Asian trade flows are expanding into newer corridors, including Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, while digital infrastructure is changing how payments, trade documents and financing can be delivered across those markets.

For transaction banks, that creates a broader requirement than adding another payment rail or trade-finance product. Sriram Muthukrishnan, Group Head of Global Transaction Services Product Management at DBS, points to a client proposition built around faster execution, financing, risk information and liquidity support, including across markets and time zones where conventional banking hours can become a constraint.

He described convergence as the biggest change. He said clients do not normally look at cash management and trade separately; from their perspective, payments and collections sit within a broader transaction banking experience.

Convergence is changing the client proposition

Muthukrishnan said DBS continues to use technology primarily to improve client experience. Local real-time rails across the markets in which it operates can provide faster payments, while data, application programming interfaces (APIs) and digital trade capabilities are bringing cash management, trade and supply chain finance closer together.

He said the effect is particularly visible in trade, where clients can increasingly receive a digital experience closer to cash management while accessing financing built around data and connectivity. In volatile markets, the same infrastructure can also provide faster information about liquidity stress and risk.

The convergence Muthukrishnan described is therefore less about combining products for its own sake than making the underlying capabilities work together for the client: financing a supplier, moving goods through a new corridor, responding to liquidity stress and completing the payment or collection.

Value-chain finance is extending beyond established supply chains

DBS has spent years digitising supply chain finance, including supplier onboarding. Muthukrishnan said the bank is now extending the model towards what it calls value-chain financing, particularly in emerging industries such as data centres and AI where companies may form part of an economic ecosystem without belonging to a formal supply-chain finance programme.

The approach uses data and connectivity to understand a company’s position in the wider value chain and provide financing when required. Muthukrishnan said the amount of capital needed in some of these industries is also increasing, making partnerships with multilateral and bilateral institutions more important.

One example is DBS’s $500 million facility with the International Finance Corporation (IFC), signed in 2024 under IFC’s Global Trade Liquidity Programme. The facility was designed to support trade flows in emerging markets across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, with DBS and IFC sharing risk. Muthukrishnan said arrangements of this kind help provide liquidity while managing country and bank risk in more difficult markets.

New corridors require financing as well as connectivity

Muthukrishnan said clients expanding into newer corridors want advice, early warning when geopolitical conditions change and consistency from their banking partners. He pointed to Asian flows into the Middle East, Latin America and Africa as areas where DBS is building partnerships and applying its digital trade capabilities.

He gave the example of a long-tenor trade between Latin America and China where extended shipment times created a need to finance inventory while it was on the vessel. DBS used electronic bills of lading and digital processes to support the financing.

The example illustrates why corridor development is not simply a connectivity question. Longer transit times and changing geopolitical conditions can create financing and risk-management requirements that have to be solved alongside the movement of money.

Trade digitisation is advancing unevenly but materially

Muthukrishnan pushed back against the idea that trade digitisation has stalled because documentary trade remains fragmented. He said DBS has concentrated on digitising the parts of the trade book where progress is possible rather than waiting for the entire ecosystem to become paperless.

Muthukrishnan said more than 70% of overall trade finance initiation at DBS is digital, including documentary trade; supply chain finance is almost entirely end-to-end digital; and receivables finance is about 80% digital.

Letters of credit and other documentary processes still face paper requirements and fragmented standards. Muthukrishnan pointed to electronic bills of lading and the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (MLETR) as mechanisms that can move those areas forward, while arguing that progress should be measured across individual trade processes rather than as an all-or-nothing transformation.

AI is moving from internal efficiency towards the client interface

DBS first applied AI to improve internal processing, and Muthukrishnan said generative AI is now being used at scale in areas including compliance, trade-document checking, credit memos, client briefing and software development. The next step is to expose more of that capability to clients.

He said front-end initiation and client engagement are increasingly being powered by AI, with the longer-term opportunity moving towards more agentic experiences. DBS is nevertheless retaining a human in the loop for now, reflecting what Muthukrishnan described as the bank’s emphasis on trust and customer safety.

Clients already benefit indirectly from AI through faster turnaround and a better experience, Muthukrishnan said. As DBS moves towards more agentic client interactions, however, the bank is for now retaining a human in the loop to protect and guide customers while still giving them the benefits of AI.

Tokenised deposits extend the operating day

Muthukrishnan sees conventional cash management and tokenised forms of money converging rather than one replacing the other. For sophisticated corporate treasurers, tokenised deposits can solve specific problems where large amounts of liquidity have to move across time zones or outside banking hours, such as an unexpected margin call.

DBS and Citi demonstrated the broader 24/7 liquidity use case on 5 September 2026, completing a cross-border US dollar payment between Singapore and New York over a weekend using tokenised deposits through the Swift Digital Ledger. DBS said the transaction took minutes rather than the industry norm of up to two business days for comparable cross-border payments constrained by time zones and weekends.

For Muthukrishnan, the longer-term objective is broader than giving sophisticated treasurers another instrument. If the technology becomes invisible to smaller businesses and e-commerce companies, they could simply ask to move or collect money outside banking hours without needing to understand which form of money or ledger makes that possible.

That brings the interview back to the convergence Muthukrishnan identified at the outset. His examples span cash management, trade, financing, AI and tokenised money, but the common direction is to make those capabilities work more seamlessly around what clients are trying to do as they operate across new markets and outside conventional banking hours.