BCG: AI, digital assets and sovereign rails reshape payments
Source: Fintech News SG
BCG's September report argues AI, digital assets and state-built rails will slow payment revenue growth, forcing firms to cut costs, find new income and defend their place in the chain.
A September report from Boston Consulting Group names three forces reshaping how money moves: artificial intelligence, tokenised assets and payment rails built by governments. The consultancy still expects the sector to expand over the coming five years, yet at a noticeably weaker pace — a structural downshift in revenue rather than a passing dip. That leaves payment companies with little slack: trim operating costs, invent fresh income lines and modernise creaking infrastructure.
Vendors and banks are already moving. Treasury software houses Kyriba, Serrala and Bottomline Technologies are shipping AI-native forecasting and risk tools that plug into corporate workflows, while Ripple Treasury lets finance chiefs hold fiat and digital money in one place. JP Morgan, Citi, HSBC and DBS have either trialled or launched tokenised deposits for corporate clients, and central banks are testing ways to make such systems interoperate.
On the AI side, BCG argues agents are lifting the bar on performance, cutting what it costs to run operations, manage risk, satisfy compliance and write code while sharpening routing and authorisation decisions. In treasury, agentic systems can now dispatch payments instantly against cost, speed and straight-through processing benchmarks, absorbing currency exposure and pooling cash within limits the company sets. Early adopters pointing AI at document review report accuracy above 85%, and one large bank's proof of concept showed software engineering work delivered 20% to 40% more efficiently.
Digital assets form the second fault line. Crypto was worth roughly US$2.3 trillion by mid-2026, stablecoins in issue reached US$260 billion, and tokenised claims on real-world assets hosted on public chains added US$38 billion — modest sums, but enough to rewire how assets are issued, held, serviced and settled. BCG sketches a high-growth path where these instruments account for 9% to 16% of investable assets worldwide by 2035, and cautions that value will drain from banks, networks and middlemen unless they stake out defensible ground in distribution, liquidity, compliance or connections to real transaction flows. Sovereignty compounds the pressure: 137 countries operate 24/7 instant systems, India's UPI clears more than 24 billion payments monthly, Brazil's Pix neared 80 billion transactions during 2025, and Africa's 36 live systems across 31 markets handled 64 billion payments worth close to US$2 trillion in 2024.
Why it matters for Singapore: Singapore sits at the crossroads of all three shifts. DBS, listed among the banks testing tokenised deposits, is homegrown, while MAS has spent years running tokenisation pilots and wiring PayNow-style instant rails to partners overseas. The National AI Strategy hands local banks and fintechs a policy tailwind, yet the disintermediation risk cuts both ways — Singapore's advantage rests on owning distribution, compliance and cross-border plumbing, not on assuming today's intermediary roles endure.
