Stablecoins and tokenised real-world assets are pulling banks, neobanks and other regulated institutions deeper and more willingly into digital markets. According to Blair Canavan, Director of Alliances for the Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Portfolio at Thales, digital assets are moving out of niche pilots and into supported financial infrastructure. As he explains, stablecoins are being tested for various things from payments to treasury operations, while tokenisation is opening new ways to issue, manage and transfer traditional instruments. Blair attributes the shift to evolving business demand rather than novelty. Institutions are looking to improve settlement efficiency and build new value-based services…

How much did it pay to run one of Hong Kong’s biggest banks in 2025? The answer varies sharply, and the numbers look quite different once bank performance enters the picture. In 2025, Hong Kong’s major banks did not end the year in the same place. Bank Of China Hong Kong (Holdings), or BOCHK, grew profit, while Hang Seng Bank and Bank of East Asia (BEA) both reported declines. Leadership changed as well where Hang Seng Bank replaced Diana Cesar with Luanne Lim as Chief Executive in October. A few months later, HSBC completed its privatisation of Hang Seng in…

Tap a multi-currency card in Tokyo, and the payment looks no different from any other card transaction. Behind the tap, however, is a different story as the issuer has to identify the purchase currency, find the matching wallet, decide whether another balance should cover a shortfall and apply foreign exchange where required.  The transaction must then be authorised, settled and reconciled across the programme’s records and external partners. More customers are making the kind of payments that expose this complexity.  Cross-border transactions on Asia-Pacific-issued Visa cards grew at more than twice the rate of domestic transactions in 2025, while spending…

Digital asset security used to be treated as a wallet problem. Protect the private key and the asset stays safe; lose it, and the asset is gone. The logic still holds, but it no longer reflects what digital asset key management now demands of exchanges, custodians, banks and other platforms. Banks are exploring digital asset services while custodians build platforms for institutional investors. Regulated assets are also starting to move onto digital rails, supported by blockchain infrastructure providers operating behind the scenes. Daniel Toh, VP of Systems Engineering, APJ at Thales, said the shift has changed how organisations think about security.…

Checking someone’s ID at the door of a nightclub tells you who they are, but it does not tell you how they will behave once they are inside. Lionel Grosclaude, CEO of Fime, used that analogy to explain a challenge emerging in agentic commerce, where AI agents are beginning to search, shop and make payments on behalf of consumers. The comparison comes as agentic commerce moves rapidly from concept to live infrastructure. OpenAI has introduced Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT, Google launched its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), while just recently, Visa and Mastercard joined in, with their Intelligent Commerce and Agent…

Conversations revolving around digital asset finance often return to the blockchain, but Shaun Chen’s concern sits closer to the point where value actually moves. Behind every digital asset transaction sits a private key, and Shaun, AVP, APJ Advisor – Quantum and AI Security at Thales, sees that key as the authority behind the asset. When someone compromises a private key, the institution faces more than a security breach because a validly signed transaction can move value before anyone fully understands what went wrong. Security around those keys helps determine whether digital asset infrastructure can move from experimentation into real commercial activity.…

Discussions about the future of banking often revolve around digital channels, cloud migration and mobile apps. At Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona, Huawei placed the spotlight on what comes next. During its Digital Finance session, the company gathered financial institutions and technology partners to discuss how artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape the foundations of modern banking. The event carried the theme “Powering Resilient Intelligence, Co-creating Finance Future” and served as the backdrop for Huawei to introduce upgrades to its Banking AI and Foundation Model Solutions aimed at supporting the next phase of industry transformation. Attention quickly turned to…

Digital assets were designed around decentralisation, yet the responsibility for securing them increasingly sits with institutions. Banks, fintechs, and specialised platforms now safeguard billions of dollars in cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and tokenised assets on behalf of customers. As digital asset markets mature, conversation is shifting from innovation to infrastructure, and, more importantly, security. Yet the biggest risks rarely originate from the blockchain itself. Most major breaches stem not from flaws in blockchain protocols but from the surrounding infrastructure, particularly the systems responsible for managing private keys. Recent data illustrate the scale of the problem. According to Chainalysis, more than US$2.2 billion…