The Monetary Authority of Singapore has issued tokenised MAS Bills in live trials on its Singapore Dollar Test Network, settling them with wholesale central bank digital currency. An initial S$1 million one-week tranche was followed by a S$10 million tranche scheduled to mature on October 23, 2026. MAS says placing tokenised securities and central bank money on common infrastructure supports monetary stability and settlement finality. Separately, the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance completed real-value testing for Project Agorá. Twenty-eight financial institutions and five central banks executed 30 transactions worth CHF 800,000 across six currencies, averaging 80 seconds per settlement. The initiatives illustrate why central banks favour wholesale CBDCs and tokenised bank deposits for institutional transactions: they aim to preserve settlement in central bank money and the existing banking system. Stablecoins remain a competing model, with industry participants citing their liquidity and round-the-clock availability.

Singapore’s Monetary Authority of Singapore has granted KPay Merchant Service (Singapore) Pte. Ltd. a Major Payment Institution licence under the Payment Services Act 2019. The approval allows the KPay subsidiary to conduct merchant acquisition, domestic money transfer and cross-border money transfer services. MAS had issued in-principle approval in July 2026 before granting the full licence after regulatory conditions were met. Unlike a Standard Payment Institution licence, the major institution licence does not carry monthly transaction volume caps, but it brings stricter base capital and customer-fund safeguarding requirements. KPay, which entered Singapore in 2022 and serves more than 10,000 local merchants, has also launched Online Payments for e-commerce, digital invoicing and remote collection, alongside KPay POS for food and beverage businesses. The group says it plans to use Singapore as a base for expanding cross-border payment operations across Asia-Pacific. The licence covers its specified Singapore activities; the regional expansion remains a stated plan.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) finalised its AI Risk Management Guidelines on 7 October 2026, setting supervisory expectations for banks and other regulated financial institutions using predictive, generative and agentic AI. The framework moves beyond responsible-AI principles by requiring board and senior-management oversight, an active inventory of internally developed, third-party and embedded AI, and risk assessments based on impact, complexity and reliance on human intervention. Governance, identification and materiality requirements take effect on 7 October 2027; lifecycle controls and staffing requirements follow on 7 October 2028. Higher-risk uses call for independent pre-deployment validation, data governance, bias and cyber testing, ongoing monitoring and workable human overrides or fallback processes. Institutions remain accountable for vendor systems and should seek independent assurance rather than rely solely on suppliers’ claims. For banks, the timetable makes AI visibility and evidence of controls pressing priorities, while increasing demands on technology providers for assurance. MAS plans a separate consultation on agentic AI in 2027.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore conducted two pilot issuances of tokenized MAS Bills settled using wholesale Singapore dollar central bank digital currency on the SGD Testnet in September and October 2026. The first issuance, on September 23, was S$1 million and matured after one week. The second was S$10 million and matures on October 23. MAS Managing Director Chia Der Jiun described the settlement initiative in an October 9 keynote at the INSEAD Digital Finance & Agentic AI Summit. The trials are limited to institutional investors and primary dealers, not retail users. They extend the SGD Testnet’s use beyond the interbank overnight lending transactions it first settled among DBS Bank, OCBC and UOB in November 2025. The pilot amounts are experimental compared with standard MAS Bill auctions, which regularly exceed S$10 billion. MAS is also consulting on amendments to the Payment Services Act for its Single-Currency Stablecoin framework, with the consultation closing on October 16.