As money becomes programmable, across central bank digital currencies, tokenized deposits, and stablecoins, a real question is emerging about where compliance should live: embedded directly in the asset as a rule that travels with it, layered on top through richer messaging and real-time screening, or enforced separately by whichever party touches the transaction last.

Players are all building credible but different answers in parallel, and none has converged on how these should interoperate across jurisdictions with different compliance regimes. The stakes are rising on every front — real-time cross-border settlement, tokenized securities, and increasingly, autonomous agents initiating transactions on their own — all of which need a compliance check at the moment value moves, not after. What would each of these approaches to programmable compliance actually need to interoperate, and which rules win when they conflict across borders?

Discussion questions:

1\.         Should compliance logic live in the asset itself, in the messaging/settlement layer, or in a separate real-time screening service, and does the answer change depending on whether it's a CBDC, a tokenized deposit, or a stablecoin?

2\.         When a transaction crosses borders, whose compliance rule actually governs — sender's jurisdiction, receiver's, or the rail's — and what happens when they conflict?

3\.         Retrofitting compliance onto existing settlement infrastructure and building it in from scratch are both live strategies right now — what would each need to prove to become the default, and is convergence between them actually possible?

4\.         As more transactions — including those initiated by autonomous agents — require a compliance check the moment value moves, what are the minimum interoperability standards needed for rules to actually travel with money across rails?

Spotlight on Merchant Payments

Featuring 2C2P, Airwallex & Amazon

Explore the opportunities and challenges shaping merchant payments through a series of practical sessions with industry leaders. From expanding across Southeast Asia and navigating AI-driven commerce to building trust in international markets, discover insights and strategies to help businesses grow.

1:30pm–1:50pm | The SEA Payment Growth Playbook

Powered by 2C2P

Many merchants are already operating across Southeast Asia. The next challenge is not entering the market, but growing within it. This conversation explores how merchants decide which local payment methods, wallets, QR and account-to-account rails are actually worth supporting — and what payment localisation really does for customer acquisition and conversion.

\- Which payment methods actually move conversion?

\- Cards vs wallets vs QR vs A2A

\- How much localisation is enough?

\- National switches and domestic rails

\- Pay-in vs pay-out considerations

\- Cost/complexity of adding another payment method

\- What merchants should prioritise in their next growth market

1:50pm–2:10pm | When AI Agents Take Action: From Shopping to Business Finance

Powered by Airwallex

As AI agents begin to make purchases on customers' behalf, merchants face new questions: how can they verify that a purchase is authorised, manage fraud and disputes, and reduce false declines? Within the business, using agents to manage money raises similar questions about access, permissions and accountability.

This discussion examines both sides, exploring what merchants should check about customer consent, the payment credential, transaction controls and human oversight before enabling agents to transact with customers or act on business finances.

2:10pm–2:30pm | The Role of Trust in International Expansion: Why Public Policy Matters in Going Global

Powered by Amazon

Going global involves more than reaching new customers. Merchants must also navigate regulations, consumer protection and trust across different markets. This session explores why public policy matters in cross-border expansion and how businesses can build the confidence needed to grow internationally.

2:30pm–3:00pm | Networking

Tokenized money is going plural — stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits are both moving toward live enterprise use in 2026, but they hold their value at par through different mechanisms, and each faces a different test under stress. Stablecoins hold par through reserves and redemption, now being formalized by 2026 rulemaking, from the GENIUS Act to MiCA; under stress, the question is whether reserves and redemption queues hold up in a run. Tokenized deposits hold par through the existing two-tier banking system and a central bank's guarantee of convertibility, but scale through interbank plumbing that's still being decided — settlement-bank arrangements or shared platforms. Under stress, the question there is whether that plumbing, and the counterparty exposure it creates, holds up if a bank or a platform fails.

As regulators and participants warned at the Point Zero Forum, the open question is whether convertibility at par survives a crisis in practice, on any of these rails. This session asks what needs to be built at each stage — reserve or capital backing, custody or bank participation, secondary-market trading, and cross-ledger settlement — for that convertibility to hold under stress. It puts reserve-backed and deposit-backed models on equal footing: where each is already resilient, where each is still exposed, and whether a fragmented rails landscape is itself becoming the bigger risk to singleness than any one model's design.