Yam Ki Chan is the Managing Director for Asia Pacific of Circle (NYSE: CRCL), responsible for the company’s business and strategy in the region. He leads a team responsible for partnerships and market expansion across the region. Yam Ki advises stakeholders on how stablecoins unlock economic opportunities for businesses and economies. Yam Ki also serves as the Managing Director of Circle Singapore. He oversaw the enablement of USDC in Japan, the first stablecoin recognized in the country.
Prior to Circle, Yam Ki held strategy & operations and public policy roles at Google Payments and Google Cloud, where he worked on partnership strategy, market launches, and government affairs.
Before Google, Yam Ki served as a Director at the White House National Security Council, where he coordinated U.S. economic strategy in Asia and was a member of the U.S. negotiations team for the G-20 and G-7. Before joining the National Security Council staff, Yam Ki worked in the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Earlier in his career, Yam Ki worked in technology investment banking at Jefferies in Silicon Valley.
He earned a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Carleton College.
Roundtable Room 2, Ground Floor
Open
AI agents are already initiating real financial transactions - booking, subscribing, settling, and disbursing without a human approving each step. The commerce and payments infrastructure built around human decision-makers was not designed for a counterparty that never sleeps, cannot be held to a contract in the traditional sense, and can be compromised at the model layer rather than the credential layer.
This session convenes payments architects, legal practitioners, and AI deployment leads to work through the practical questions the industry is looking to answer: how do you authenticate an agent, assign liability for an autonomous transaction gone wrong, and design governance frameworks for a technology that is already in production.
Participants will examine the specific mechanics of agentic payment flows - wallet delegation architectures, spending limit enforcement, multi-agent authorisation chains, and the emerging standards around agent identity that are still being written in real time by consortia that have not yet reached consensus.
The session will also surface the fraud and risk management implications: how transaction monitoring systems designed to flag anomalous human behaviour respond to the high-frequency, pattern-consistent activity of a well-functioning agent - and what entirely new risk frameworks may be required when the buyer is a model, the merchant is an API, and the dispute resolution process was designed for neither.