Anouska Ladds of Mastercard and Johnson Poh of Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority argue that AI agents will scale only when financial institutions can govern, trace and supervise their actions inside live operations.

With the Strait of Hormuz under severe disruption, the world is facing a major physical shock to oil supplies through which around 20 million barrels per day of crude oil and petroleum products transit. The disruption is reshaping FX behaviour, with energy exposure increasingly driving currency moves while the Chinese yuan shows early signs of relative resilience.

First Bank of Nigeria Limited (FirstBank) has aggressively rolled out Digital Xperience Centres (DXCs)—fully automated, self-service hubs designed to provide customers with 24-hour access to banking services. The initiative reflects the bank’s effort to combine digital innovation with its extensive physical branch network as customer expectations shift toward more flexible banking options.

Barney Frank, former US Congressman and Dodd-Frank co-author, passed away at 86. He reshaped financial regulation and remained influential in global debates on banking, innovation, governance and systemic risk.

Lewis Sun, global head of digital currencies, corporate and institutional banking at HSBC, explains how tokenised deposits can give corporate treasurers 24/7 access to commercial bank money while preserving the safety, compliance and yield characteristics of bank deposits.

Grab Holdings Limited will make Indonesian digital lender Superbank a subsidiary after Singtel transfers its stake to GXS Bank and lifts Grab’s effective ownership above 50%, expanding its financial services footprint in Southeast Asia.

HBL CTO Faisal Anwar believes large-scale banking transformation increasingly depends on whether incumbent institutions can modernise continuously while keeping customer operations, payments and resilience environments running live at scale.

RHB's integration of anti-money laundering and fraud management, combined with an SME cyber self-assessment tool, points to a broader challenge: financial crime defence increasingly depends not only on bank-side controls, but on how well institutions can help customers address the operational weak points scammers exploit.

The macroeconomic outlook for 2026 remains uncertain, with both the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) revising downward their growth forecasts for the Eurozone amid rising geopolitical risks.

Techcombank is investing in centralised AI governance and a modular agent platform designed to transform its software development lifecycle. Tran Hoang Quan, chief technology officer of Techcombank, discusses the bank's approach to AI governance, data architecture, hallucination mitigation and productivity outcomes.

Tan Su Shan, chief executive officer of DBS Bank, and Gan Kim Yong, Singapore’s deputy prime minister and minister for trade and industry, set out how Singapore is trying to turn institutional trust into a practical advantage for AI finance.

As global transaction flows become more fragmented and operationally complex, transaction banks are being asked to do more than execute payments and financing. Increasingly, institutional clients expect them to help navigate complexity itself.

Trust Bank’s first profitable month in March 2026 is an important milestone, but the more meaningful question is whether it signals that digital banking economics in mature markets are finally becoming sustainable or whether success still depends on structural advantages that many digital challengers do not have.

As treasury operating environments become faster, more fragmented and more deeply embedded in business workflows, the focus is shifting from incremental efficiency towards real-time decision-making, integrated execution and trusted orchestration.

I&M Bank is expanding access to retail and SME banking in Kenya through a digital-led strategy supported by a hybrid distribution model. The approach is designed to deepen its integration into the country’s mobile money-driven financial ecosystem and widen access to everyday banking services.