Money is critical infrastructure & most people only notice it when it fails. This session explains how trust in digital payments & settlements can be strengthened as cyber threats rise, economies digitize, and quantum moves from theory to threat. You’ll leave with practical trust upgrades that matter most for the decade ahead - access to resilient, secure money & payments in the age of disruption.

Wholesale digital money is moving from experimentation to infrastructure. Across the Indo-Pacific & Europe, central banks, regulators & financial institutions are testing tokenised settlement models to improve cross-border payments, liquidity efficiency & risk management through initiatives such as Project Acacia (Australia), Project Guardian and BLOOM (Singapore).

This closed-door session convenes senior leaders from policy, banking, market infrastructure, and technology providers to compare takeaways from leading pilots and align on what it will take to move from proofs-of-concept to interoperable, secure, scalable wholesale settlement rails across jurisdictions.  

The roundtable builds on GFTN’s recently launched Digital Money principles, emphasising interoperability, sovereignty, resilience, trust, and inclusion. Participants will also consider enabling foundations underpinning trusted digital markets. 

The “next economy” is already here (but not evenly distributed) with AI in everyday services, new digital markets through tokenisation, quantum-driven security upgrades, and green infrastructure powering modern compute. But not all growth stories are sustainable, and bubbles do happen (is AI due for a reset? Is Quantum finally ready?). That leaves a simple question for everyone—from mums and dads, VCs and family offices to Australia’s super funds:

What does this mean for savings, wealth, retirement and the kind of economy we’re building?

This roundtable brings together investors, technologists and researchers, regulators and practitioners to separate durable value from hype, and to define what high-return, responsible investing looks like under real uncertainty.

We also ask the hard questions: if some jobs disappear or shift, how do large funds still deliver for members and the broader economy—not just short-term winners?

Western Australia’s economy is highly export-driven. With exports over $240 Billion, it makes nearly half of the total Australian goods exports. Yet cross-border payments still carry potentially avoidable friction such as settlement delays, layered fees, FX spreads, manual exceptions & compliance overheads, costs that hit SMEs hardest & compound across large trade flows.

This session is a practical, industry-first discussion focused on one question:
How can WA reduce the costs & friction of cross-border export payments & safely adopt modern, regulated digital settlement tools where they deliver clear benefits while maintaining strong compliance, consumer protection, operational resilience & effective supervision?