Asia’s fintech market is entering a more complicated phase: digital banks are expanding, stablecoins are moving closer to mainstream financial infrastructure, and artificial intelligence is beginning to influence how banks operate. Against that backdrop, the Responsible Fintech Institute (RFI) is bringing regulators, banks and technology companies together in Kuala Lumpur for the inaugural Asia Fintech Forum 2026, scheduled for October 2.

The Responsible Fintech Institute has opened registration for the Asia Fintech Forum 2026, a one-day financial technology summit that will bring roughly 40 speakers and an expected 1,000 delegates to the World Trade Centre Kuala Lumpur on October 2.

The event is significant less for its conference format than for the issues it intends to put into the same room. Its agenda covers AI in financial services, stablecoin settlement, cross-border payments, digital banking, real-world asset tokenisation, post-quantum cryptography and financial inclusion.

RFI, which is headquartered in Singapore, is positioning the Kuala Lumpur event as its first major forum outside Singapore. Remi Technology, a Singapore-based cross-border settlement company, will serve as title sponsor.

The central question running through the event is increasingly relevant to financial institutions across Asia: how can countries develop their own digital-finance rules without creating a patchwork of incompatible systems?

That challenge is particularly visible across ASEAN. The region has been working toward the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA), designed to support deeper digital integration and establish common approaches to areas including digital trade and data flows. ASEAN substantially concluded DEFA negotiations in 2025 and expects the agreement to move toward signing in 2026.

For banks and fintech companies operating across borders, regulatory interoperability can be just as important as the underlying payment technology.

From payment rails to financial infrastructure

The forum’s focus on settlement is arriving as payment systems become increasingly fragmented.

McKinsey’s 2025 Global Payments Report describes a market moving toward a mix of traditional networks, instant-payment infrastructure, programmable systems and digital-asset rails. Its analysis also points to regulatory uncertainty and differing technical standards as barriers to consistent adoption.

That makes cross-border settlement an important battleground.

Remi Technology CEO and co-founder Sam Su argues that banks need settlement infrastructure that can operate within existing compliance environments rather than forcing institutions to route transactions around their established controls.

The distinction matters for enterprise adoption. A new payment rail may offer faster settlement, but banks still have to manage sanctions screening, know-your-customer requirements, transaction monitoring, liquidity and reporting. Any infrastructure that cannot integrate with those controls risks becoming another isolated system rather than a replacement for existing financial plumbing.

The same tension appears in the forum’s stablecoin agenda. Stablecoins could provide a programmable mechanism for moving value across jurisdictions, but their usefulness to banks depends on custody, reserve management, compliance and regulatory recognition as much as transaction speed.

AI moves from experimentation to governance

Artificial intelligence is another major theme.

Rather than focusing solely on generative AI demonstrations, the forum plans to examine agentic AI in financial services. That points toward a more consequential stage of enterprise AI adoption, in which software agents could potentially execute workflows rather than simply generate recommendations.

For banks, however, autonomous execution introduces questions around authorization, auditability, model risk and operational resilience.

Those concerns increasingly resemble the governance challenges faced by financial institutions adopting cloud infrastructure and algorithmic decision systems. The technology may be supplied by vendors such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon or NVIDIA, but responsibility for financial decisions remains with the institution deploying it.

The financial-services industry is also becoming more interested in AI as an infrastructure layer. McKinsey’s latest payments research identifies AI-native operations and agentic commerce among the forces capable of reshaping payments economics.

Digital banks and inclusion create another test

Malaysia provides a useful setting for the discussion because its financial system is developing a new generation of digital banking businesses while maintaining a substantial Islamic-finance ecosystem.

Confirmed speakers include Mohammad Ridzuan Abdul Aziz, CEO of AEON Bank; Aaron Tang, general manager of Luno Malaysia; Kenneth Chan, CEO of Webull Malaysia; Victoria Wymark of PwC Southeast Asia; and senior representatives from the Labuan Financial Services Authority.

The forum also includes sessions on Islamic fintech and digital banking, highlighting an important distinction between simply digitising banking products and redesigning them for underserved consumers and businesses.

Digital adoption is already deeply established across Asia-Pacific. McKinsey found in an earlier survey that active digital-banking usage in emerging Asia-Pacific markets rose from 54% in 2017 to 88% in 2021.

The next challenge is less about convincing customers to use digital channels and more about building trusted, interoperable infrastructure underneath them.

Tokenisation and quantum security broaden the agenda

The forum’s inclusion of real-world asset tokenisation reflects another shift in fintech: moving blockchain discussions from cryptocurrency speculation toward financial-market infrastructure.

Tokenised securities, funds and other assets could eventually connect traditional capital markets with programmable settlement systems. But adoption will depend on custody, liquidity, legal enforceability and cross-border recognition.

Post-quantum cryptography adds a different dimension. Banks are increasingly having to consider whether today’s cryptographic infrastructure will remain resilient as quantum computing advances. Migrating cryptographic systems across large financial institutions is not a simple software upgrade; it can involve payment infrastructure, authentication systems, certificates and long-lived sensitive data.

That makes PQC migration an enterprise risk-management issue rather than merely a cybersecurity trend.

The Asia Fintech Forum 2026 therefore arrives at an interesting point for the region. The next phase of fintech competition may not be determined by who launches the most visible digital wallet or banking app. It could be determined by which markets can connect AI, payments, digital assets and regulatory systems without sacrificing security or trust.

For banks and fintech companies, the practical takeaway is straightforward: interoperability is becoming a product requirement.

Market Landscape

Asia’s financial technology ecosystem is moving from isolated digital products toward interconnected infrastructure. Instant payments, digital banks, tokenised assets and AI-enabled financial services are developing simultaneously, creating opportunities but also increasing the number of technical and regulatory dependencies.

McKinsey estimates that instant-payment value flows reached almost $22 trillion in 2024 across 15 major economies using such rails, with those flows expected to grow at roughly 15%–18% annually over the next five years.

Competition is consequently shifting. Traditional banks are competing with fintech platforms, digital banks and increasingly embedded financial services, while regulators are attempting to preserve consumer protection and financial stability without blocking innovation.

ASEAN’s DEFA process is particularly relevant because it seeks to create a more integrated digital economy across markets that retain different national regulatory systems.

For enterprise teams, the implication is that selecting a fintech platform increasingly requires evaluating regulatory coverage, API interoperability, settlement architecture, cybersecurity, data governance and regional scalability alongside conventional cost and functionality metrics.

Top Insights

• Asia Fintech Forum 2026 will bring regulators, banks and fintech companies together to examine AI, stablecoins, digital banking and cross-border settlement infrastructure.
• ASEAN DEFA gives the event a broader regulatory context as governments work toward greater digital integration while retaining national financial rules.
• Agentic AI in banking shifts the conversation from generative tools toward autonomous workflows, creating new requirements for governance, authorization and operational resilience.
• Stablecoins and tokenised assets could reshape settlement and capital markets, but institutional adoption depends on custody, liquidity, compliance and legal certainty.
• Post-quantum cryptography highlights a less visible fintech challenge: banks must modernize security infrastructure before quantum threats become an operational problem.

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