Held in Bangkok from 14 to 16 October 2026, alongside the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings, the IIF Annual Membership Meeting brought together finance ministers, central bank governors, regulators and financial services leaders. Forvis Mazars was represented by Rudi Lang, APAC Financial Services Leader; Gregory Marchat, Group Head of Financial Services Advisory; and Eric Cloutier, Group Head of Banking Regulations and the Financial Services Regulatory Centre. The three organisations bring distinct but complementary perspectives to the discussions.
The IMF and World Bank discussions focused on economic and financial stability, development and investment mobilisation, while the IIF brought the financial industry’s perspective on financing that investment and managing the associated risks.
The central message from Bangkok was that, despite the global economy’s resilience, governments have less room to respond to another major shock. Public debt and borrowing costs remain high, while investment needs in technology, infrastructure, energy and security continue to grow. Private capital will need to finance more of that investment, although not every public priority will translate into a financeable opportunity. Discussions also highlighted the growing global influence of Asia-Pacific (APAC), both in attracting investment and supply chains and in advancing AI, payments, tokenisation and fraud prevention.
“Asia is no longer simply responding to changes in global finance. The region is increasingly shaping developments in payments, digital infrastructure and private-capital mobilisation. Greater regional integration will be critical to realise the opportunity at scale.”
Rudi Lang Partner – APAC Financial Services Sector Leader
The discussions centred on three interconnected areas: technological change and its risks, regulatory and supervisory reform and financing strategic investment and regional growth. Each presents important choices for financial institutions.
AI is already improving fraud detection, risk assessment, operational efficiency and customer service. But it is also making existing cyber threats faster and easier to exploit, while increasing reliance on a relatively small number of models, cloud platforms and technology providers.
This concentration risk increasingly matters for supervisors. A cyber vulnerability or operational failure at one major provider could affect several institutions at once, even where firms have strong controls over their own use of AI.
Looking at AI use case by use case is therefore not enough. Financial institutions need to understand where critical activities across the market depend on the same models, platforms and providers, how a common failure could spread and whether credible alternatives exist. This is increasingly a question of financial-system resilience and technological sovereignty, not simply third-party risk management at firm level.
AI is enabling attackers to identify and exploit cyber vulnerabilities faster, while giving institutions new tools to strengthen their defences. Dependence on common technology providers can also amplify an incident, with one vulnerability affecting several institutions before its full impact is understood.
This puts existing resilience arrangements under pressure. Firms may have much less time to identify an attack, assess its impact and contain it, while remediation, escalation and decision-making still take time.
Resilience testing therefore needs to reflect how quickly an incident can now develop. Firms need to test whether they can identify and contain an attack when the time to respond is significantly reduced and decisions have to be made before the full impact is known.
Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is accelerating rapidly, driving investment, transforming business operations and attracting increasing regulatory scrutiny across industries and global markets. Our AI Impact Hub brings together the latest insights and expertise on AI’s business impact helping organisations make informed decisions and prepare for what’s next.
“Technology is very rapidly changing how financial services are delivered, how customers make decisions and where risks sit across the system. Financial institutions need to capture these opportunities while adapting their infrastructure, controls and operating models at the same pace.”
Gregory Marchat Partner - Group Financial Services Leader
Rapid developments in agentic commerce could change how customers identify, compare and buy financial products. If customers increasingly rely on an AI agent to search and transact across the market, the institution providing the product may no longer control how the customer finds, assesses or selects it. Customers need confidence that the agent is following their instructions, merchants need evidence that it is authorised to transact, and banks need to establish that the customer, agent and payment are legitimate.
This could shift competition from who provides the product to who controls the AI agent, the logic used to compare products and, ultimately, the customer interface. Financial institutions will need to decide where they want to participate, what authority they will accept from an agent and who is responsible when a customer disputes a transaction.
The discussion around tokenisation and stablecoins is evolving beyond technological experimentation towards practical implementation, with a growing focus on improving payments and settlement.
While technology has already increased the speed of cross-border payments, important frictions remain when payments reach individual markets. Local rules, processes and infrastructure can still slow the final part of a transaction. Financial institutions will need to identify where these technologies provide a clear advantage over existing arrangements and address the legal, settlement and cross-border issues that still limit their use.
The digital asset sector has moved beyond its early focus on cryptocurrency exchanges to full integration within traditional financial services. Whether driven by the roll-out of new global regulations, such as Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA), or the need to integrate stablecoins and digital asset tokenisation into existing models, financial institutions and digital asset native businesses are under...
Many jurisdictions agree on the need to modernise financial regulation, but the pace, scope and implementation of reforms continue to differ.
The US has started a significant recalibration of its regulatory and supervisory framework. The UK is also changing its approach to supervision, reporting and the use of capital buffers. In Europe, the European Commission has set out its reform agenda, with a Banking Package expected in the first quarter of 2027, but its practical effects remain to be seen.
These different approaches could increase fragmentation, with similar activities facing different capital and supervisory treatment across jurisdictions. Global banks will need to assess the implications for individual businesses, portfolios and legal entities, including product returns, capital allocation, booking decisions and competitive position. ding product returns, capital allocation, booking decisions and competitive position.
“Modernising global financial regulation is not only about capital requirements. It is about making the framework simpler, more predictable and more focused on material risks. Regulation and supervision must evolve together, without national reforms fragmenting global standards or triggering a race to the bottom.”
Eric Cloutier Partner - Global Head of Banking Regulations
Regulatory modernisation will only have practical value if it is also reflected in day-to-day supervision. Otherwise, less prescriptive rules may lead to supervisory expectations, interpretations and model reviews that firms cannot anticipate or effectively challenge. These decisions can materially affect risk-weighted assets, capital requirements and the financing banks can provide.
Global banks will need to monitor how supervisory changes are implemented across jurisdictions, maintaining a consistent group-wide approach while managing the different effects on capital and business activity.
The debate on capital is not only about the level of formal requirements, but how the different parts of the framework interact and how much capacity banks can use in practice.
A reduction in one requirement may have limited effect if leverage constraints, supervisory expectations, market pressure or other buffers remain binding. Similarly, buffers cannot absorb stress if banks are reluctant to use them because of the expected supervisory or market response.
As capital frameworks change, financial institutions need to understand what drives the gap between formal requirements and the capital and liquidity they can deploy in practice. They also need to consider how differences across jurisdictions could create relative winners and losers, influencing where banks compete and deploy capital.
Private credit and non-bank financial institutions have become a structural part of global financing. Supervisors are focused less on private credit as a standalone risk than on the connections between private credit funds, banks, insurers and private equity sponsors, and the potential for stress to spread across them.
Lower direct lending should not therefore be treated as evidence that the related risk has left the bank or the banking system. Banks may remain exposed through financing and counterparty relationships, or through common borrowers and assets. They therefore need a consolidated view of the underlying exposures, leverage, valuations and liquidity risks.
Higher defence spending is creating new financing needs, but these are not evenly distributed. Large established contractors can generally access funding; the bigger challenge for financial institutions is financing innovative suppliers and scale-ups as they move into industrial production, within existing risk and regulatory frameworks.
In Europe, more common funding could support joint procurement, reduce duplication and improve interoperability. Public guarantees, first-loss structures and securitisation may help attract private capital, but they address financing risk rather than the underlying quality of demand.
Geopolitical fragmentation is redirecting investment and supply chains towards APAC. The opportunity is not simply to attract that investment, but to convert it into stronger domestic capabilities, technology transfer and higher-value production. Meeting the region’s energy and infrastructure needs will require greater mobilisation of private capital alongside public investment.
For ASEAN, the growing economic opportunity could provide further momentum for deeper integration. Better-connected supply chains, greater intra-regional trade and further integration in cross-border payments and the digital economy could then give businesses greater scale and allow the region to retain more of the value being created.
The next challenge for the global financial system is not simply to withstand shocks, but to finance growth and technological change at a time of elevated debt, geopolitical fragmentation and increasingly interconnected risks.
Financial institutions will need to adapt as technology changes their businesses and regulatory reforms affect where capital can be deployed. New financing needs will continue to emerge across infrastructure, energy, defence and supply chains.
As these developments unfold, Asia will play an increasingly important role in shaping global investment flows, financial markets and technological innovation. Financial institutions will need to translate these shifts into clear choices about capital, partnerships, technology and risk.
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