Last week at the Singapore FinTech Festival’s 10th anniversary, I sat down with senior leaders across payments companies, fintechs, and banks. What they told me — and what I witnessed on the show floor — revealed five forces reshaping the industry: Agentic payments are moving from experiment to competitive weapon; payments-specific foundation models are emerging to challenge general-purpose AI; fraud management is now table stakes; transaction banking is delivering outsized AI returns; and stablecoins are fragmenting as they scale. Here’s what I learned.

Agentic Payments Are Moving To The Competitive Front Line

Forrester’s take: Two routes are converging: protocol standardization (ACP/SPT) to make agentic commerce interoperable and multirail enablement to ensure that agents can pay anywhere with minimal “last mile” friction. Issuers, acquirers, and payment service providers must upgrade risk models to “recognize agents as actors” or “know your agent,” ingesting new signals such as Shared Payment Token (SPT) scope, agent reputation, and intent authorization context while preserving merchant control and existing dispute flows. For instance:

  • Stripe and OpenAI launched ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol), an open standard that lets AI agents, merchants, and buyers complete purchases safely while keeping the merchant in control (orders, payments, customer relationship). The debut product is Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, and the Shared Payment Token allows an AI to pass a scoped, limited‑use reference to the buyer’s payment method to the merchant — without exposing credentials. Early partners and ecosystem moves (such as Salesforce and commercetools) aim to curb channel fragmentation for merchants.
  • Ant International’s Antom released an agentic payment solution built on MCP (Model Context Protocol), spanning alternative payments methods (APMs) and card rails, with an AI‑ready payment mandate model and EasySafePay (Antom’s digital checkout solution) to streamline APM checkout — and it’s open‑sourced. Mastercard/Visa are engaged to pilot card capabilities for AI agents.

Payments‑Specific Foundational Models Are Breaking Out Of The Lab

Forrester’s take: Expect a shift from general-purpose LLMs to industry-specific models like Ant’s and Stripe’s. Large payment firms and banks must decide whether to build or partner for access to these specialized models.

  • Ant International open‑sourced Falcon TST (Time‑Series Transformer) — a mixture‑of‑experts model (up to 2.5 billion parameters) with over 90% accuracy on internal cashflow/foreign exchange exposure forecasting, helping Ant cut FX costs by up to 60%, and deployed with partners (e.g., airlines such as AirAsia) for price stability.
  • Stripe has also introduced payments‑focused foundation modeling for fraud and risk, now positioned to score agent‑initiated flows via ACP/SPT.

Fraud Management Is Now Table Stakes — For Banks And Merchants

Forrester’s take: As deepfake-driven account takeovers, synthetic IDs, and agent hijacks rise, firms need a unified risk stack — device, identity (deepfake-aware), transaction, and agentic signals — covering the entire customer journey. Embed liveness and deepfake checks at onboarding, fuse agent context (SPT scope, authorization window) into real-time scoring, and pair generative embeddings with deterministic rules to combat novel attack vectors.

  • Visa (via Featurespace) is scaling TallierLTM, a generative large transaction model trained on billions of transactions. Adding its embeddings to standard fraud models lifted fraud value detection by up to 71% at typical false positive rates.
  • Tencent showcased a financial-institutution-focused risk suite: a decision engine, device intelligence, e-know-your-customer, and deepfake detection (with its AI Face Shield). Ant Digital Technologies doubled down on deepfake offense/defense with million‑scale multimodal datasets and global challenges/workshops to harden detection for financial use cases.

Transaction Banking Is A Pragmatic AI Beachhead

Forrester’s take: Build an AI adoption heatmap for transaction banking use cases. Start with areas showing mature AI track records and expand systematically. For instance:

  • The long‑standing pain — document review, exceptions, reconciliation, payments/settlement operations — is ripe for genAI and agentic orchestration.
  • Nucleus Software is deploying AI across invoice segmentation, anomaly detection, and foreign exchange forecasting within transaction banking suites (e.g., FinnAxia). Veefin brings AI‑powered delinquency management and multiparty communications to supply chain finance, strengthened via acquisitions that add genAI and end‑to‑end workflows.

Stablecoins: More Use Cases But A More Fragmented 2026

Forrester’s take: Stablecoin-based payment use cases are expanding across corporate treasury, crypto card issuing, cross-border remittance, and cross-border B2B payments. But the stablecoin ecosystem is becoming more fragmented. Stablecoins offer benefits such as automated settlement and programmable features but are not a payment panacea. Banks and payment firms should also explore tokenized deposits and central bank digital currencies as alternative rails. What I saw last week:

  • Multiple regulated stablecoin issuers are competing head to head. Ripple’s RLUSD (facilitated by the New York Dept. of Financial Services [NYDFS] trust framework) surpassed $1 billion in circulation and is being piloted with Mastercard/WebBank/Gemini for stablecoin‑based card settlement on the XRP Ledger — one of the first bank‑settled, public‑chain pilots in mainstream card flows. Paxos gained full Monetary Authority of Singapore approval to issue a USD stablecoin in Singapore, with DBS as cash management and reserve custodian, as USDG stablecoin distribution expands via institutional networks. Circle is actively reducing cross‑chain fragmentation for its USDC stablecoin with Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP), Gateway, and Bridge Kit, plus Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) integration for secure interoperability.
  • But fragmentation persists as assets, chains, and regimes multiply — even as volumes and supply hit new highs. Expect multi-issuer, multichain liquidity and regional regulatory divergence to continue into 2026.

Alternative Payment Rails Are On The Rise While Card Payments Are Evolving, Not Retreating

Forrester’s take: Alternative non-card payment infrastructure and card payment infrastructure will coexist. Both are advancing digital payments and displacing cash and paper checks. Banks and payment companies should embrace both rather than choosing one over the other.

  • Ant International’s Alipay+ now connects over 40 wallets/digital banks across more than 100 markets, reaching about 1.8 billion users with standardized QR interoperability and AI‑assisted travel/merchant services — materially boosting SME acceptance in tourism flows.
  • Alternative payment solution provider Boku launched a Singapore Innovation Hub focused on real‑time foreign exchange, cross‑border payouts, and AI/blockchain to simplify global merchants’ money movement across over 200 local payment methods and more than 7 billion accounts.
  • Offline resilience: CMA Small Systems and Crunchfish are adding an offline contingency layer atop national real-time gross payment networks so that payments continue through connectivity/system outages.
  • Virtual cards and stablecoin-linked cards are driving issuer tech demand. For example, card-issuing fintech provider Paymentology is accelerating card issuance for digital banks across the APAC, EMEA, and LATAM regions, from months to weeks. Meanwhile, Ramp, Coupa, and Brex are aggressively advancing virtual card adoption in the US for B2B payments that will replace check payments.

Envisioning The Future Of Payments

The next chapter of payments will be agent-led, model-driven, and multirail. Agentic payments and stablecoin payments standards (e.g., ACP, CCTP, CCIP), domain-specific foundational models (e.g., Falcon TST, TallierLTM), and non-card payment infrastructure (e.g., Alipay+, Boku) will collectively shape the future of payments.

To learn more about the future of payments, agentic payments, cross-border payments, identity and security technologies, and fraud management, Forrester clients can read Forrester’s relevant reports and blogs (see the below links) or request a guidance session or inquiry with me.

Predictions 2026: Payments

The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Fraud Management Solutions In Asia Pacific, Q4 2025

The Merchant Payment Providers Landscape, Q4 2025

Predictions 2026: Asia Pacific

How Stripe And Bridge Are Pushing Stablecoin Real-World Adoption: A Conversation With Mai Leduc

Navigating The Terminology Jungle Of Cryptocurrencies, Stablecoins, And Other Constructs

The Future Of Payments

The State Of Digital Retail Payments In Asia Pacific, 2024

The Cross-Border Payment Solutions For B2B Landscape, Q1 2024