Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to become a foundational capability for financial institutions as technology advances rapidly, but stronger governance and cybersecurity measures will be needed to ensure its safe and sustainable adoption, Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) managing director Chia Der Jiun said.
Speaking at the Global FinTech Fest 2026 on Friday, Chia said AI was advancing and being adopted faster than other emerging technologies, with AI models already performing at expert or specialist levels in areas including coding, graduate-level science and mathematics, and general knowledge work.
However, gaps remained in areas requiring complex interpretation, strategic judgement, decision-making and human interaction skills.
While a high proportion of companies reported using AI, a much smaller share reported significant productivity gains, he said. This was likely to increase as employees and organizations became better users of AI through training and the redesign of processes and products.
In Singapore’s financial sector, AI is already being deployed at scale for fraud detection, credit underwriting, risk management, regulatory compliance, marketing, customer service and document processing.
Chia said MAS wanted the benefits of AI to spread across the financial industry rather than create a winner-takes-all dynamic dominated by the largest institutions.
To support this, MAS launched Pathfin.ai, a platform and program to share and match validated AI solutions across the industry. The initiative aims to help smaller financial institutions reduce the cost and effort of finding and deploying effective AI solutions. It now has more than 300 participants and a growing number of successful matches.
MAS is also working with law enforcement and the banking industry to test AI models using cross-bank and public-private data to improve the detection of suspicious accounts and transactions in near-real time.
“The aim is to detect sooner, intervene faster and reduce losses,” Chia said, adding that findings from the work are expected by the end of this year.
On AI governance, Chia said MAS and the industry had jointly published a generative AI risk framework in 2023, followed by two AI Risk Management Handbooks in 2025 covering banking, insurance and capital markets.
MAS has also issued Guidelines for AI Risk Management for public consultation, setting out supervisory expectations for governance, risk management and AI life-cycle controls and capabilities.
Chia said the rapid development of AI also posed growing cybersecurity risks. High-severity Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures rose sixfold this year to 2,200 compared with the average of the preceding three years, while CrowdStrike reported an 89% increase in AI-enabled cyber attacks.
Despite the rise in vulnerability discovery and attacks, reported successful breaches had not increased to the same extent, he said, citing AI model guardrails and multi-layered cyber defenses.
Financial institutions should use the time available to strengthen cyber defenses and make greater use of AI for vulnerability discovery and remediation, continuous code scanning, real-time threat detection and incident response.
Chia said AI would increasingly remove transaction and decision-making frictions, with implications for competition, financial institutions, regulation and financial stability.
He also highlighted the growing Singapore-India financial partnership, including the UPI-PayNow linkage and the multilateral Nexus fast-payment interconnection initiative.
He said Singapore and India had much common ground to share and learn from each other as they sought to ensure technology and innovation delivered safe and sustainable benefits.
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