Best Innovations 2026: Asia Pacific

AI commanded most of the attention among innovators in the Asia-Pacific region in 2025, but looking ahead, fraud prevention, open banking, cross-border payments, and tokenization could also figure prominently.

“The banks winning right now are the ones deploying AI where it actually generates revenue,” Zennon Kapron, founder and director at GL Insight, a global fintech consultancy firm, told Global Finance. “APAC’s leaders have moved into generative AI for wealth management and AI-driven credit scoring for thin-file customers, and the gap between early movers and laggards is widening fast,” he added.

Nehal Vora, CEO of India’s CDSL, told Global Finance: “The coming year in Asia-Pacific finance, in our view, is likely to be shaped by a powerful trinity: intelligent data, intelligent protection, and intelligent access.”

Vora anticipates further advances in anomaly detection and behavioral analytics that enable financial firms to detect manipulation and scams earlier in the business cycle. “AI-based fraud detection is now the price of admission in APAC,” added Kapron.

As scam losses mount across Singapore, Australia, and Hong Kong, regulators are forcing banks to absorb more liability, reshaping the economics of fraud investment far more than any technology shift. It should help that the region enjoys some of the world’s most innovation-friendly regulatory frameworks.

“This has been the most consequential year for APAC fintech regulation in a decade,” said Kapron. “Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and South Korea are all advancing stablecoin and digital asset frameworks in parallel, and APAC is now setting the global pace while the US and Europe play catch-up.”

CTBC

When it comes to thwarting scam attacks, industry collaboration can make a difference. That was CTBC Bank’s reasoning when it launched Taiwan’s first AI fraud alliance last year, featuring industry-wide intelligence sharing and new standards for digital safety.

AI SkyNet 2.0 has increased fraud detection eight­fold; 90% of online transactions now undergo scam-risk evaluation within 30 milliseconds, allowing the bank to immediately place holds or step up verification. Scam‑related losses are prevented on the spot.

CTBC found that, with any single institution acting on its own, 5% to 17% of fraud attacks in high-risk accounts would have remained undetected. Sharing information clearly helps.

Elsewhere, CTBC launched an AI-enhanced program to support consumer loans last year. The new technology helped drive a 13% increase in consumer loan submissions and cut processing time by 20%.

AI has been transformative for the bank. “Generative AI has evolved from a productivity tool into a key force redefining employee roles and the nature of financial services,” a spokesperson tells Global Finance.

CDSL

Central Depository Services (India) Limited (CDSL), India’s largest depository institution by number of investor accounts, invigorated its compliance protocols last year with a new trading window closure mechanism.

The process, designed to prevent insider trading, initially applied only to “designated persons” who were clients before July 2025; but has since been extended to those persons’ immediate relatives. The intention is to make it more difficult for relatives of company insiders to buy and sell securities during so-called blackout periods: those sensitive, restrictive time slots when most insider trading occurs.

Also, last year, CDSL developed a new framework that reduces the demat (dematerialized) account closure timeline from 30 days to two, along with a tagging mechanism that helps ensure the tax system recognizes a nominee as the legal heir and recipient of a nontaxable inheritance rather than a commercial market purchase.

Cathay United Bank | GMB App Single-Device, Multi-Enterprise Mobile Authentication Innovation Mechanism

Taiwan’s Cathay United made mobile communications less unwieldy and more secure for its corporate bank clients last year. Previously, its GMB app could be linked to only one corporate account; now, it can be used to communicate securely with multiple commercial clients. Developed by an internal cross-functional team within the bank—including specialists in corporate banking products, information technology, and information security—the enhancement aims to address the needs of corporate clients who often carry multiple mobile devices to avoid mixing up business accounts. By enabling secure communication with multiple clients from the same device, it eliminates the inconvenience and security risks of carrying multiple devices.

CTBC Bank | AI SkyNet 2.0: Interbank Fraud-Prevention Intelligence Network

Last August, Taiwan’s CTBC pioneered and validated this interbank lineage model, which it says can identify 5% to 17% more high‑risk accounts than any single institution acting alone. AI SkyNet 2.0’s verification process uses double-blind, de‑identified data in a secure data clean room.

DBS Bank | Gen AI Copilot Processing: Consumer-Banking Deposit Account Opening

Last September, serial innovator DBS launched a processing copilot powered by generative AI (Gen AI). The copilot automates the time-consuming task of reviewing supporting documents for opening new deposit accounts. The app reduces employee time spent on repetitive manual verification and drives more-standardized, consistent processing outcomes.

DBS Bank | Gen AI Processing Copilot for Self-Service Banking (SSB) Claims

Self-service banking (SSB) processes make errors. By embedding Gen AI directly into its existing SSB operations workbench to automatically extract, interpret, and analyze electronic journals and intervention reports, DBS can correct mistakes and refund customers faster.

DBS Bank | iCoach

Coaching executives to become better managers is as much art as science; but DBS, in partnership with noted executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, is using generative AI to tackle this critical task through iCoach, a platform launched last year. Some 10,000 DBS employees received coaching on the platform during its first six months, including guidance on asking better questions, yielding positive results.

DBS Bank | Credit Cards & Unsecured Lending (CUL) Onboarding With Gen AI

Processing income-related documents is an arduous but necessary step in issuing unsecured loans. Since its introduction last December, DBS’ new Gen AI onboarding platform has reduced document processing time in Taiwan by 38%. The payoff for the bank’s customers has been faster credit card activation.

Fubon Insurance | FacePass – Redefining Speed and Security in Insurance

Onboarding new insurance customers can be a slow, document-heavy process; Fubon Insurance has harnessed biometrics to accelerate it. Fubon launched a fully digital insurance application-and-onboarding process in February, featuring digital identity authentication, electronic policy signing, and advanced biometric facial recognition and liveness detection. These enhancements reduce a process that once took days or weeks to under an hour, and face-to-face appointments are no longer required before a policy is issued.

NSE Clearing | Innovative Risk Management Architectural Upgrade – Post-Trade Risk Management Technology Transformation

India’s equity derivatives markets have seen explosive growth in trading in recent years, but the country’s risk management infrastructure has sometimes struggled to keep pace. NSE Clearing launched India’s first fully distributed, concurrent multirisk-engine post-trade risk management system last year. The platform can now handle a fivefold increase in current volumes. Key to the enhancement was decoupling secondary processes, introducing multiple parallel risk engines, and implementing a dedicated feed server to improve communication efficiency and workload distribution. The result has been increased throughput and reduced risk.

OPL Innovate | OAM+

OPL Innovate, one of India’s largest digital-lending infrastructure providers, aims to make life easier for digital lenders with its OAM+ solution, which simplifies the complex process of integrating data from multiple vendors. This support helps banks and other financial institutions accelerate loan origination while improving the accuracy of risk assessment. Lenders can now work with multiple bank-statement-analysis vendors through a single platform. Multiple services can communicate with one another over the OAM+ network, and OPL Innovate has also made it easier to update the services.

Taipei Fubon Bank | Real-Time Inquiry Mechanism & Eagle Eye Care+

Taiwanese banks are combating financial fraud by combining AI, interbank collaboration, and a third-party fraud-notification process. Taipei Fubon Bank launched the Eagle Eye real-time inquiry mechanism last July, with 21 financial institutions participating. That number quickly expanded to 43. Since then, Eagle Eye has intercepted an average of 61 suspicious cases per month, blocking 76.1 million New Taiwan dollars (about $2.4 million) in fraudulent transactions, a 30% increase over the average monthly blocked amount. A nationwide anti-fraud survey conducted in late 2024 found that nearly 90% of respondents in Taiwan support designated-contact notifications for major financial transactions.

TBC Uzbekistan | Lola – Central Asia’s First AI Banking Assistant

TBC Uzbekistan, one of Central Asia’s leading digital banks, was inspired by Gen AI chatbots such as ChatGPT to design Lola, which TBC calls a “private banker in your pocket.” The AI assistant guides users through TBC’s ecosystem, answering questions and offering advice on financial needs. When users ask Lola for a summary of their spending on a given day, for example, it not only answers the question but also compares that day’s spending with other days and suggests alternative ways to deploy funds.