Stephen Man, Head of Wealth and Retail Banking at Standard Chartered Hong Kong, explains how the bank’s retail strategy is centred on affluent-led growth, a hybrid digital–advisory operating model and a disciplined approach to innovation, balancing scale, productivity and governance in a complex market environment.

As wallets, instant payments and embedded finance reshape how customers interact with payments across Asia Pacific, card issuance is often assumed to be losing relevance. David Lim of Alliance Bank Malaysia, Anshul Sabherwal of Standard Chartered and Andrew Murray of FIS examine how issuance is being repositioned to support credit, control and engagement in a wallet-first payments ecosystem.

As artificial intelligence moves from experimentation to core financial infrastructure, governance is becoming the decisive factor shaping the future of financial services. Regulators, institutions and ecosystems are redefining accountability, culture and capability to scale AI safely, responsibly and sustainably.

Florian M Spiegl, founder and chief executive officer of Evident, explains how the firm is building a full-stack digital asset platform focused on private equity, private debt and fund structures, how China functions as both an origination and demand driver, why Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Ordinance framework shaped Evident’s operating strategy, and how the firm is pursuing profitability through platform economics rather than balance-sheet risk.

TNEX CEO Nguyen The Minh explains how lending economics, funding structure and regulatory constraints shape the company’s development as a digital finance provider in Vietnam.

Regulated digital money is shifting from trials to early production as major banks including HSBC, JP Morgan and Standard Chartered move towards interoperable, compliant settlement systems operating alongside existing rails.

Tuan Nguyen, group chief information officer (CIO) of Techcombank, explained how a cloud-first strategy, multi-year platform modernisation and delivery discipline reshaped the bank’s technology foundations over its first five-year transformation cycle and set the operating conditions for the next phase.

As China enters the longevity era, high-net-worth (HNW) families are demanding more than wealth management. Taikang Family Office has responded by building an integrated finance + services ecosystem, combining wealth, health, succession and family governance into a single life-cycle solution for long-term family needs.

Riverchain is applying proprietary data and technology and disciplined underwriting to construction supply chain finance, addressing a long-standing liquidity and risk imbalance.

As global wealth becomes increasingly mobile, wealth managers face rising execution risks from regulatory fragmentation, geopolitical uncertainty and intergenerational complexity. WRISE Group executive chairman Derrick Tan explains how governance design, regional leadership and technology are being used to scale across Asia and the Middle East without fragmenting control.

For many countries today, the core economic question is no longer how to grow faster, but how to grow smarter, as labour is aging, capital is more expensive, supply chains are less predictable, and technology is moving faster than institutions.

As institutional engagement with tokenisation deepens across Asia, financial institutions are testing what it takes to operate safely as activity scales. Yvonne Ng, vice president for Asia Pacific at Elliptic, examines how banks and regulators are strengthening identity assurance and cross-chain risk visibility to support the next phase of tokenised finance.

Endowus is positioning its Hong Kong business around a different understanding of wealth, liquidity and incentives, adapting a fee-only fiduciary model to a market shaped by property concentration, capital constraints and widening inequality.

The UK’s development finance arm, British International Investment, is scaling its presence in Southeast Asia through platform-building, patient capital and early-stage risk-taking, aiming to mobilise private investment into one of the region’s most under-funded climate-transition markets.

VPBank completed the migration from its existing core banking system to the latest release of Temenos Core on the Red Hat OpenShift container platform, reinforcing its ability to scale, innovate and prepare for an AI- ready future