GLOBAL PARTNERSHIPS | DIGITAL FINANCE | FINANCIAL INCLUSION
By Special Correspondent | Singapore, 18 February 2026
When Ericsson and Mastercard announced their partnership on Wednesday morning, the press release was datestamped Stockholm. But the story it tells — about the future of money movement, digital inclusion, and the battle to become the world’s premier payments hub — could scarcely be more relevant to Singapore.
The collaboration, which integrates Ericsson’s Fintech Platform (Mobile Financial Services) with Mastercard Move, promises to let telecom operators, banks, and fintechs launch new payment services — cross-border wallets, remittances, disbursements — faster, cheaper, and with fewer compliance headaches than before. The initial rollout targets the Middle East and Africa. But the architecture being assembled has direct and immediate implications for Southeast Asia, and for the city-state that has spent the better part of a decade positioning itself as the region’s definitive gateway for digital money.
“Singapore has successfully built the infrastructure for a cashless, tokenised economy. The focus now shifts to interoperability — making different regional systems talk to each other.” — Singapore FinTech Association / PwC Singapore, Payments’ State of Play 2026
THE PARTNERSHIP, DECODED
At its technical core, the deal is an integration play. Ericsson’s platform — deployed across 22 countries, serving over 120 million active users and processing more than four billion transactions monthly — gains the global money-movement rails of Mastercard Move: a portfolio spanning 200 countries and territories, connecting over 17 billion endpoints, and supporting transactions in 150 currencies.
The value proposition for operators is straightforward: instead of individually negotiating and engineering connectivity to each payment corridor, a telecom or fintech building on Ericsson’s platform can now access Mastercard Move’s network through pre-integrated APIs and cloud-native infrastructure. The compliance burden — KYC, AML, sanctions screening — is substantially pre-packaged. Time to market collapses from months to weeks.
This matters because the payments landscape has historically fragmented at exactly the moment when it needed to consolidate. A remittance service provider in Manila wanting to serve customers sending money to Karachi, Nairobi, or Riyadh would previously have needed separate banking relationships, separate regulatory licences, and separate technical integrations in each corridor. The Ericsson-Mastercard stack proposes to abstract much of that complexity away.
SINGAPORE’S SINGULAR POSITION
To understand why this announcement reverberates in Singapore, it helps to appreciate the peculiar role the city-state has carved out in global finance. Singapore is simultaneously a developed-market clearing house — foreign exchange trading volumes reached US$1.485 trillion daily in 2025, a 60 per cent increase from 2022 — and the primary node through which capital flows into and out of a developing-market neighbourhood of 680 million people.
That dual identity creates exceptional demand for exactly what the Ericsson-Mastercard collaboration promises: infrastructure that works for both the institutional treasury departments in Marina Bay and for the migrant construction worker in Jurong who needs to send S$300 home to Dhaka before the weekend.
Singapore’s remittance market, currently valued at approximately US$8 to US$9 billion, is projected to reach US$35 billion by 2033, according to market research published in 2025. The drivers are structural and durable: a large expatriate and migrant worker population, a role as an entrepôt for regional trade finance, and the gravitational pull that comes from hosting the headquarters or regional offices of virtually every major financial institution operating in Asia.
Over 98 per cent of Singapore’s adult population holds a bank account, and digital payment adoption rates have crossed 90 per cent. Digital wallet transactions are projected to reach S$89 billion by 2027. PayNow, the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s flagship instant payment platform, is now woven into the fabric of daily commerce in a way that would have seemed implausible even five years ago. Singapore is, in other words, not a market that needs basic digital payment infrastructure. It is a market that needs to export that infrastructure — and profit from doing so.
THE INTEROPERABILITY IMPERATIVE
The most important strategic question for Singapore’s fintech sector in 2026 is not whether digital payments have arrived. They have. The question is whose rails they run on, and who collects the economics.
Project Nexus, the multilateral instant payments connectivity framework led by the Bank for International Settlements and managed since April 2025 by Singapore-based Nexus Global Payments, represents the public-sector answer. By connecting the domestic real-time payment systems of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and India into a single interoperable network, Nexus aims to make cross-border transfers as seamless as a PayNow transaction. Several bilateral linkages — Singapore-Thailand, Singapore-India, Thailand-Malaysia — are already operational.
But Nexus is a public-good infrastructure project. It does not, by itself, address the commercial layer: how financial institutions and fintechs build revenue-generating services on top of that infrastructure, and how they extend reach beyond the corridors Nexus directly serves, including into Africa and the Middle East, where significant communities of workers with Singapore connections are concentrated.
That is precisely the gap the Ericsson-Mastercard collaboration is designed to fill. Mastercard Move’s 200-country reach is not replicated by any public multilateral framework currently operational. For a Singapore-based operator wanting to serve remittance corridors to, say, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, or Nigeria, the private network that Mastercard brings remains essential.
IMPLICATIONS FOR SINGAPORE’S TELECOM AND FINTECH ECOSYSTEM
Singapore’s two major telcos — Singtel and StarHub — both have fintech or mobile financial services ambitions that extend beyond their domestic subscriber bases. Singtel’s Dash digital wallet and its regional footprint through Optus, AIS, Telkomsel, and Globe Telecom make it a natural candidate to leverage exactly the kind of platform integration Ericsson is now offering. Ericsson is already a key infrastructure partner for Singapore’s telecommunications operators in the 5G rollout.
For the broader fintech ecosystem — which numbered over 1,300 firms in Singapore as of late 2025, according to the Monetary Authority of Singapore — the partnership’s significance is as a reduction in the infrastructure cost of going global. Firms like Nium, a Singapore-based cross-border payments infrastructure company, or YouTrip and Instarem, which serve specific remittance and travel money corridors, will be watching closely. The Ericsson-Mastercard stack potentially introduces a new set of well-capitalised competitors into corridors that incumbent fintechs have painstakingly constructed.
At the same time, it creates partnership opportunities. A fintech with deep local customer knowledge and a licensed presence — a Major Payment Institution (MPI) licence from MAS, for instance — but limited global connectivity could use the Ericsson-Mastercard platform as a wholesale infrastructure layer while retaining its customer relationships and brand differentiation. This is roughly the model that has allowed Singapore-based infrastructure plays like StraitsX (stablecoin settlement) and FOMO Pay (merchant payments) to operate alongside rather than against the global card networks.
“Fragmented APIs and inconsistent Know Your Customer requirements across ASEAN nations continue to create friction for businesses trying to scale regionally.” — Singapore FinTech Association / PwC Singapore, Payments’ State of Play 2026
THE MAS DIMENSION
No account of Singapore’s digital finance landscape is complete without reference to its architect-in-chief. The Monetary Authority of Singapore has, over roughly a decade, pursued a deliberate strategy of using the city-state’s small, controllable domestic market as a regulatory laboratory — and then exporting the standards developed there to the region and beyond.
MAS’s regulatory posture has evolved alongside the market. The Payment Services Act, which came into force in 2019 and was substantially amended in 2021 and 2023, created a tiered licensing regime — Standard Payment Institution and Major Payment Institution — that provides clarity without being so prescriptive as to chill innovation. MAS has also been an active participant in multilateral standard-setting, co-authoring the Project Nexus framework with the BIS and participating in the G20’s cross-border payments roadmap.
From MAS’s perspective, the Ericsson-Mastercard partnership represents a test case for how private-sector infrastructure can complement the public-sector multilateral frameworks Singapore has championed. If the partnership succeeds in demonstrating that a cloud-native, API-first platform can dramatically lower the cost and complexity of cross-border payment services, it strengthens the case for the technology standards that Singapore has already adopted domestically — including ISO 20022 messaging and the harmonised API frameworks the BIS’s Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures has been promoting.
The flipside, of course, is concentration risk. MAS has in recent years taken an increasingly firm line on systemic resilience, requiring financial institutions to maintain robust business continuity plans and imposing strict rules on outsourcing to cloud providers. A world in which a significant portion of ASEAN payment traffic flows through a single vendor-integrated stack raises questions that regulators will be watching closely.
FINANCIAL INCLUSION: BEYOND THE TALKING POINTS
Both Ericsson and Mastercard have emphasised the financial inclusion dimension of their collaboration, and in the Singapore context this deserves substantive rather than cursory treatment.
Singapore is home to approximately 1.4 million foreign workers, the majority of whom are from lower-income countries in South and Southeast Asia. Many remain significantly underserved by formal financial services, despite Singapore’s advanced overall banking infrastructure. The reasons are structural: identification barriers, minimum balance requirements, language friction, and a working-hours schedule that makes branch visits impractical. For this population, the difference between a digital wallet that works and one that does not is the difference between sending money home affordably and paying extortionate fees to informal transfer operators.
The potential for the Ericsson platform — which already includes wallet, lending, and loyalty services — to serve this segment is real. Singtel Dash, for instance, already offers remittance services targeted at migrant workers. An integration with Mastercard Move’s 200-country reach could meaningfully expand the corridors served and reduce the per-transaction cost.
The caveat is familiar. Financial inclusion narratives in fintech have a tendency to outpace delivery. The populations that most need affordable cross-border payments are also those with the least digital literacy, the least stable employment, and the greatest exposure to fraud. Singapore recorded S$840.3 million in scam losses as of November 2025, with investment scams the largest single category. Any platform expansion that increases the velocity of money movement without commensurate investment in fraud detection and user education risks inflicting harm on the very communities it aims to serve.
Ericsson’s platform does include enterprise-grade security, and Mastercard has invested heavily in AI-based fraud detection. But the implementation details will matter enormously.
THE COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE
The Ericsson-Mastercard partnership does not exist in a vacuum. It enters a market in which Visa, through a series of fintech acquisitions and network-expansion deals, has been aggressively building its own cross-border capabilities. PayPal and its Xoom subsidiary remain formidable in consumer remittances. Wise, now publicly listed, has built a multi-currency infrastructure that competes directly on cost transparency. And in the background, China’s digital payment networks — Alipay and WeChat Pay — continue to expand their presence among Chinese tourists, students, and business travellers in Singapore, creating a parallel ecosystem that the traditional card networks have not fully penetrated.
The specific advantage Ericsson brings is the telecom operator relationship. In markets across Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Southeast Asia, mobile network operators have a customer relationship, a billing infrastructure, and a trusted brand that banks often lack. That is the market access that makes Ericsson’s platform strategically valuable — and that makes Mastercard’s choice to integrate with it, rather than compete against it, a telling signal about where each party sees its comparative advantage.
For Singapore, the question is whether the city-state’s own operators and fintechs move quickly enough to integrate these capabilities before competitors in other regional hubs do. Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and Bangkok are all investing in their fintech ecosystems. The window during which Singapore can credibly claim to be the default headquarters for payments infrastructure serving ASEAN is not indefinitely open.
LOOKING AHEAD
The Ericsson-Mastercard collaboration, as announced, will begin its rollout in the Middle East and Africa. Asia-Pacific, including Singapore and the broader ASEAN region, is not the immediate target. But the architecture being assembled is explicitly designed to scale globally, and the corridors connecting Singapore to the Gulf states and East Africa are among the highest-volume remittance routes in Asia.
The more immediate impact on Singapore is likely to be felt at the level of corporate strategy and competitive positioning. Operators and fintechs with regional ambitions will need to assess whether to integrate with the Ericsson-Mastercard stack, build comparable capabilities independently, or find other partnership arrangements. MAS will need to ensure its regulatory frameworks keep pace with the infrastructure changes underway. And Singapore’s Smart Nation agenda, which has consistently framed digital finance as a tool for social equity as well as economic competitiveness, will be tested by whether the benefits of this kind of global payment infrastructure actually reach the workers who need it most.
Money, as the press release puts it, is being reshaped. Singapore, whether it acts on that opportunity or merely observes it, will be changed by the reshaping.
Sources: Ericsson / Mastercard press release (18 Feb 2026); Singapore FinTech Association & PwC Singapore, Payments’ State of Play 2026; IMF Finance & Development, September 2025; Kapronasia, Shifts Redefining Singapore’s Payment Ecosystem; AMRO Asia, ASEAN+3 Cross-Border Payments Revolution (November 2025); Report Ocean, Singapore Remittance Market 2024–2033; MAS cross-border payment linkages documentation; Chambers and Partners Fintech 2025 Singapore Guide.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice.