the roundtables

The off-the-record roundtables took the argument further, highlighting the risks of autonomous agents executing transactions within live environments.

Across several roundtables, participants converged on treating AI agents as a new category of identity, with authority bounded by spending limits and approved counterparties, and authorisation verified before an agent acts rather than disputed afterwards. The phrase "know your agent" recurred as a deliberate parallel to KYC, applied at two levels: the agent itself, and the person or institution that owns and authorises it.

Participants argued for architectures that keep an agent's intent separate from execution and settlement functions, so that probabilistic systems cannot drive deterministic financial outcomes without safeguards in between. One participant recounted a frontier AI executive being asked what a customer should do when an agent buys the wrong item, and answering: call your bank, which the participant rejected as an unsustainable approach.

Yet, discussants also questioned the reflex to turn to human oversight as a sufficient safeguard, with one participant describing a human reviewing hundreds of thousands of agent transactions a day as oversight theatre.

The same difficulty appeared well beyond AI. In tokenisation and stablecoin discussions, participants highlighted that responsibility for a single transaction may now be divided among an issuer, a reserve custodian, a distributor, a wallet provider, a bridge and a settlement system, even as the customer experiences the chain as one financial service.

A financial crime roundtable examined the potential consequences: functions traditionally performed by regulated intermediaries are dispersing across on-chain infrastructure, and the ability to freeze, reverse or investigate a transaction may sit with different participants, or in some cases may not exist at all, making it harder to assign liability when something goes wrong.

A separate roundtable on programmable compliance offered one possible way out: encoding regulatory rules directly into financial assets and processes, so that a transaction either complies and exists or it doesn't, rather than being checked after the fact. However, encoding an obligation does not discharge it, and a firm cannot blame the smart contract when something goes wrong; a human or entity remains answerable, even where the failure originates in an autonomous agent acting on their behalf.

Participants also cautioned that encoding compliance changes the shape of the risk rather than eliminating it: a single coding error can now propagate at network speed across an entire system, turning what would once have been an isolated reconciliation error into a systemic one. One participant noted that only the easy part of a rule encodes cleanly, with ambiguous edge cases requiring human interpretation.

2. Common regulatory principles are not yet producing common implementation, and supervisors are racing to keep pace

Transparency, accountability, resilience and consumer protection command broad agreement across jurisdictions. The approach to implementation is where jurisdictions diverge, even as individual jurisdictions are racing to keep pace with technological developments.

The policy task

The priority emerging from Zurich was a shared implementation floor rather than a shared rulebook: common definitions, comparable assurance standards, reliable information-sharing mechanisms and clear channels for supervisory cooperation across borders. The GENIUS Act's reciprocity provision is the nearest live test of whether that floor can be built by agreement rather than forced by a crisis, and several speakers treated it as the most consequential coordination instrument currently on the table.

What was said

The regulatory sessions highlighted that digital assets frameworks such as MiCA, the GENIUS Act and the emerging Asian regimes agree on principles and outcomes while diverging on definitions, reserve rules and licensing architecture, and firms operating globally must design for that divergence.

What speakers largely rejected was the reflexive answer of a single global rulebook. In one roundtable the alternative was put crisply: let distinct systems keep their own rules and teach them to talk to each other, focusing on interlinking rather than merging. The GENIUS Act's reciprocity provision, which Circle's Dante Disparte described as an encouragement to regulators to seek out comparable frameworks, was repeatedly cited as that idea written into law.

On stage, Bank of Canada Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers delivered a valuable warning that framed the discussion on divergence. Drawing on her Basel Committee experience, she observed that the only thing history has shown eliminates fragmentation is a crisis, because crises create the political will that bucks the trend. The implication ran through several sessions: coordination built now, through reciprocity and mutual recognition, is considerably cheaper than coordination forced later through a crisis.

"The only thing that history has shown avoids or eliminates fragmentation is a crisis. Crises create the political will that bucks the trend of fragmentation."

Carolyn Rogers · Senior Deputy Governor, Bank of Canada

A parallel conversation running throughout the conference was the push jurisdictions face to build supervisory capacity — including via AI tools of their own — to keep pace with the technology reshaping the markets they oversee.

FINMA Chair Marlene Amstad, presenting IOSCO's global SupTech survey, drew attention to Interpol findings that AI-enhanced fraud is already four and a half times more profitable than traditional methods — what the organisation calls the industrialisation of fraud — and described a trend of supervisors increasingly adopting AI themselves to more efficiently and effectively process data and derive insights, with people retaining judgment and responsibility over decisions made.

The view from the roundtables

This point recurred throughout the roundtable discussions as well. Roundtables on digital money noted that despite broad convergence on objectives — full backing, redemption at par, issuer accountability and segregation of reserves across jurisdictions — significant divergence in legal classification, terminology, reserve composition and redemption standards creates structural frictions that impede efficient cross-border operations.

"Regulatory clarity is arriving as regulatory fragmentation. Clarity inside each border, but friction at every crossing. If that hardens, we would have just rebuilt the correspondent banking problem that we set out to solve, just on faster rails. Faster friction is still friction."

PZF roundtable · Digital money with traditional finance

3. Tokenization has moved into production, but scale remains an infrastructure challenge

The forum spent little time debating whether tokenised finance works. The live discussions concerned settlement, legal certainty, interoperability and the cash leg, which is where the ability to scale continues to hit roadblocks.

The policy task

The next phase requires clarity on shared settlement assets, legal finality, identity standards and the use of public infrastructure, so that tokenised markets can interoperate safely across existing and emerging rails without creating parallel pools of inaccessible liquidity. Several speakers noted that perfect payment rails settle nothing without tokenised assets that carry real liquidity, which makes issuance and secondary market depth as much a policy concern as the infrastructure itself.

What was said

The evidence for tokenised finance at the Point Zero Forum was strong. Ant International's Kelvin Li described moving around half of the group's treasury activities onto blockchain rails, with more than six hundred thousand transactions across sixteen currencies in tokenised bank deposits, run as what he called real-time treasury. Euroclear and Societe Generale-FORGE announced a collaboration to explore the use of a MiCA-compliant stablecoin to settle tokenised USD-denominated Negotiable European Commercial Paper (NEU CP).

Yet, Fireblocks' Tim Way quantified the distance still to travel: 88 per cent of financial institutions surveyed by Fireblocks have committed budgets to digital asset infrastructure, but only 16 per cent have a live production offering. Participants in other sessions cited statistics that stablecoins only account for around $400 billion worth of real-economy payments, a rounding error in global commerce.

"Showing that tokenised assets can work is one thing. But achieving cross-border tokenised flows at scale is actually a totally different ballgame. When you bring scale into the equation, we get into the areas of trust, resiliency, safety and soundness."

Leong Sing Chiong · Deputy Managing Director, Monetary Authority of Singapore

A panel between central bank leaders zeroed in on this scaling challenge. The Bank of England's Sarah Breeden, Bank of Canada's Carolyn Rogers, Bundesbank board member Burkhard Balz and MAS Deputy Managing Director Leong Sing Chiong noted that even though the technology is proven, the binding constraints remain regulatory fragmentation, missing standards and cross-border infrastructure. Breeden's plea for careful interoperability work — "let's not do a botched job" — was quoted back approvingly by fellow panellists.

Project Agorá, the BIS and IIF initiative spanning seven central banks and more than forty financial institutions, was discussed across both stage and roundtables as one of the most advanced attempts to rebuild cross-border settlement infrastructure with tokenised central bank money at its core.

The view from the roundtables

The roundtables extended the same diagnosis across to the plumbing. A session on practical settlement options identified the following preconditions for scalable tokenised markets: standards and regulatory clarity, a credible settlement asset, appropriate infrastructure and liquidity, with some participants arguing that the settlement asset ideally sits on the same chain as the asset it settles.

Likewise, the GL1 dialogue previewed the initiative's market infrastructure toolkit — a self-attestation controls framework for tokenised platforms mapped to PFMI, the Digital Asset Securities Control Principles, and the GBBC Risk Mitigation Framework — and framed the risk it exists to prevent: domestic tokenised markets emerging in ways that are incompatible with each other, lacking interoperability, and missing the cross-border and cross-asset benefits a more connected system could bring.

The unresolved layer is the cash leg. Wholesale central bank money on-chain does not yet exist at scale, which leaves tokenised deposits and regulated stablecoins shouldering settlement in the interim.

"We really need a credible settlement asset. Ideally we want a settlement asset that is on chain, and that is on the same chain as whatever it is that you are tokenising."

PZF roundtable · Tokenised settlement

4. A plural monetary system is emerging, but public money will continue to anchor trust

Stablecoins, tokenised deposits, and central bank money will coexist. The design question that ran through the forum is how they will remain convertible at par when it matters.

The policy task

The test that emerged from Zurich is whether each new form of money remains connected to a trusted settlement anchor, even as the demand for more plural forms of money grows. That requires clear redemption rights, supervised reserves, defined responsibility for the claim when instruments are wrapped or bridged across networks, and workable resolution arrangements across borders. Kganyago's question for any central bank digital currency — whether it solves a real problem or is a solution looking for one — was echoed by the Swiss and Danish central banks, both of which declined a retail CBDC while investing in wholesale settlement, which is where the urgency sits from their vantage points.

What was said

In her keynote, BIS Deputy General Manager Andréa Maechler highlighted that trust in money rests on the guarantee that deposits convert at par against central bank money, but today's stablecoins sit on rails disconnected from central bank settlement, which means they lack singleness in times of stress. Her supporting observation was structural: non-bank institutions now hold roughly half of global financial assets, but they still depend on banks to settle, so the two-tier architecture remains load-bearing even as intermediation moves outside it.

South African Reserve Bank Governor Lesetja Kganyago made the same point in plainer language: whether money is created in the private or the public sector, a dollar is a dollar and a pound is a pound, and that is what central bankers call the singleness of money. If a stablecoin's reserves fail, it will lose this singleness, underscoring the importance of ensuring they remain well-backed and connected to central bank money.

"Whether that money is generated in the private sector or created in the public sector, a dollar is a dollar, a pound is a pound. That is what central bankers call the singleness of money."

Lesetja Kganyago · Governor, South African Reserve Bank

Carolyn Rogers, Senior Deputy Governor, Bank of Canada, at Point Zero Forum 2026

Sessions across the forum showed how instruments are being designed around this need for an anchor. The roundtable on commercial bank money on-chain examined deposit tokens and tokenised reserves as instruments built to keep the two-tier monetary system intact while stablecoins scale outside it, and asked why deposit tokens remain largely in pilots while stablecoins have reached distribution.

In the roundtable on stablecoins and the monetary order, one contribution set the bar in the terms quoted below: moneyness is a higher standard than stability, and it depends on central bank settlement as the anchor, whether reached directly or through regulated intermediaries.

"Moneyness is a higher standard than stability. To become a broad means of payment, the stablecoin must support singleness of money, where one unit remains worth one unit across issuers and venues and market conditions. And it needs a credible anchor."

PZF roundtable · Stablecoins and the monetary order

The jurisdictional responses came from the stage. The National Bank of Georgia's Governor Natia Turnava explained that the central bank's announcement of a project to place the Georgian lari on blockchain rails with a private issuer is part of a broader strategy to position Georgia as a digital finance hub and leverage the benefits of stablecoins and tokenization.

On the digital euro, ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone set out the waterfall design that tops up wallets from bank accounts, described holding-limit simulations run at the European Parliament's request that showed only a tiny impact on banks, and confirmed a first pilot transaction planned on September 2027 with wider rollout from mid-2028.

However, DWS's Alexander Bechtel observed in a panel discussion that Euro-denominated stablecoins stand at roughly 500 million Euro against a 16 trillion Euro money supply, a market share of less than 0.01 per cent, with Europe's debate concentrating on financial stability risk while the American debate concentrates on extending the dollar's reach.

The roundtables also carried the demand side that explains why the plural system will not wait for the architecture to be settled.

In the discussion on stablecoins as cross-border payment infrastructure, participants reported corridors where settlement times have fallen from three to five days to minutes and foreign exchange costs fell by roughly thirty per cent, alongside corridors where pre-funding and long intermediary chains persist and, in some cases, no market infrastructure exists at all. The unresolved questions the discussions kept returning to were redemption, distribution, and who carries the claim when an instrument is wrapped or bridged across jurisdictions.

5. Sovereignty is being pursued through resilience, optionality and control over critical dependencies and funding structures

Payment continuity, cloud concentration, the quantum migration timeline, and Europe's dependence on bank financing have moved inside the perimeter of financial policy. The European sessions were the most candid on what that costs.

The policy task

Sovereignty is becoming an operational discipline, and the relevant capabilities are concrete: supplier portability, alternative payment routes, offline functionality, control over critical data, a more diversified funding structure that reduces reliance on bank debt for long-horizon financing, and a credible plan for post-quantum cryptographic migration with clear ownership. Because several of these dependencies extend into telecommunications, energy, competition and national security, the agenda is one of coordinated resilience, with domestic agencies sharing visibility over critical dependencies and cross-border authorities agreeing how financial continuity is maintained during disruption. What remains untested is who pays for the redundancy, and whether sovereignty decisions like DNB's cloud choice stay isolated examples or become supervisory expectations.

Building resilience

Eesti Pank Deputy Governor Andrus Alber set out the dependency in concrete terms: thirteen countries in Europe rely entirely on international card schemes for everyday card payments, with no national alternative, and Estonia is one of them, with roughly 90 per cent of card payments running over a single scheme.

De Nederlandsche Bank's Steven Maijoor described choosing European cloud for a supervisory database despite higher cost and weaker functionality, because resilience and autonomy justified the price.

In contrast, Switzerland's State Secretary Daniela Stoffel highlighted the importance of not confusing sovereignty with protectionism, given that the Swiss economy is built on openness.

In his keynote speech, Danmarks Nationalbank Governor Ulrik Nødgaard extended resilience to the household level, describing the country's strategy to build an offline card solution as a payments contingency plan for a society that has gone almost fully cashless.

Gearing up for the quantum moment

Quantum readiness ran through the same sessions as a dependency with a date attached. IBM Research's Alessandro Curioni told a sovereignty discussion that Google has pointed to 2029 as a hard internal deadline to transition to post-quantum cryptography and that a United States executive order accelerating the timeline for post-quantum migration had been announced the day before he spoke, making post-quantum cryptography, in his words, the single most urgent thing to do today.

A live poll during the quantum panel found 86 per cent of the audience had nobody in their organisation who owns quantum readiness. HSBC's Philip Intallura made the constructive case that value from quantum-inspired methods is available now, and that institutions which wait for full quantum advantage will not catch up.

The quantum roundtable turned the deadline into an operating plan and further emphasised how little of the problem is owned. Regulators across the Global Financial Innovation Network discussed Project Otto, described in the room as the first international initiative of its kind focused on what quantum maturity will look like for financial supervisors.

The migration itself was set out in sober terms: an inventory of assets, data and the applications running critical functions, followed by a post-quantum migration plan, with participants noting that in digital assets the exposure extends to asset ownership, transaction data and wallet control, all secured by cryptography.

The hardest question raised was sequencing across jurisdictions. With differing regulatory deadlines across borders, a group operating in many markets must decide whether to migrate jurisdiction by jurisdiction or take a group-wide strategic path. Harvest-now-decrypt-later recurred as the reason the clock has already started.

Reducing the AI concentration risk

The central banking and AI roundtable applied the same dependency lens to models. Participants weighed the trade-off between shared infrastructure and concentrated dependency: foundational models supplied by a small number of vendors create correlated exposure across institutions, while open-source alternatives were argued to reduce vendor lock-in and model concentration.

Others pushed back on the fear itself, noting that individual models inside individual firms have never simply added up to systemic risk, and that supervision has managed correlated behaviour before. Where the room converged was on the level of analysis: protecting the system now means protecting an ecosystem rather than supervising institutions one at a time, starting with a shared terminology for what counts as an AI system at all.

Managing financing structure dependency

The opening fireside chat between Swiss Federal Councillor Karin Keller-Sutter and EU Commissioner for Financial Stability, Financial Services and the Capital Markets Union Maria Luis Albuquerque raised a different kind of dependency: financing structure.

Albuquerque argued that Europe needs to "rely more on ourselves," pointing to corporates' 75 per cent reliance on bank debt as a structural weakness that starves innovation of the patient, long-horizon equity capital that deeper capital markets — the rationale behind the EU's flagship Savings and Investments Union — could supply instead. The stakes went beyond growth, with Albuquerque tying the same financing gap to Europe's ability to fund its own defense, security, and innovation priorities, and she argued that a functional, effective, and efficient financial system is what allows the EU to channel capital toward those needs rather than depend on external sources.

Keller-Sutter framed the same integration as mutually reinforcing rather than one-directional, highlighting that full market access for Switzerland would make Swiss and European finance more competitive together.

In a separate panel, Lithuania's Vice-Minister of Finance Januš Kizenevič echoed the same diagnosis from the other side of the capital markets debate, calling the Savings and Investment Union "the proper response to big challenges that we have been facing," framing Europe's reliance on external markets for scaling companies not just as an economic gap, but as a resilience and security issue in its own right.

Key announcements and developments

1. Digital euro: pilot timeline set out 

In a fireside chat, Piero Cipollone, Member of the Governing Board, European Central Bank, announced that the European Parliament had adopted its position on the digital euro regulation the previous day — the final of the three EU legislative bodies to finalise a proposal, with all three positions closely aligned ahead of trilogue negotiations. The digital euro's pilot timeline was also laid out: a limited pilot launches September 2027, expanding to broader participation by mid-2028, with full public launch targeted for 2029, requiring roughly 2,200 banks and millions of merchants to be onboarded.

2. Launch of the FinTech Regulatory Futures Index

Singleness under stress

Can stablecoins be brought into an architecture that guarantees convertibility at par before a stress event breaks trust in them? Redemption rights, reserve supervision and responsibility for wrapped or bridged instruments across borders are where the answer will be decided.

Cross-border recognition

Which common definitions and assurance standards are essential for regulatory regimes to recognise one another? Reciprocity requires comparable outcomes, credible supervision, and mechanisms for resolving disputes between authorities. Whether GENIUS Act reciprocity produces actual framework agreements is the nearest test, alongside whether Europe's debate shifts from containing stablecoin risk to competing for the euro's international role.

Settlement and finality

Which forms of money will carry settlement in tokenised markets, and under what conditions? Authorities will need to clarify how finality, insolvency and ownership operate across conventional systems and distributed ledgers, and how far tokenised deposits and regulated stablecoins can carry the cash leg before wholesale central bank money arrives on-chain at scale.

Supervisory readiness

What minimum technical capability should every financial supervisor hold as AI and tokenised activity, as well as quantum capabilities, expand? The Zurich discussions pointed towards AI inventories, on-chain analytics, code-assurance skills and cross-border incident sharing, together with post-quantum migration acquiring named owners and timelines before the window on today's cryptography closes.