The infrastructure underpinning payments, settlement and asset issuance is undergoing a significant upgrade. This Payward-led session examines how distributed ledger technology, asset tokenisation and 24/7 access to global markets are reshaping how financial institutions operate and access financial services.

Drawing on operational experience in regulated environments, the discussion will explore how industry participants and regulators can work together to manage systemic risk and ensure consumer protections in an increasingly global technology stack.

Participants will gain insights from market experts assessing how emerging infrastructure may change competition and regulation, and what these developments could mean for established institutions and new entrants.

The conversation around digital money has largely focused on issuance, whether stablecoins, tokenized deposits or central bank digital currencies. BLOOM (Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multicurrency) focuses on a different question: how can different forms of digital money coexist and work together seamlessly in real-world payments, treasury, liquidity management and cross-border settlement? Bringing together banks, payment service providers, FinTechs and policymakers, BLOOM supports the development, deployment and scaling of digital money solutions, alongside the interoperability, regulatory alignment and partnerships needed for adoption.

This roundtable convenes the BLOOM community to take stock of ongoing work on cross-bank interoperability, programmable compliance and liquidity optimisation, and share lessons from implementation. Participants will also explore emerging opportunities such as micropayments, agentic payments and automated treasury management, and identify the standards, partnerships and policy support needed to scale these capabilities across institutions and jurisdictions.

As AI agents move from making recommendations to executing transactions, financial institutions face a practical question: how can they support autonomous commerce safely and at scale?

The panel will examine what happens when an agent must identify a counterparty, obtain authorisation, initiate a cross-border payment, select an appropriate form of digital money and settle within defined risk parameters. The discussion will explore what safeguards financial institutions need before they can trust AI agents to make and settle payments on their behalf.