What APAC's payments shift demands of compliance

Real-time payments, which have become the standard in Asia-Pacific, are outpacing the programs built to regulate them. Interpol reports that cybercrime accounted for more than 30% of all crime recorded across Asia and the South Pacific in 2025, with combined losses estimated at $40 billion. 

In Singapore alone, more than nine in ten residents and around 350,000 merchants use PayNow, and 61% of firms are prioritizing real-time monitoring to keep up, according to our 2026 State of Financial Crime research. For compliance leaders, the right question to ask is whether their frameworks, data, and teams can keep pace with money that settles in seconds.

At the opening session of The Future of Compliance Asia-Pacific, our Global Head of FCC Strategy at ComplyAdvantage, Andrew Davies, was joined by:

• Angela Ang, Managing Director, APAC and President, Singapore at BitGo.
• Arnaud Wenger, Chief Compliance Officer at Tazapay.
• Leona Gan, Director of Business Development at FOMO Pay.

Together, they walked us through the forces driving payments across the region and the demands each imposes on compliance teams.

Real-time compliance as the new standard

Real-time rails are the primary way money moves in most developed APAC markets. But once a payment is confirmed, it cannot be recalled, which compresses the window for intervention to almost nothing. That leaves one place for compliance to work: the front, understanding a customer’s purpose and source of funds (SOF) before the first payment rather than waiting to see what happens.

“We should not call compliance at the end, when we have a fire everywhere.” 

– Arnaud Wenger, Chief Compliance Officer, Tazapay

Detection also has to run at the moment a payment happens, which matters most where digital payment tokens (DPTs) are involved, and has the added benefit of reducing suspicious transaction reports (STRs) filed after the fact. 

“Everything related to digital payment tokens has to happen on the spot – the transaction monitoring, when the transaction happens within our ecosystem.”

– Leona Gan, Director of Business Development, FOMO Pay

Visibility as the real stablecoin challenge

Stablecoins have entered the mainstream of cross-border payments across APAC, but treating them as a wholly new category misses the point. Because they operate on public blockchains, transaction data is transparent and often freely available, which, when paired with robust upfront due diligence, gives a compliance team more to work with. 

“Firms going into stablecoin payments should take advantage of that transparency to better inform their compliance decisions.”

– Angela Ang, Managing Director, APAC & President, Singapore, BitGo

Visibility breaks down in fractional flows, where funds move from wallet to platform to wallet, and a compliance officer sees only one segment. This is all down to the logic behind the Travel Rule: follow value a hop or two beyond the immediate transaction. 

“Let’s look not at what happened one or two hops before, but what happens one or two hops after – that’s the only way to know whether there’s money laundering behind it.”

– Arnaud Wenger, Chief Compliance Officer, Tazapay 

AI-enabled fraud at industrial scale

As it turns out, our 2026 State of Financial Crime research found that authorized push payment (APP) fraud is the top concern for Singaporean firms.

Globally, Global Financial Integrity estimates transnational crime is worth between $1.6 trillion and $2.2 trillion a year. Yet organized crime uses AI to run familiar fear-and-greed scams at scale, so teams are seeing recognizable typologies far more often than new ones.

“The technology, whether it’s AI, whether it’s blockchain, is a neutral thing. It just depends whose hands it’s in and how well they use it.” 

– Angela Ang, Managing Director, APAC and President, Singapore, BitGo

Automated detection has a real limit, because many scam methods never appear in public data, which makes peer collaboration one of the most effective tools available.

“We still rely on peer sharing. When we talk to peers in the payments industry, we share our knowledge about criminal activity and what each of us has encountered.”

– Leona Gan, Director of Business Development, FOMO Pay 

One standard, many jurisdictions

A cross-border payment may be subject to three regulatory regimes in a single day. The workable model is to set one strong group standard as the baseline, adapt it locally, and scrutinize counterparties directly, especially in weaker jurisdictions.

“What we’re adopting is complying with the higher standard, so we’re more comfortable acquiring clients from different jurisdictions and markets.”

– Leona Gan, Director of Business Development, FOMO Pay

This aligns with the evolving regulatory landscape shaped by authorities like the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and the EU’s Authority for Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AMLA). The focus has shifted toward practical outcomes, effectiveness, and alignment with a firm’s specific risk appetite.

From control to confidence: Proving effectiveness

Modern regulation demands real-world effectiveness over paperwork. Late 2025 regulatory penalties in Malaysia proved that delayed reporting fails to stop instant financial crime. 

Compliance teams must abandon static quarterly metrics and adopt live, actionable risk dashboards focused on continuous improvement rather than a flawless, zero-incident record. The operational version of the same idea closed the session.

“Financial services are moving at the speed of life, in real-time. That’s why we need real-time intelligence in a dashboard.”

– Andrew Davies, Global Head of FCC Strategy, ComplyAdvantage

Aligning compliance velocity with real-time payment settlement

To summarize, here are three practical, actionable takeaways for compliance leaders over the next 12 to 24 months:

1. Build compliance into the product from day one, so controls sit up front where real-time settlement leaves room to act.
2. Treat on-chain and transaction data as intelligence to be used, and follow the money a few hops in both directions.
3. Set one group standard as the floor, adapt it locally, and be ready to show a regulator how the program works, not just that it exists.

Control you can demonstrate becomes confidence, with a board and a regulator, and that confidence is what lets a business move into new markets and corridors faster.