Pat Patel speaks about finance with the calm of someone who has seen several revolutions arrive early, stumble, and then become ordinary. His career has moved through the hidden machinery of money: the UK’s Faster Payments system at VocaLink, the rise of Money20/20 Europe, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and now the Global Finance & Technology Network, the organization behind the Singapore FinTech Festival and the Point Zero Forum in Zurich.
In conversation with Michael Blaschke and Stefan Grasmann on Bitcoin, Fiat & Rock’n’Roll, Patel describes a financial system caught between old rails and new ambitions. The vocabulary has changed — stablecoins, tokenization, agentic AI, quantum computing — but the deeper question remains familiar: who gets to shape the infrastructure on which money moves?
Patel’s answer is neither romantic nor fatalistic. Technology matters, but timing matters more. Capital matters. Regulation matters. The willingness of institutions to speak to one another before the market has already chosen a winner may matter most of all.
The End of Fintech’s First Era
The first wave of fintech, Patel argues, was built on a stack of technologies that now feel almost invisible: the smartphone, APIs, cloud computing, digital public infrastructure and blockchain. They changed how financial services were distributed, connected and consumed. Mobile phones became bank branches. APIs opened once-closed systems. Cloud computing altered cost structures. In India, Brazil, Singapore and elsewhere, public digital infrastructure showed how identity, payments and access could be rebuilt at national scale.
That era did not destroy banks. It sat on top of them. Much of fintech’s first generation improved the interface of finance while leaving its deeper architecture intact.
The next wave looks different. Patel sees artificial intelligence, tokenization and quantum computing as the defining technologies of the coming cycle. Quantum may still be some distance from mainstream financial deployment, but AI and tokenization are already pressing against the foundations. They do not merely improve distribution channels. They ask whether balance sheets, compliance, settlement, identity, markets and money itself can be redesigned for a world where software does more than execute instructions.
For financial institutions, that is an architectural challenge. Decades of accumulated systems, regulatory obligations and business processes cannot simply be replaced by a new layer of code. The work is slower, more expensive and politically charged. It requires bridges between legacy banking infrastructure and emerging networks where assets, deposits, securities and currencies may exist in programmable form.
Stablecoins and the Sovereignty Question
The stablecoin debate has moved with unusual speed. A topic once treated cautiously by many regulators has become a strategic concern for governments, central banks and commercial institutions. Patel points to the United States as the market now setting much of the tempo. Regulation there has changed the international conversation, pushing other regions to revisit their assumptions.
In Africa, he sees a new curiosity among central bankers and policymakers. Conversations that were peripheral a year ago have become central. Stablecoins are now discussed in the context of local currency projects, cross-border payments, passporting frameworks and financial inclusion. In Singapore, the approach has been measured and deliberate. In Europe, the picture is more conflicted.
Europe moved early with regulation, especially through MiCA, but Patel suggests that the continent’s instinct for consumer protection may have slowed experimentation. The concern is no longer merely whether stablecoins are safe. It is whether Europe can preserve monetary and financial sovereignty in a world where dollar-based digital money moves faster, scales globally and attracts the strongest private-sector networks.
That question becomes sharper when stablecoins cross borders. If a euro stablecoin is issued by a non-European company, where are the reserves held? Which jurisdiction controls the risk? What happens when the token moves globally but the assets backing it remain trapped in a national or institutional framework? Beneath the technical language lies an old contest over influence.
A New Language for Money
One of Patel’s most revealing points is that finance is struggling with language as much as technology. Central bankers, commercial banks, fintechs, crypto-native firms, regulators and software companies use the same words differently. “Digital money” can mean a retail CBDC, a wholesale CBDC, a stablecoin, a tokenized deposit, a bank liability, a bearer asset or a settlement instrument.
Those semantic disputes are not academic. They shape law, product design, risk models and public trust. A regulator asking about systemic risk may hear a crypto founder answering with decentralization. A commercial banker may speak in terms of liabilities and compliance, while a software company thinks in workflows and programmable execution.
Patel’s work at GFTN and the Point Zero Forum is built around that gap. The aim is to create rooms where different sides can speak plainly, sometimes under Chatham House rules, sometimes away from public stages. He recalls early Point Zero sessions where crypto companies spoke while regulators listened, followed by closed discussions among policymakers about what they had heard. The format mattered because it allowed caution without silence.
Such convening is easy to dismiss as conference diplomacy. Yet in financial infrastructure, where trust is often negotiated before it is coded, the ability to align language can become a practical tool.
When AI Agents Start Spending
The convergence of AI and digital money may be the most radical part of the conversation. Patel points to developments from companies such as Stripe and Amazon, where agents may increasingly interact with retail systems, wallets and payment flows. The financial industry is beginning to ask what happens when software agents initiate transactions, negotiate services, manage workflows and make payments on behalf of businesses or consumers.
That future requires more than faster settlement. It requires rules embedded into the transaction environment. Who authorized the agent? What limits apply? Can a payment be reversed? Who is liable if an agent misinterprets instructions? What kind of money should agents use? How should compliance checks be applied when the economic actor is no longer a person clicking a button, but a system operating inside another system?
Patel suggests regulation may need to shift away from products and toward activities. A financial action should be governed according to what it does and what risks it creates, rather than the traditional category in which a provider happens to sit. That would mark a serious change in supervisory thinking.
Point Zero and the Corridors Ahead
Point Zero Forum 2026 arrives at a moment when private innovation and public authority are again being forced into the same room. The agenda spans AI in financial services, stablecoins, tokenization, regulatory design and the geopolitics of financial infrastructure. Some conversations will happen on stage. Others, Patel hints, will happen in closed rooms and late-night exchanges, where the more sensitive questions around economic corridors, sovereignty and global power can be addressed with fewer prepared lines.
The most plausible future is unlikely to be a single winner. Bitcoin will not erase central bank money. CBDCs will not eliminate stablecoins. Tokenized deposits will not end every other form of digital value. Patel and his hosts return to a more complex vision: coexistence, interoperability and harmonized principles that allow different forms of money to operate without creating new walled gardens.
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