What we learned at Intersekt 2026

Ahead of Intersekt, the industry eagerly awaited the government’s response to the Independent review of the Enhanced Regulatory Sandbox, published earlier this year. The review recommended several reforms to improve Australia’s regulatory environment for financial innovation. During his keynote address, Assistant Treasurer the Hon Dr Daniel Mulino MP delivered the government’s response and released the Financial Innovation Strategy. The strategy sets out plans to create a more dynamic, competitive and trusted financial system.

The government will accept all the review’s recommendations. The existing legislative sandbox will be repealed and replaced with a more flexible model administered through ASIC’s relief powers, bringing Australia into line with the United Kingdom and Singapore. A financial innovation committee will bring industry, regulators and government together to identify opportunities earlier. The government will also consider targeted sandboxes in priority areas – including AI-assisted advice, tokenised markets and digital money – so new ideas can be tested with appropriate safeguards.

Dr Mulino made the economic case for these reforms, emphasising that innovation drives productivity and that productivity, in his words, “in the long run [is] almost everything”. He described finance as the means by which people transact, save, borrow, manage risk and prepare for retirement. From that perspective, financial innovation is ultimately about helping people achieve those outcomes more effectively.

The broader strategy extends beyond sandbox reform. Dr Mulino confirmed that consultation on a new Payments Strategic Plan would begin shortly and referred to digital asset and tokenisation legislation passed this year. He also described the Consumer Data Right as undergoing a “reset”: non-bank lenders have recently joined the regime, which has around 1.5 million users, and a business case is considering whether ATO data could be shared through it. On scams, he outlined an ecosystem-wide response involving banks, telecommunications companies and digital platforms.

Throughout his address, the Assistant Treasurer stressed the need to balance growth with appropriate safeguards and maintain the social licence required to bring the community along. He acknowledged the difficulty for governments asked to enable the rapid rollout of technologies whose long-term effects are not yet known.

RSM Australia was honoured to moderate a panel on the future of payments featuring leaders from Tyro, AP+ and NAB. The discussion explored how the payments experience could evolve by 2030 and the challenges the industry will need to address along the way.

From a business perspective, Australia is moving towards more payment rails than ever before. However, businesses derive little value from the rail itself; what matters is lower costs, settlement certainty, richer data and simpler integration. New infrastructure should therefore be assessed by whether it reduces complexity for businesses accepting payments. The same principle applies to consumers. The distinction between in-store and online payments reflects legacy infrastructure rather than customer preference, and the future points towards payments that are seamless and effectively invisible.

Connecting to the broader regulatory focus of this year’s festival, the panel also explored issues of security and trust. They expect agentic AI to become a meaningful part of the payments ecosystem by 2030, managing transactions rather than simply processing them. AI is already being used by both fraudsters and those defending against them. As payments become more seamless for customers, trust will increasingly depend on the integrity of the infrastructure beneath the experience. Because these risks are systemic, the panel argued that more responsibility should sit within shared infrastructure rather than with individual participants, whose fragmented responses can leave gaps.

In general, the panel came to two broad conclusions. First, invention is not the same as innovation. A capability becomes an innovation only when it solves a genuine problem and is adopted by merchants, customers and the wider ecosystem; acceptance must therefore be designed alongside the technology. Second, the future of payments will not be defined by a single rail or technology, but by the convergence of infrastructure, trust and customer experience. The system works best when the technology itself recedes from view.

The uncomfortable reality is that fraudsters operate without regulatory constraint and can deploy AI faster than the institutions defending against them, and we should expect the same asymmetry to apply with agentic AI.

Integrated data strengthens fraud detection

The strongest fraud defence comes from connecting data that already exists across the organisation. Warning signs of mule accounts or account takeovers may be spread across login, payments and KYC systems, where each appears routine on its own. Bringing these signals together can reveal fraud without requiring a more sophisticated model. Integrating systems may require upfront investment, but fixing fragmented tools later is often more expensive. The stakes are particularly high for fintechs, where a single major incident can threaten the business.

The regulators

It was heartening to see regulators use Intersekt 2026 to signal a more open and forward-looking approach to emerging technologies.

Reserve Bank Assistant Governor Brad Jones launched a consultation on how RITS, the Bank's core settlement system, should support a tokenised ecosystem and integrate existing and new forms of money. He highlighted the RBA's Project Acacia as an example of testing already being conducted here rather than overseas. 

There was a notable shift in focus when comparing to last year’s Intersekt. In 2025, the payments licensing framework dominated discussions, and tokenised money only received an occasional mention. This year saw the reverse; payments licencing drew comparatively little attention, but there was a strong current of conversation around tokenised money and agentic commerce came up constantly. Last year the industry watched where the ball was bouncing; this year, where it is going next.

One of the more significant signs of a more collaborative regulatory culture emerging was seeing ASIC and APRA on a joint panel with Stripe and Remitly, taking direct questions on the payments licensing reforms. 

We also heard from Andrew Hastie MP, who delivered a keynote on AI that was in substance about national security, arguing that where Australia sources its AI is a question of resilience rather than procurement.

The session that the RSM team resonated the most with came from Xero chief executive Sukhinder Singh Cassidy. She spoke with pride about Xero’s growth from New Zealand into Australia and now the United States, highlighting the importance of an exceptional team, giving people room to experiment and solve real problems, and continuous innovation. She rejected the idea that pursuing several things at once reflects a lack of focus, describing it as portfolio management across core, adjacent and moonshot bets, some of which are expected to fail. 

Her broader message was that innovation depends on the environment around it. Policy settings, incentives and access to capital can either encourage businesses to take risks and scale from Australia or push them elsewhere.

That is a powerful message that reflects the major concerns we are hearing from clients. Capital is hard for growing businesses to obtain, while proposed capital gains tax changes coincide with a markedly tighter approach to R&D Tax Incentive claims. The supports that helped a company such as Xero scale are narrowing at precisely the moment the Government says it wants to lean into growth. A thematic sandbox is of limited value if the businesses it is designed for cannot fund the experiment.

Overall, though we left Intersekt 2026 more optimistic than we arrived. We saw regulators prepared to test and consult openly, and businesses prioritising customer trust. Our takeaway is that innovation, regulation and customer experience are not competing priorities but the same objective viewed from three positions.

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