Introduction

1. Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.

2. Thank you Federal Councillor Karin Keller-Sutter and SIF State Secretary Daniela Stoffel for hosting us here in Zurich for the 5th edition of the Point Zero Forum and bringing Switzerland and Singapore closer together.

3. Switzerland and Singapore are nations and financial centres built on stability, reliability, and trust. And I plan to speak about trust this morning as we explore Trust in the Age of Transformative Technologies.

4. To kick us off, let’s explore a new piece of frontier technology used in this year’s World Cup. I am talking about Trionda — the highly advanced official match ball.

5. Trionda has a 14g motion sensor that tracks trajectory and physical contact 500x every second, transmitting real-time data to help referees make decisions. Trionda has ignited a passionate debate about whether it is making the Beautiful Game better, or destroying it. Just as VAR did. And navigating this paradox is why we are here. Frontier technology is advancing much faster than human trust can keep up. Players and referees must trust the tech for it to work.

6. The word Trionda has an interesting meaning. It combines "Tri" — celebrating the three host nations — with "Onda", the Spanish word for "wave." A unified wave rolling across borders.

7. We can think of the three frontier technologies driving financial innovation using this analogy, with artificial intelligence, tokenisation, and quantum computing comprising our "Tri". They operate on different horizons, but are merging to generate a singular, colossal wave sweeping across our financial systems. Just as co-hosting a tournament requires international cooperation, we can only navigate this technological wave by coordinating our basic rules of trust.

Frontier One: Artificial Intelligence

8. Let’s begin with the first element of our "Tri"—Artificial Intelligence.

9. We are moving rapidly from systems that help us make decisions, to systems that actively shape, and sometimes make those decisions for us. As its influence grows, deep human questions emerge:

• Do we understand how these systems arrive at decisions?

• Are they fair, unbiased, and aligned with our values?
  
  
• Ultimately, who is accountable when they fail?

10. AI has been called a "cognitive amplifier" and "general-purpose life advisor." These descriptions suggest a massive expansion of human capability, but also tempt us with a dangerous illusion. When we build systems that can predict, reason, and write, we are easily seduced into treating them not as helpful tools, but as infallible oracles. We risk buying into Yuval Noah Harari’s thesis in his book Homo Deus that humanity will use technology to upgrade ourselves into all-knowing, all-powerful gods. The mathematician and philosopher John Lennox offered a vital correction to this idea. He warned that when humans attempt to play god, we do not become divine; we lose our humanity.

11. This is the core of our trust challenge. True trust cannot exist in a vacuum of artificial perfection. It rests on human relationships, our shared vulnerability, and our willingness to be held accountable. If we outsource our judgment to an all-knowing digital god, we destroy the human basis of trust itself.

12. During my time at Facebook, I saw this dynamic play out daily. Even as we built our products, we used to remind ourselves at Facebook about Marshall McLuhan’s famous warning: "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." If our tools inevitably shape us, we must be careful how we shape them.

13. AI’s benefits may take years to scale, but the consequences of its misuse can be sudden, systemic, and severe. AI governance is key to managing this risk. Because traditional rulebooks cannot keep pace with AI, we must design frameworks that are agile and practical.

14. To manage these emerging risks, MAS convened a consortium of leading financial institutions. This collaboration produced the AI Risk Management Toolkit and an Operationalisation Handbook, giving financial institutions clear, step-by-step guidance to implement the MAS AI Risk Management Guidelines across traditional, generative, and agentic AI. This consortium has now joined a new workgroup under MAS’ BuildFin.ai initiative to tackle the autonomous risks of next-generation agentic AI.

15. Because we cannot code trust into a machine, but must instead build trust through the human structures around the machine:

• Who owns the decision?
  
  
• Who answers for the outcome?
  
  
• Who is held accountable?

Frontier Two: Tokenisation

16. Our second frontier challenges how we establish and transfer trust in value: Tokenisation.

17. Our global economy depends on our shared confidence to exchange assets, settle obligations, and rely on transaction integrity.

18. Consider the microchip inside the Trionda. It translates physical contact into structured, undeniable digital data — establishing an absolute record of truth for the game.

19. Tokenisation does the same thing for finance, translating physical or traditional financial assets into secure, digital tokens on a shared ledger. This creates a single, tamper-proof source of truth that allows value to move instantly across borders, bypassing traditional friction.

20. Just within the past year, we’ve seen major milestones:

• Project Agorá delivered its prototype
  
  
• ECB published the Appia Roadmap to build Europe’s tokenised financial market
  
  
• US passed the GENIUS Act.

21. These milestones signal momentum.

22. But to scale tokenisation, we must prevent fragmentation. Progress across the broader financial sector remains uneven, and where this unevenness tips into fragmentation, the path to scale is blocked. Tokenised assets must bridge different asset classes, currencies, and networks, remaining fully interoperable with existing systems. Building this seamless global financial ecosystem requires deep public-private collaboration, which is already bearing fruit.

23. Under Project Guardian, policymakers including MAS and FINMA are collaborating with financial institutions to test how tokenised assets can operate safely within regulated systems.

24. Project Mariana, a joint effort involving MAS, the Swiss National Bank, and the BIS Innovation Hub successfully tested cross-border trading and settlement of wholesale central bank digital currencies (wCBDCs).

25. But tokenisation will only go as far as the trust in the systems securing it.

Frontier Three: Quantum Technology

26. This brings us to our third frontier: Quantum Technology.

27. Quantum fundamentally challenges our assumptions about security. Think of data streaming from the Trionda on the pitch, tracking player movements hundreds of times a second. How do we keep this data secure?

28. Much of our current digital infrastructure rests on cryptographic foundations that a powerful quantum computer could break. But quantum is also an extraordinary set of defensive tools, from physics-based, unhackable communication to quantum sensing that secures data in a tokenised world. The real question is: Have we built systems resilient enough to remain trustworthy over time, even as the computing environment changes?

29. Singapore is answering this question head-on.

30. MAS has committed up to S$100M under the Financial Sector Technology and Innovation Scheme to support Quantum and AI capabilities. Through this initiative, MAS is actively co-funding Quantum Technology Centres, driving industry-led innovation trials, and providing security grants to help financial institutions transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography and Quantum Key Distribution. Combined with our nationwide Quantum-Safe Network, we are building a durable, quantum-resilient digital infrastructure designed to stand the test of time.

Trust as The Common Thread

31. At last night’s Speaker’s Dinner, I reflected on Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money. 31. His core thesis is simple yet profound: money is not metal or paper; it is trust inscribed. And ever so often, humanity faces a defining historical moment where we must write a new blueprint for how to organise and build that trust. We find ourselves at such a moment today.

32. As our "Tri" of technologies sweeps forward, we are witnessing shifts that could fundamentally fracture our global financial systems. If we do not act, the global financial highway risks breaking into isolated, national toll roads, even as autonomous agentic payments and tokenisation completely change how value moves.

33. To prevent our wave or “onda” from crashing, we must take three practical steps to engineer trust. Think about it as our tactics:

34. First, we must prevent the fracturing of the global financial highway by building open, cross-border public-private utilities.

35. Our networks must be interoperable by design. Initiatives like Project Guardian and Project Mariana are excellent proof points, so we must actively scale them into multilateral, global regulatory standards, from isolated pilots into live, mainstream financial markets. This means moving past proof-of-concepts toward unified ledgers anchored in wholesale central bank money, ensuring that new digital value remains stable, liquid, and trusted.

36. Second, we must establish the trust architecture for autonomous agentic payments. We need bounded agency protocols, cryptographic identity verification, and clear legal liability rules. Trust cannot be coded into the agent; it must be built into the operational and legal guardrails around the agent.

37. And third, we must bake quantum-resilient security directly into the foundations of tokenisation and agentic payments, ensuring the platforms we build today remain trusted tomorrow. A technically brilliant system still fails if its governance is opaque. A well-governed system still fails if public confidence is absent. We must thus build trust holistically across technology, institutions, and society.

Conclusion

38. The referee is about to blow the full time whistle, so let’s wrap up the game.

39. No matter how many microchips we place inside the Trionda, human coordination and structural trust still define the beautiful game. Because in football, we don't draw white boundary lines, install goalposts, or agree on the offside rule to restrict the players. We engineer those rules and that infrastructure to create a secure, stable, and predictable space where the players can play. The rules and structure are what makes the game possible. And we don’t love football for the sterile perfection of its data. We love it for its beautiful, unscripted human imperfection. Even Messi messed up his penalty last night — although he scored two after.

40. And AI can calculate the exact trajectory of a pass, but it can never feel the raw instinct of a midfielder who makes a blind, impossible delivery. And it’s not because the numbers add up, but because he trusts his teammate is already running into that space.

41. Trust is not a mathematical formula. It is a vulnerable human choice. It is fragile, fallible, and sometimes broken. And that vulnerability is precisely what makes us human. If we surrender our judgment to sterile, unyielding systems in search of perfect certainty, we do not become gods. We simply lose our humanity.

42. So our task in this forum is not to design systems that replace human connection, but systems that protect it. Because the ultimate measure of our technology is not what it can calculate, but whether it makes us more, or less, human.

43. Thank you.