The ever evolving and accelerating world of financial and payment services presents challenges for regulators and market participants. Regulators struggle with establishing an appropriate regulatory framework to effectively address the risks associated with services leveraging innovative technologies and market participants may reject new rules if compliance is perceived as too burdensome and costly.

Technological advancement, however, not only presents challenges but also opportunities as rules and policies may be directly implemented into products and the provision of services to clients. At the roundtable, regulators, academics and industry leaders will explore the potential, risks and limits as well as regulatory requirements on a national and international level of this approach, which is commonly referred to as "programmable compliance". 

The problems that constrain tokenization at scale do not belong to one working group, one institution, or one regulatory perimeter. Cross-ledger settlement, stablecoin licensing fragmentation, FMI readiness in developing markets, and the legal enforceability of smart contracts are structurally connected with each a precondition for the next, each requiring actors across infrastructure and regulation to work from the same evidence base.

This session brings both working groups together for the first time in person. Working Group 1 (Interoperability and Infrastructure) and Working Group 2 (Regulation, Trust, and Governance) will each present their problem statements before presenting to the Oversight Panel. The purpose is to establish shared understanding of the initiative's full scope, test framing with peers who approach the same challenges from different vantage points, and sharpen the asks that each working group will direct to the Oversight Panel in the session that follows.

About the initiative

GFTN has launched _Tokenization in Finance: Evidence and Implementation Pathways_, a structured, multi-stakeholder initiative convening two working groups drawn from leading financial institutions, infrastructure providers, and market participants to assemble a practitioner-oriented evidence base spanning spanning digital money and payment rails through to tokenized real-world assets, securities, funds, and capital markets infrastructure. At Singapore FinTech Festival in November 2026, the initiative will publish a practitioner guide designed to give financial institutions a structured basis for sequencing their digital asset strategies, and to equip regulators and finance ministries in emerging and developing economies with implementation pathways they can draw on directly.

Idle corporate cash has long been a missed opportunity - but tokenised money market funds, on-chain repo, and atomic settlement are rewriting the treasurer's playbook. Major institutions are already delivering yield and instant liquidity through tokenised instruments, settling FX derivatives on-chain, and integrating programmable collateral into intraday operations. This session examines what the shift to programmable treasury infrastructure means for CFOs navigating 24/7 markets with systems built for banking hours.