For decades, the holy grail of financial technology was invisibility. The industry spent billions waging a war on friction, relentlessly shaving seconds off transaction times until payments became instant, seamless, and largely thoughtless.

We succeeded. Today, money moves across borders and counters at the speed of a tap, often faster than we can second-guess the purchase. Nowhere is this acceleration more palpable than in Singapore, a market so saturated that the average consumer now juggles up to four credit cards.

But this victory over friction has come with a hidden cost. As barriers to payment fell, vulnerabilities rose, creating an infrastructure that is efficient for legitimate users but increasingly lucrative for fraudsters.

In this hyper-competitive landscape, the speed race is already won. The new contest is for safety and meaningful engagement.

Hasan Khan, Head of Cards and Lending at Trust Bank, speaks with the urgency of someone who sees the industry at a turning point.

Sure, payments have evolved more in the past five years than in the previous fifty. But Hasan shares that same acceleration has exposed consumers to the unprecedented risk of fraud, with nearly $4 billion lost by Singaporeans in the last five years.

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Is faster always better? Real-time payments used to be cool. Now? They’re just table stakes. Here is the scary reality: Singaporeans lost $4 Billion to fraud recently. Hasan Khan (Trust Bank) argues that money moves fast, but fraud moves faster. The new battleground isn’t speed. It’s safety. We spent a decade removing friction. Now, smart banks are adding it back in to protect your wallet. @Trust Bank Singapore #fintech#digitalbanking#payments#singapore

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For Khan, real-time payments are no longer a differentiator; they are “table stakes.” The next leap forward is making payments “smarter, more intuitive, and safer”.

And to get there, he says the industry must do something counterintuitive: abandon its obsession with eliminating friction and instead introduce “strategic friction”.

This intentional slowing down of specific high-risk processes acts as a crucial circuit breaker, shielding consumers from the emotional manipulation behind modern social engineering scams.

Turning Risks into Rewards

Khan speaks with a kind of infectious optimism when he talks about reimagining banking from a dry utility into something entertaining and even fun. He shares that traditional financial tools like charts, graphs, spending dashboards rarely resonate with the average consumer.

To change that, Trust Bank looked to social media and gaming for inspiration. The result was “Budget Buddy,” a playful feature where a character grows and prospers as the user spends, turning routine transactions into a catchy visual narrative.

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How Trust Bank Made Budgeting Fun (Finally) “The more you spend, the fatter they become.” 😂 Budgeting is boring.Trust Bank figured a more fun way to do it. @trustbank.sg fintech digitalbanking banking finance

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But engagement goes beyond gamification. Khan highlights Trust Bank’s bold decision to eliminate Foreign Exchange (FX) fees entirely.

By offering 0% FX fees, the bank turned a traditional revenue stream into a massive engagement tool, encouraging customers to use their cards globally without fear of hidden costs.

There is a clear thread of empathy running through Khan’s thinking. He understands that people want to manage their money without feeling overwhelmed or bored.

This extends to the bank’s hyper-personalisation strategy, where users choose their own cashback categories instead of being forced into rigid, pre-set rewards.

“We’ve just launched this year, a cashback card where you can choose your own cashback category, so you’re customising it for yourself.”

When Payments Disappear Into the Background

Beyond the user interface, Khan points to a deeper structural shift toward embedded finance, where payment is no longer a separate “transaction” but an invisible part of a broader lifestyle ecosystem. Modern consumers, he says, expect to “shop, pay, and borrow” within a single, uninterrupted experience.

Meeting that expectation requires banks to move past real-time settlement and into real-time decision-making. Khan illustrates this with a simple scenario: a customer buying a mobile phone.

Instead of waiting days for a paper credit application to be approved, the bank can now assess creditworthiness instantly at the point of sale, allowing the user to convert the purchase into instalments on the spot.

“We’ve recently launched, in partnership with Visa, instalments at purchase (Trust Visa Instalments). When people do large purchases (at participating merchants), they can use their Trust (credit) card right then and there and convert that into equal monthly instalments at 0%, solving a customer pain point.”

By removing the traditional administrative lag, the bank ensures that financial support appears exactly at the moment a customer intends to buy, when it matters most.

The Tech Stack That Makes Speed and Control Possible

Behind these consumer-facing innovations is a rigorous technological foundation that Khan describes with the confidence of a tech-native executive.

He attributes the bank’s agility to its cloud-native infrastructure on AWS and its modular partnership with Euronet through the Ren Payments Platform, delivering the “reliability at scale” required of a fully digital bank.

The impact is tangible. Trust Bank can onboard a new customer, from application to digital card issuance, in three minutes. Hasan elaborates,

“In Singapore, we have the fastest, actually the world’s fastest onboarding journey. The customer starts the application after downloading the app. From the start of the application to the decisioning, then card issuing for the digital card to be provisioned in an Apple Pay or a Google Pay transaction,  it is in net 3 minutes. These are all the capabilities that we built in partnership with Euronet. Euronet helps us as a key strategic partner, not just as a vendor.”

And this speed extends well beyond onboarding. The same architecture enables real-time control features, such as instantly locking a card or disabling overseas usage.

This reinforces Khan’s view that technology should go beyond merely moving money faster to giving customers immediate, flexible control over their financial lives.

The Race for Intelligence

As Hasan reveals, the race for intelligence has just begun. Trust Bank’s strategy acknowledges a candid reality: in a market where the average Singaporean holds three to four credit cards, being “fast” is no longer enough to win share-of-wallet.

The winning differentiator is now experience, specifically, the balance between “strategic friction” for safety and hyper-personalisation for engagement.

Looking ahead to 2026, Khan points to agentic AI as the next frontier, moving beyond simple transaction monitoring to predictive models that can autonomously block anomalies before a scam occurs.

By combining this high-tech security with gamified features like Budget Buddy, Trust Bank is positioning itself beyond a utility and closer as a lifestyle partner. In doing so, they are proving that while payments must be invisible, the feeling of safety and control should be unmistakable.

Watch as Hasan Khan and Chief Editor Vincent Fong discuss how the bank is preparing for the era of Agentic AI. Catch the full episode, The Next Chapter in Payments: Safety, Experience & Speed, right here.