HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SINGAPORE FINTECH FESTIVAL WEEK 2025
The Insights Forum & the 10th anniversary edition of the Singapore Fintech Festival were held between 10th and 14th November 2025.
This weeklong Finance and Technology innovation extravaganza captured the key themes currently dominating global finance.
It has taken me a little longer than normal to step back, reflect and really assess the key changes currently taking place in Global Finance & Technology.
Some of the key highlights from this year’s event were.
Global Financial Interoperability – As new forms of money and assets emerge such as stablecoins and digital assets there was a heightened focus this year on building more globally interoperable standards. With asset tokenisation moving from controlled pilots to early commercial application across money markets funds, tokenised gold and fractional real estate assets there was much more of a focus on building open, interoperable, institutional level rails to manage these transactions.
To get to where we are now to a future where most financial assets are on chain, according to the MD of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Chia Der Jiun requires.
- Asset backed tokens need to be standardised and networks interoperable.
- A deep pool of safe and reliable settlement assets.
- Institutional grade networks are needed
The big challenge still appears to be interoperability of many of these new forms of Digital Money and networks as they often have different technical specifications, so asset backed tokens on one network may not be portable to another network or not without friction.
In light of these major changes taking place across the financial ecosystem, our program Thinking Like a Banker helps corporate sales teams developing and selling these new technologies to banks achieve revenues more efficiently.
AI in Banking – AI was also a prime focus during the event with many sessions highlighting the implementation of AI for compliance management, credit underwriting and risk management. There were also examples of customer facing AI tools to support customers and provide 24/7 responses to frequently asked questions.
We have developed our own AI capability to help corporate financial services sales teams be more effective with AI based guided selling. You can learn more here www.transformsales.ai
Synergy Soup – I was delighted to take part in the inaugural Synergy Soup thought leadership roundtable on the topic of Marketing Effectiveness. A roundtable of marketing experts including Mansi Chopra from Finmo, Alunood Almulla from Emirates Bank, Gaya Anada from Banking Circle, Chris Young from Adobe, Carlo Rinaldi from humans.tech, Joanna Teo from Attribute Data, Rajev Rajkumar from capital-e, Charu Sethi from Polkadot and moderator Marion Bernardi from GFTN deliberated the topic of ‘When FinTech Marketers Build, Not Broadcast’.
Doing Account Based Marketing and Sales was a key discussion of the roundtable and a key challenge for many organisations. This is the exact reason why I developed the Realise the Revenues strategic target client sales growth program.
Talent for the Future – This was an eye-opening theme for me; particularly how difficult it is for many well educated and talented young people to get work. There were also some amazing discussions where several academics focused on how becoming too reliant on AI can have a serious impact on our learning and reasoning capabilities.
Founders and start-ups – There were some fascinating stories from entrepreneurs and new businesses at The Founders Peak Stage. As an entrepreneur myself, two key learnings I took away from the sessions were to have more fun and be easy on yourself and celebrate the little wins along the way, rather than always focusing on what must be done next.
I’m really looking forward to reading the Founders Story book coming out next year based on a range of real-life entrepreneurial stories.
The recent article in the Economist by Larry Fink and Rob Goldstein at Blackrock how tokenisation could transform finance describes the converging of these technologies and developments as a bridge being built from both sides of a river, converging in the middle. On one side stand traditional institutions. On the other are digital-first innovators: stablecoin issuers, fintechs and public blockchains.
I’m already looking forward to the Singapore Fintech Festival in 2026. In a world where the Global Financial Infrastructure we all know is changing there will be opportunities aplenty for the individuals and organisations willing to adapt and transform.
