Fintech leaders urge unified payments push as AI grows

Fintech executives are urging banks and merchants to invest more in unified payments infrastructure and fraud intelligence as artificial intelligence reshapes digital finance. Their comments come as the industry marks World Fintech Day amid rapid growth in instant payments and AI-led commerce.

Digital payments adoption across Southeast Asia and Singapore continues to rise, increasing pressure on the systems that connect consumers, merchants and financial institutions. Industry leaders say growing transaction volumes and the spread of AI-driven tools are exposing gaps between front-end innovation and back-end resilience.

Ben Wong, General Manager of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong at Adyen, said retailers in Singapore are already seeing the impact of this shift across online and in-store channels.

"With 72% of Singaporeans already relying on digital and AI tools to streamline their shopping, businesses can no longer afford back-end payment friction. As retail and commerce become increasingly fragmented across channels, the role of fintechs is not to overcomplicate the front end, but to deliver a single, unified platform that allows businesses to scale effortlessly and adapt to shifting consumer habits in real time," said Ben Wong, General Manager of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong at Adyen.

Merchants across the region are rolling out AI-powered tools for personalisation and customer engagement. In response, payment providers are upgrading back-end systems and building unified platforms that connect card payments, local real-time schemes and digital wallets under one framework.

Security and trust remain central as consumers adopt AI-led commerce tools. Financial firms and payment providers face growing pressure to show that faster, more automated systems do not weaken fraud protection.

"In an era defined by rapid AI adoption, financial technology must prove that convenience never comes at the cost of security. Our research shows that 59% of Singaporean consumers lose trust in a brand following a single payment failure, while tools like biometrics are increasingly viewed not as friction, but as vital reassurance. As AI-driven commerce expands across Asia, trust has become the primary currency. Fintech innovations must focus on strengthening visible security signals and back-end resilience to give consumers total peace of mind every time they transact," Wong said.

Cybersecurity specialists see a similar shift in how banks and fintechs approach fraud prevention. Rather than focusing only on the point of payment, institutions are examining the full lifecycle of an attack, from phishing and device compromise to money laundering.

Dmitry Volkov, CEO of Group-IB, said the next evolution of fintech security lies in giving financial institutions a unified, predictive view of cyber, fraud, and payment risks, allowing them to detect threats before they escalate rather than responding afterwards.

"Financial fraud today often begins well before a transaction takes place," said Volkov. "A customer may be phished, a device may be compromised, or payment credentials may already be circulating and being abused long before the final transaction appears in a bank account."

Volkov said banks and fintechs already possess much of the data needed to detect fraud earlier, but the challenge lies in combining those signals quickly enough to predict emerging threats rather than simply documenting past incidents

"Behavioural data, device intelligence and external threat intelligence, taken together, can show when an account or device has likely been compromised before money actually moves. External threat intelligence covers a few distinct things: brand intelligence, which flags phishing pages and fake apps impersonating a bank before customers ever land on them; mule intelligence, which tracks the network of accounts used to launder stolen funds; and financial intelligence, which surfaces compromised bank cards and credentials already circulating on criminal markets. On their own, each of these signals is just noise. Read together, and read against how fraud networks actually operate, they tell a much clearer story."

He added that the growing speed of payments requires fraud detection and intelligence systems to operate just as quickly.

"Instant payments mean there is often no window to catch fraud after the fact. That's the core case for cyber fraud fusion: fraud intelligence needs to become faster and more joined up across cyber, fraud and payments teams that have traditionally worked in separate systems, so the signals point forward instead of just explaining what already happened. But speed only helps if it is guided by people who understand how these networks think and adapt. Technology can surface the pattern. It still takes experienced judgement to decide what that pattern means and how to act on it."

AI is also changing how financial firms approach collections and accounts receivable. Providers in this segment are moving away from broad-based outreach and manual processes toward more targeted engagement and embedded payment options.

"World Fintech Day is a chance to look past the technology itself and focus on what it makes possible for the future of financial services. In collections and accounts receivable, AI is replacing fragmented, reactive processes with more connected experiences that help businesses unlock cash flow faster, improve recovery performance, and build stronger customer relationships.

"Rather than relying on one-size-fits-all outreach, AI can help organisations identify the right moment to engage and determine the message, channel and next step most likely to move an account forward. Paired with automation and embedded payments, it can take friction out of the process, reduce manual effort on the organisation's side, and give consumers clearer, more flexible paths to resolution.

The organisations that define the next chapter of fintech will be those that turn intelligence into measurable impact, such as accelerated cash flow, improved recovery rates, a lower cost-to-collect, all while delivering a better experience for consumers," said Dan Kutchel, CEO, Overtime.

Wong said AI now sits at the centre of many of these changes in retail and payments across Asia.

"72% of Singaporeans already rely on AI to guide purchasing decisions. Yet the future of fintech isn't about replacing human connection with automation; it's about using intelligence to elevate it. Because AI is only as smart as the ecosystem it observes, training models on full-funnel payment journeys transforms transaction data into near-instant intelligence - precisely recognising trusted shoppers, curbing fraud, and delivering exceptional experiences," Wong said.