The label “MAS-regulated stablecoin” is about to become a statutory gate. On 1 September 2026 the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) published a consultation on legislative amendments to the Payment Services Act 2019 that would give the MAS stablecoin framework legal effect. The consultation invites feedback by 16 October 2026; responding is not a mandatory…
Bank Indonesia and the Monetary Authority of Singapore switched on the Indonesian rupiah-Singapore dollar Local Currency Transaction framework on 31 August 2026. From that date, twelve appointed banks can facilitate eligible current-account transactions, direct investment and cross-border payments in rupiah and Singapore dollars, with direct IDR-SGD quotation promoted under the framework. The announcement is short,…
On 17 September 2025 the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced that they had exchanged a Memorandum of Understanding on banking supervisory cooperation. The two authorities describe the HKMA-MAS banking supervision MoU as strengthening supervisory cooperation and facilitating the exchange of information and mutual assistance for supervisory purposes,…
On 28 July 2026, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) launched a joint body to defend the financial sector against cyber attacks that use frontier artificial intelligence. Its formal name is the AI-Driven Cyber and Technology Risk Taskforce, shortened to ACT. For a technology-risk or compliance officer,…
On 1 July 2026 the United Kingdom took over the two-year Presidency of the Financial Action Task Force and used its first day to launch the FATF 2026-2028 Roadmap on Combatting Fraud. The launch event, opened by the incoming FATF President Giles Thomson and supported by Executive Secretary Violaine Clerc, set fraud as one of…
On 8 July 2026 the Financial Action Task Force published a global stocktake of public-private partnerships for fighting illicit finance, and the message to reporting teams is blunt: the data that would expose a laundering network usually sits in fragments across separate banks, payment firms and law enforcement files, and criminals move faster than any…
A payment service provider that reads the PayNow Generation 2 study as a press release will be a step behind when the implementation roadmap lands at the end of 2026. On 25 June 2026, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) set out four areas of enhancement to…
Run a single family office in Singapore on the wrong legal basis and you are doing one of two uncomfortable things: managing money without a licence, or relying on an exemption that no longer fits how the rules read. From 15 June 2026, the MAS Single Family Office framework replaces the old case-by-case approach with…
Get the PayNow alias removal wrong and you do not lose a payment. You lose a fraud control. From 6 June 2026 the user-chosen nickname that a retail PayNow recipient could set will disappear, and the payer instead sees selected letters of the recipient’s real registered account name. The Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS),…