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Singapore's Minister of State Alvin Tan opened with an unlikely metaphor — a World Cup football's motion-sensor chip — to frame three technologies now converging on global finance: AI, tokenization, and quantum computing. His argument: these forces are advancing faster than human trust can keep up, and the future of finance depends on building that trust deliberately, not assuming the technology will build it for us.
AI's real risk isn't capability: it's mistaking a tool for an oracle
Tan argued finance is shifting from AI that helps people decide to AI that starts deciding for them, which raises hard questions no rulebook fully answers yet: how do these systems decide, are they fair, and who's accountable when they fail? His core point, drawn from a debate around Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus: when we try to hand judgment over to an "infallible" system, we don't become godlike — we lose the human accountability that trust actually depends on. Singapore's answer is the Monetary Authority of Singapore's (MAS) AI Risk Management Toolkit and Operationalization Handbook, built with industry and now being extended to tackle the specific risks of autonomous "agentic" AI.
Tokenization is moving fast — and the real risk now is fragmentation, not adoption.
In the past year alone, Project Agora delivered a working prototype, the ECB published its roadmap for a tokenized European financial market, and the U.S. passed the GENIUS Act. But Tan warned that if tokenized systems don't stay interoperable across asset classes, currencies, and networks, progress will fracture into isolated pockets instead of scaling. Singapore's own proof points — Project Guardian (testing tokenized assets in regulated markets, with MAS and FINMA) and Project Mariana (cross-border wholesale CBDC settlement, with the Swiss National Bank and BIS) — are the model he wants scaled into shared global standards.
Because quantum computing will eventually break today's encryption, Singapore is already funding the fix.
MAS committed up to S$100 million under its Financial Sector Technology and Innovation Scheme to co-fund quantum research centers, run industry-led trials, and help financial institutions move from post-quantum cryptography to quantum key distribution, alongside a nationwide quantum-safe network. Tan's closing point tied all three threads together: technology can calculate anything, but trust is a human choice, not a formula — and the goal of every one of these systems should be to make finance more human, not less.
Speaker:
Alvin Tan, Minister of State, Ministry of Trade and Industry and Ministry of National Development, Singapore and Board member of Monetary Authority of Singapore, Government of Singapore
