Money20/20 Asia 2026: Notes from Bangkok on Tokenization, Cross-Border Payments, and More
Money20/20 Asia 2026 wrapped up three days of one of the region's leading fintech gatherings, hosted at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center in Bangkok. The event drew more than 4,500 attendees from 90 countries, alongside 1,400+ companies and 360+ speakers across four stages. It's the place where Asia's banks, regulators, payment networks, fintechs, and digital asset infrastructure providers come together to have conversations about where the industry is actually heading.
Our Director of Enterprise Marketing, Mary McGilvray, was on the ground, taking the pulse of the event, having the real conversations that don't make it onto agendas, listening closely to what institutional decision makers are actually wrestling with on tokenization issuance, digital ledger integration, and payments, and picking up the insider read on the topics every team in the region is currently navigating. Those conversations included senior leaders from Bank of Thailand, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Mastercard, PayPal, Revolut, Coinbase, Ripple, Standard Chartered, Bangkok Bank, Thunes, Trulioo, Ernst & Young, Neofin, and many others.
A few themes ran through nearly every conversation at Money20/20.
- The line between established financial systems and digital asset infrastructure raises the question of how to bring the security, compliance posture, and finality of established markets together with the programmability of newer rails.
- Tokenization came up in almost every session, with the discussion clearly past whether it works and how it functions inside a regulated market structure.
- Cross-border payments and interoperability dominated, with banks, fintechs, and payment networks framing partnerships as shared infrastructure rather than commercial deals.
- And a newer thread, around agentic commerce and the need to have a human in the loop with AI, is starting to take shape as a real product question.
We'll go deeper on each of these in the chapters that follow, with the perspective we brought home and what we think they mean for the institutions we work with.
Where the Industry Is Right Now
Technology is rapidly changing how consumers interact with institutions. What we observed during the panels is that people in Asia have a wide and growing range of digital payment options, and they are visibly cautious about which ones to trust given how common scam activity has become.
The other consumer-side pain point is consistency. Domestic payments in most Asian markets are now genuinely fast, low-friction, and mobile-first. However, consumers require the same level of experience with cross-border payments, too. In this regard, PayPal made a point: borderless payments only succeed when a small business owner in Vietnam, for instance, can sell to a buyer in Germany without the experience falling apart between them. Right now, the friction is often seen at the points where global standards join local payment methods (namely, different regulations and compliance).
We would say that this is where the real challenge sits: payments infrastructure has to do two things at once:
- serve the local optimization customers actually want (the local payment method everyone in a given market uses, with the rails and UX shaped to it)
- meet the global standardization institutions need to settle, reconcile, and stay compliant across jurisdictions
Institutions need infrastructure that can connect to both established rails and newer ledger-based systems without being forced to pick a side. The teams winning these conversations are the ones treating interoperability, compliance posture, and operational resilience as joint design constraints. This anchors the work we do at Cosmos: build the secure and interoperable infrastructure that lets independent digital ledgers, payment systems, and existing banking infrastructure operate together in production.
Asia is defining the future of digital payments by utilizing its expertise in RTP in new digital asset and tokenization flows. I'm looking forward to seeing new innovations that will be founded in this region.
Mary McGilvray, Director of Enterprise Marketing
The Future of Borderless Payments
The conversation over these three days shifted into: the use cases that need to get to production first, the regulatory frameworks which need to harmonize for cross-border flows to scale, and the institutions that are willing to be first movers in their region. With virtual bank licenses, active CBDC pilots, and a rising appetite for cross-border tokenized settlement, it seems that Asia is moving on borderless payments fast.
Cross-border payments experience: building for a fragmented world that's getting more connected
Cross-border payment data and compliance information are now shared more freely between APAC countries than at any prior point, which is real progress. For payment service providers, the challenge here sits in predictability. With so many actors involved in any given cross-border flow (correspondents, FX providers, local rails, compliance handoffs), creating a predictable customer experience is genuinely difficult. We would add that there’s no wonder tech partners are now expected to take much of this complexity off the bank's plate, and to keep the integration current as standards and networks shift.
Bank of America was specific about what it now looks for when evaluating a tech partner: first, coverage, meaning the number of cross-border connections, FI relationships, and bank links a partner already brings, and the consistency of that service across FX providers and banks; second, proven market capabilities. Both criteria reward partners who have actually shipped at scale.
McKinsey's read of the customer side mapped to the same underlying point. Trust is now a hygiene factor, and the differentiation has moved up the stack: convenience and value-added services for the end users a bank serves. Resilience of systems, structures, and networks sits alongside that as a top concern across the institutions we spoke with.
Commercial platforms operating across borders carry a stack of dependencies: strict KYC and AML controls, card issuer rules, banking intermediary handoffs, local payment failures, and incentive structures that vary market by market, which too often they manifest as auto-canceled transactions, unexplained holds, and friction that lands on the customer. None of these is individually catastrophic. Yet, we believe that together, they are the reason a Vietnam-to-Germany payment doesn't yet feel like a Singapore-to-Singapore one.
The structural barriers came up repeatedly: regulatory fragmentation across markets, the compliance burden of operating across them, the absence of true connectivity between systems, and the cost of digital transformation, which is a real burden for small and mid-sized banks trying to keep pace. This is also the part of the discussion where the work we do at Cosmos has the most direct application. The challenge of connecting many independent payment networks, settlement systems, and banking infrastructures, each with its own compliance regime, currency, and operating model, is exactly the problem the Cosmos stack and the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) were designed for.
IBC lets independent digital ledgers interoperate through point-to-point connections that each party runs on its own infrastructure, which means a bank can extend its existing cross-border network without taking on a third-party or a new vendor dependency in the middle.
Tokenization and DLT: asset quality first, infrastructure second
With tokenization, the CEO of Hashkey iterated that the quality of the asset matters more than the quality of the technology. She also argued that the time and resources for a new tokenization platform is often underestimated by institutions. The reason is that the frameworks are new, the rules vary across jurisdictions, and many financial institutions are operating them for the first time.
APAC has a head start here. Project Guardian, led by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, has tokenized asset settlement programs that connect to existing payment systems, including QR payment rails, with direct implications for SME capital access in the region.
Data and AI: do more, but with a human in the driver's seat
AI was framed as a tool that helps financial players do more and move faster, with one consistent norm: a human stays in the driver's seat. In regulated finance, regulators always ask who is at fault when something goes wrong, and the answer cannot be "the model". Most of the AI use cases in production today sit on the bank's existing risk surface: fraud detection, AML, KYC, credit underwriting, and improvements to payment UX for customers.
Besides that, the forward-looking conversation at the event was about agentic commerce, the case where AI agents act on behalf of users to make payments and execute transactions. The estimates we heard put viable agentic commerce 18 to 24 months out, with regulation and consumer adoption likely to take longer because payment systems take years to adopt as people have to learn new behavior.
You might ask the questions: who is liable when an agent misbehaves, how do you identify and authenticate the agent itself, and how do you keep it truthful across counterparties? "Know Your Agent" frameworks are starting to emerge as a serious requirement, and Visa is in pilot with network-level capabilities for managing agentic commerce flows. Regulators are working on the framework too, with the candid acknowledgement that they don't yet fully know what they need to prevent or protect against.
We advise teams to look carefully at the settlement layer underneath agentic activity. It has to do more than process transactions: it needs to support identity-linked permissioning, traceable on-chain records, and configurable compliance guardrails that hold up under audit.
Geopolitical risk and what FIs are doing about it
Speakers and participants at the conference continuously discussed ways that their organizations were adapting to today’s geopolitical risk. Common concerns were situations like reductions in service and FX corridor availability, the addition of counterparties to sanctions lists, unexpected tariff shocks, and the prospect of an institution's data or assets being co-opted for geopolitical activity. Speakers consistently said this is now the operating reality, and institutions are hedging accordingly.
Institutions are adapting in several ways. They are localizing infrastructure and vendor relationships and reducing reliance on single points of failure across vendors, liquidity counterparties, and asset providers. Several speakers also pointed to national-level efforts to set up intrabank networks as domestic backstops if global rails go offline, with Sweden named as one example exploring this kind of fallback.
We think that underneath all of those strategies, customers want multiple paths to move funds from A to B, and they want the ability to switch quickly if any one of those paths becomes unavailable. So, it’s all about having options. From our vantage point at Cosmos, we constantly recommend to our partners that the stack they choose lets institutions plug into multiple settlement networks, currencies, and counterparties through point-to-point connections each party operates itself, with no single vendor or liquidity provider as a chokepoint. In a market that increasingly treats geopolitical resilience as a procurement criterion, that's the architecture institutions should actively specify.
Our advice for institutions building toward this
If there's one conclusion that we gathered after three days at Money20/20 Asia, it's this: institutions making real progress are treating connectivity and system resiliency as the core problem to solve. . A few takeaways worth carrying back into your own planning:
- Make sure to future-proof: Digital asset flows and tokenization are material for long-term business growth, particularly for PSPs and banks. A decision on tokenization or asset flow infrastructure today will impact your ability to connect to a new FX corridor tomorrow.
- Build resiliency: Institutions consistently operate across multiple jurisdictions and with many types of customers and clients. The ones who have robust, flexible systems and risk management processes are the ones that build market share.
If you'd like to compare notes on any of these themes, or talk through where Cosmos infrastructure fits into your strategy on tokenization, cross-border settlement, or digital currency programs, contact our team and we'd be glad to continue the conversation.
