Globally, regulators are each moving ahead with their own AI governance tracks, ranging from voluntary frameworks to draft legislation and sector-specific rules. This growing regulatory fragmentation, if not managed well, could raise the compliance burden for regional fintechs and banks, and ultimately undermine broader goals of achieving integrated digital markets, with multinational financial institutions having to account for different risk-classification, testing, and disclosure regimes in their AI use-cases.

Using Southeast Asia as a case, this roundtable takes stock of how ASEAN member states regulate and supervise AI in financial services, and where closer alignment is within reach. Participants, including ASEAN central banks, banking associations, and regional financial institutions, will discuss the most pressing near-term opportunities to leverage and challenges to address.

Roundtable outputs will feed into efforts to build a long-term implementation roadmap to facilitate greater alignment across AI governance in ASEAN, with lessons relevant to any region working to bring AI rules closer together.

Financial institutions are moving well beyond experimentation with AI, deploying it across credit decisioning, fraud detection, and everyday employee workflows at genuine scale. But how they get there differs sharply: some are building their own foundation models on proprietary data to avoid depending on external providers with their most sensitive information; others adopt commercial AI tools but wrap them in anonymization and strict governance before sensitive data reaches them; and some capital allocators are treating AI infrastructure itself — compute, data centres, foundation models — as a strategic asset worth direct ownership.

Regulation is catching up fast and unevenly, with major regimes now treating data location and third-party AI access as a risk to be supervised, not just a technology choice. Given the different AI strategies already in motion, what would it actually take to make them interoperable, auditable, and defensible across jurisdictions?

Agentic commerce moved from feature to production in barely eighteen months - from AI-assisted purchasing in early 2025 to the first production-grade agentic transaction run on full banking rails in June 2026. But the infrastructure underneath is still fragmented: at least half a dozen competing protocols govern identity, authorization, and payment - and the platforms actually processing agent transactions haven't converged on any of them.

From the standards that can bind an agent to accountable identity, the platforms that process its transactions, and the frameworks that would assign liability when one goes wrong, this roundtable convenes financial institutions, payment processors, standard-setting bodies, and compliance and enforcement bodies to discuss what each party would need to adopt, require, or share to close the trust gap, and on what timeline.

The discussion will use concrete examples to test and refine trust principles for agentic commerce, including what evidence would demonstrate them in practice, what should be tested or benchmarked before an agent is trusted to transact, and what different actors would need to recognise across protocols and jurisdictions.