Asia-Pacific banks are pairing AI innovation with stronger fraud controls and tokenized finance. 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.” Most Innovative Bank in Asia-Pacific 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