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?

Quantum computing's impact on financial services is beginning to expand beyond its initial focus on security implications to early experimentation and pilots for potential use-cases, from portfolio optimization to risk management and derivative pricing. Early pilots have demonstrated real value, but the timeline for live deployments remains in the horizon, raising a difficult question: are institutions building use-cases before the technology is mature enough to justify it or is this early investment what makes tomorrow's readiness possible?

The work so far has also relied on open collaboration between banks, regulators, and technology providers, but as quantum applications start to carry real commercial value, that openness gets harder to sustain. This session looks at what these early efforts have actually taught the industry — what worked, what didn't, and what the next phase of experimentation should prioritize as the window for open collaboration closes.

The session will explore questions such as:

1. Is developing use-cases now premature given how immature the technology still is, or is that the only way real readiness gets built?
2. Should current funding prioritize talent pipelines over experimentation, or do the two need to grow together?
3. As quantum applications become commercially valuable, what keeps competitors willing to keep collaborating?
4. What would genuinely long-term, system-wide collaborative action look like beyond individual pilots?

As payment networks become increasingly interconnected, the challenge is no longer whether they can connect, but how they coordinate. At the Point Zero Forum 2026 roundtable, leaders from payment networks, central banks and regulators converged on a common principle: compete at the customer experience layer, collaborate on the standards and infrastructure beneath it.

But connectivity creates new questions. As instant payment systems, card networks, wallets and emerging digital money platforms become part of a growing "network of networks", who manages shared risks, aligns incentives and coordinates the rules that keep the ecosystem open, resilient and innovative?

This roundtable will bring together global payments leaders to explore the governance, economics and architecture of the next generation of integrated payment networks, and what it will take to build a truly connected global payments landscape.