SMEs in developing economies face a financing gap of about US$5.7 trillion, and it is growing faster than the economies themselves. Supply alone will not close it. Policy, data and market infrastructure must develop alongside it.

This closed-door roundtable brings ministers responsible for SMEs together with leaders from payments, fintech, banking and development finance. It looks at three questions:

• Which cross-border payment and trade-finance rails would help SMEs sell abroad?
• How can governments crowd in private lending at scale?
• What role should the public sector play in enabling digital lending, including alternative data and AI credit scoring?

As a Singapore stop on the Road to Geneva, the discussion will produce priorities for the 2nd Global SME Ministerial Meeting in May 2027 and for the SME Trade Finance Facility.

The white-collar skills that have historically lifted millions out of poverty across emerging economies are now facing disruption from AI. In the Philippines alone, the ILO estimates that more than a quarter of the workforce — some 12.7 million workers — holds jobs at risk of being displaced by AI automation. Most of these roles will be transformed rather than eliminated outright, but the shift is already reshaping what "job-ready" means for graduates and mid-career workers alike.

This roundtable brings together policymakers, regulators, educators, and industry leaders to confront the anxiety facing today's fresh graduates and mid-careerists, many of whom were trained for a job market that is changing faster than their curricula can keep pace with. Panelists will chart the policy interventions, employer strategies, and new models of education that will define career pathways for the next generation of workers in emerging economies.

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?