Six years ago, Disruption Banking first began covering the Singapore Fintech Festival. Today, the organization behind the festival, GFTN (Global Finance & Technology Network), runs events on multiple continents, backs an early-stage investment fund, and helps shape the conversation around artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and tokenization.
We’ve covered many of the key moments of its growth, not because we set out to track one organization’s rise, but because the conversations it kept convening turned out to matter to the readers who follow banking and digital finance with us.
Singapore Fintech Festival 2020: Where It Started
Our first dispatch came in November 2020, when we asked why Singapore, a city-state then barely 55 years old, had built the world’s largest fintech festival. Days later, we reported that Bill Gates had joined the speaker line-up for that year’s pandemic-era, largely virtual edition. Neither piece could have predicted how fast the festival would grow. It returned as a full in-person event in 2022 with over 850 speakers and 450 exhibitors, put artificial intelligence centre-stage in 2023 and quantum technology in 2024.
Attendance rose 33% year-on-year in 2021 alone; by 2024, it drew 65,000 participants, and by its tenth edition in 2025, it reinforced the event’s importance in Singapore’s fintech calendar. Our coverage tracked that same arc: early pieces on digital payments basics gave way to reporting on institutional blockchain, Southeast Asian venture capital, and the infrastructure debates that now dominate the agenda.
Beyond Singapore: GFTN’s International Expansion
GFTN’s international ambitions took shape well before Singapore’s central bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, formally established it as GFTN in 2024, consolidating years of earlier convening work under one banner. In 2022, it launched Point Zero Forum in Zurich, a joint venture with Swiss regulators that drew more than 1,000 senior finance leaders in its debut year, and we were there from the start, following the Forum through its later years of generative AI, digital assets, and regulatory debate. It has since added platforms stretching from Bangkok to the Middle East, each aimed at a different corner of an increasingly connected industry.
In an ambitious move, GFTN pushed into the Southern Hemisphere with the Black Swan Summit in Western Australia, which we’ve watched helping elevate Perth’s profile as a regional hub for digital assets and emerging tech. This July, we sat down with GFTN’s James Boey to discuss Q-FINEX, a quantum finance testbed GFTN built with the University of Western Australia and ST Engineering.
Behind the events, GFTN has also grown a research and investment arm, including an AI research engine called ALFIN and a $200 million fund launched with SBI Holdings for growth-stage fintechs. The organization now operates out of Singapore, Germany, Japan, India, and China, describing itself as a neutral, not-for-profit network built to connect regulators, banks, fintechs, and investors rather than simply host conferences.
Point Zero Forum 2026: Coverage in Full View
This June’s Point Zero Forum in Zurich showed how far both organizations have traveled together. Disruption Banking was the Forum’s official media partner, and our Editor-at-Large, Andy Samu, served as a Point Zero Forum ambassador.
The 2026 edition brought together senior voices from finance, regulation and technology, across main-stage discussions, workshops and more focused public-private roundtables. Much of the conversation centred on what comes next for AI, quantum computing and tokenization: how these technologies move from experimentation to real-world adoption, and the infrastructure and regulation needed to support them.
Over three days we published eleven articles, including coverage of the harder question of who actually buys tokenized assets once the technology works. Circle’s Dante Disparte, who spoke twice at the Forum, later wrote to our Editor-at-Large on LinkedIn: “You handily owned event coverage during the week.”
Singapore Fintech Festival 2026: What Comes Next
Singapore FinTech Festival 2026 returns from 18 to 20 November under the theme “The Coming Rewiring of the Financial System: New Risks. New Rules. New Growth.” Organisers expect more than 70,000 participants and 940 speakers, a scale almost unrecognisable from where the festival stood in a virtual room back in 2020.
After six years of covering the festival, our team will be on the ground in Singapore this November to bring readers closer to the conversations shaping the next phase of finance. Particularly AI, quantum computing and tokenization, the core themes of SFF 2026.
Author: Ayanfe Fakunle
The editorial team at #DisruptionBanking has taken all precautions to ensure that no persons or organizations have been adversely affected or offered any sort of financial advice in this article. This article is most definitely not financial advice.
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