Building the Future of Digital Payments with JP Morgan's Wee Kee Toh

Ari Redbord (00:02):

I am Ari Redbord and this is TRM Talks. I'm Global Head of Policy at TRM Labs, we provide blockchain intelligence software to support law enforcement investigations and to help financial institutions and cryptocurrency businesses mitigate financial crime risk within the emerging digital asset economy. Prior to joining TRM spent 15 years in the US federal government, first as a prosecutor at the Department of Justice, and then as a Treasury Department official where I worked to safeguard the financial system against terrorist financiers, weapons of mass destruction, proliferators, drug kingpins, and other rogue actors. On TRM Talks, I sit down with business leaders, policymakers, investigators, and friends from across the crypto ecosystem who are working to build a safer financial system.

(01:05):

Between May 2024 and April 2025, reports of generative AI enabled scams surged by an astonishing 456% according to Chainabuse data, A platform maintained by TRM Labs just the prior year had already seen a 78% rise driving home. One Critical truth AI has become a force multiplier for fraudsters. At the core of this shift is the weaponization of generative tools, large language models, synthetic media, and deep fake technology to craft more compelling and believable scams. M has documented deep fake based crypto scams featuring manipulated videos of figures like Elon Musk, inviting victims to double your Bitcoin or claim fake giveaways. One instance alone appears to have netted scammers around $5 million in livestream fraud within minutes. But deepfake scams aren't confined to celebrities. Scammers now use live or coded deepfake calls to impersonate company executives, family members, or public figures. They deploy LLM powered personas, chatbots and fake help desks to build trust over time and guide victims towards fraudulent platforms.

(02:20):

Criminals are even outsourcing much of this to AI as service providers paying to generate conversation scripts, phishing content and fake identities, the threat landscape has evolved. Sophisticated fraud networks can now reach hundreds or thousands of targets simultaneously with minimal human oversight, deep impersonations, romance scams, and synthetic voice cloning have enabled criminals to escalate schemes across geography and scale observed these techniques being used even in financial grooming scams lasting months. Yet the same innovations deployed by scammers are now being harnessed defensively. Blockchain intelligence platforms like TRM Labs integrate AI powered tools that trace elicit fund flows, detect suspicious smart contracts, flag emerging fraud typologies, and automate investigative workflows. With real time anomaly detection and predictive risk analytics, investigators can dismantle AI and augmented scams faster. And now I sit down with JP Morgan's Wee Kee Toh. Today I am joined by Wee Kee Toh, the Global Head of Business Architecture at Kinexys Digital Payments at JP Morgan. Wee Kee. Thank you for joining, thank you for joining at this moment and really excited for the conversation today.

Wee Kee Toh (03:46):

Yeah, thanks, Ari.

Ari Redbord (03:47):

Tell me sort of how did you end up in this role at JP Morgan? You're a real early adopter expert in this space, so tell me a little bit about how you got to this point.

Wee Kee Toh (03:56):

So I was actually involved in digital currencies almost 10 years ago, so it has actually been pretty long journey for me. I joined Kinexys Digital Payments about three over years ago, but maybe let's start at the beginning because I think as we talk through the different parts of blockchain crypto, the evolution, in fact, I do feel like a large part of my work actually has a lot to do with the evolution within the industry as well. So the move from experimentation to live production usage, it actually coincided with my own personal journey of moving from experimentation at the of Singapore and then to doing live products at JP Morgan. So 10 years ago, I pretty much just dropped right into it because when I joined Malaysia Authority of Singapore, MAS, as we usually call it, I was in the FinTech innovation group. I was in the payments and technology department within the FTIG.

(04:49):

So it was just one of those questions that came one day that someone was like, oh, this whole blockchain thing looks really interesting. Can you try to find out a little bit more about it? So I did a bit of digging. I think the first thing that I came across was actually IBM's open blockchain. So what eventually became Hyperledger Fabric, tried it out, did some simple applications just try to do and see how it works and honestly, back then I didn't really understand what the hype was about, what made it so special, but it was an interesting piece of software. And then I heard Joe Lubin. So there was this occasion where we actually had ' talking about Ethereum and he was actually explaining this concept of the word computer, and that's when things started to click. That's when I was like, okay, this is a really interesting concept, this idea of a single computing platform where everyone can deploy their applications.

(05:41):

We're able to do all sorts of different applications deployed on this public Ethereum and all this application has this ability to interact with each other. That's when I was like, oh, this is actually really interesting. So we started getting a lot of high around blockchain crypto, but no one really knew what it was about, what they were even talking about. It was just a lot of all these buzzword flying around, and we always believed that the best way is to actually learn through doing. So that's when we were like, okay, let's get together. Let's get some of these people who are really interested in the technology together, come together to explore it, to learn about it. And that's actually how we started on Project Ubin.

Ari Redbord (06:18):

It's absolutely an amazing story and when I look around the world, when I got to TRM five years ago, I looked around the world and said, alright, who are the most important regulators and who've been doing this the longest? And obviously MAS in Singapore really, really has, and to be in the moment when MAS as really one of the first regulators was starting to do it, it's amazing. What were those lessons from Project Ubin going back to 2016 that you learned at the time, but then also how have they been applicable as you've kind of built or thought about the space as it's grown?

Wee Kee Toh (06:47):

So Project Ubin, we went through five phases of it. There were six reports that were publish. I think the knowledge that was generated was probably one of those important contribution important outcomes from the project itself. But personally, I do think that the most important outcome was actually the development of talent and ecosystem in Singapore. So a lot of times when people look at Project Uben, and they think about it as CBDC project, as the MAS project, but back when I was at MAS, we actually referred to this as a payments project and an industry project. So it was primarily a payments project with digital payment tokens. But what happened was that the tokens are actually issued by the Central Bank, hence we referred to it as Central Bank issued or CBDC. But CBDC was never the initial objective of the project. It was really around payments, but we just happened to be the subject and we were issuing our tokens. So that made it CBCD token. It was also an industry project. So this was around everyone coming together to learn about the technology, how to use it across the five phases. I think we have hundreds of people who were involved in some way or another. So developing the talent and expertise in this new space, developing Singapore as a leading center for blockchain innovation, I think that was probably the most important outcome that came out of Project Ubin much more than the knowledge that we generated.

Ari Redbord (08:04):

It's really amazing because when I think about that moment, you think about all that MAS has done since and how it's been really a model for what other regulators globally. It's amazing to have been a part of that moment.

Wee Kee Toh (08:15):

Yes, so it was really an amazing moment for myself as well. I think there was a whole people element to it just working with all of the brightest people within the industry, at least in that space for that time. So some of the people I work with in JP Morgan today, they were involved in the project right at the start of it. Back then, those were the people working on Quorum, actually building a new blockchain protocol. So it was great because as part of Project Ubin, we actually had expertise, like leading expertise all around the world coming together to work on the project together.

Ari Redbord (08:46):

I feel like your career has been really defined by this experimentation, especially from a regulatory standpoint and now obviously more from a business financial institution standpoint. But tell me about your experience at the BIS Innovation Hub.

Wee Kee Toh (08:58):

So maybe before I even go into BIS, I just wanted to bring up one more point and that was kind of like the natural transition from Project Ubin into Project DunbarUm and talent being one of the biggest contribution or outcome from Project Ubin itself. So what happened then was that we started to see that we have developed a fairly big pool of talent, but we were actually continuing to tie them out in industry experimentation. So towards the end of phase five of Project Ubin, we actually decided to make probably the most difficult decision for the project, which was to conclude it. The view was that there's actually a cost to doing such POCs. It's not just the monetary cause of running a project, but really the focus and attention of industry participants as well.

(09:45):

So Ubin in a way, I think it was becoming too successful for its own good. We could probably have ran the project for another five years, everyone would still participate, but at what cost to the industry. So that's when we decided to take this view that actually we need to conclude project bin, release the resources back into the industry and that's how we can further generate even more growth within the sector itself. I actually remember the initial draft of the press release ending the project we wrote the conclusion of Project Ubin marks the end of experimentation and the start of commercialization. It was really interesting because you know how press releases often go through many rounds of reviews in government. I was getting live updates on the review process itself because everyone who got the draft of the press release actually ping or just caught me when they saw it.

(10:31):

So in a way it was like writing an obitutary for the project itself and I had to go through five stages of grief with everyone in the review. Everyone who saw it was like, are you serious? Are you sure? Is this really what we are going to do? But it was actually tears of joy as well because right after we concluded the project, Padio was born shortly after, it was a joint venture by JP Morgan, DBS. We sent the charter Deutsche Bank and a number of others joining after. And the industry was also doing lots of interesting work in Singapore. So you had JP Morgan building, it's what we call JPM coin back then, but what we know as Kinexys Europe payments today, DBS built its DBS digital exchange. Lots of FinTech startups was actually entering into Singapore building all of this new products, new services.

(11:17):

And that to me was really that whole big part of Project Ubin the conclusion of it and what came out of it. So there was one part that came out which was really from a commercialization perspective, banks building live products. And the other part was further experimentation, but not just in a single CBDC but in a multi-CBDC context. So this was the part where you were asking me earlier around BIS Innovation Hub solve of the projects that we did. So two Project Ubin, we proved that yes, it's possible to do multiple currencies on a single blockchain. We have the ability to do different type of transactions on it now we wanted to see, okay, what happens if we bring multiple central banks in and look at multiple central banks issuing CBDCs on a common platform? This was actually really interesting because one of the vendors that we use for this particular project was Partio itself.

(12:06):

That was something I was really proud of to see Partio getting involved in some of these other experimentation. And the really cool thing is that when we did the multi CBDC project, the partio product was used almost as it came out of the box. So we essentially swap out some of the banks and the currency names like we had in Partio, we have commercial banks doing commercial bank money. So you kind of have JP Morgan for US dollar DBS Bank for Sing dollar, all these different settlement banks and the settlement currencies. We just swap out the names. Like now you have MAS, we have sing dollar CBDC, you have Bank Negara with Ringgit, CBDC, you have Australia with Aussie dollar CBDC, and everything worked out of the box. And to me it was a validation of the idea that we had around this idea of multicurrency settlement. You can do it with commercial bank money. You can also do it on an experimental basis with CBDC. The underlying technology is actually very similar.

Ari Redbord (13:04):

Fantastic. It really does. When you talk through all of this a, it's like it's history, but it's really history that built the conversations that are happening now in exactly the work that you're doing. Specifically your current work at JP Morgan with Kinexys is really still all about building that next generation of digital payments infrastructure, a lot of what you experimented with as a regulator. Talk me through a little bit about the most significant insights or lessons you've gained at Kinexys over the last few years of building and what that means to you.

Wee Kee Toh (13:33):

So I would say again, it is very much like the journey how I moved from the MAS to Kinexys. So if you think about it from two perspective, I went from doing experiments to doing live project and the other perspective is I went from a regulatory body to a regulated body. So the biggest difference is really from a planning horizon perspective. So when we think about public sector, generally we think in terms of years and decades, but private sector, the X in weeks and months, but if you actually go in a little deeper, it's really not that different. So public sector focuses a lot more on the designing and planning while private sector focuses on the execution. So the first big insight for me was really the need to design for the future and even while we built for the present. So it was a bit of pulling together the two different perspective to it, the public sector perspective and the private sector perspective.

(14:23):

So designing for the future is very important to not create tech that. So if we think too mildly, if we think only from a short-term perspective, we end up building systems that are very rigid, they don't scale well and we end up with architecture and spaghetti connections very quickly. So I thought that was a useful learning for me even when I'm in the private sector, which is really the idea of let's design for the longer term even if we need to build immediately and very quickly. The research with MIT, so we've been doing a fair bit of research with MIT digital currency initiative. I think it's a good example of how we try to avoid some of this short-term thinking. So a lot of times we are doing product development, but we also do academic research in parallel. So academic research, it forces us to take a more broader view of what an ideal product looks like without the confine of resources and time. So even while we accelerate efforts of product development building very quickly, we don't lose track of the bigger picture. So that's really that one perspective of designing the future while building for the now.

Ari Redbord (15:26):

It feels like there are a couple of things that are specifically important when it comes to what you're building and honestly and the experimenting that you did as a regulator, programmability, interoperability. How do you think about these types of things? And we've heard interoperability referred to as the holy grail of digital payments. Talk to me a little bit about how you're thinking about these things as you're building and maybe even bringing in some of your experience from the sandboxes and the work that you were doing at MAS.

Wee Kee Toh (15:50):

So I would say that programmability and composability is probably one of the biggest differentiator of blockchains today. Something that was previously not possible or very difficult to achieve. So if you think about Kinexys digital payments today, we have a live blockchain based payments platform. We do about two to $3 billion in transaction value every day. We allow our clients to do cross-border payments in different currencies in nearer time and around the clock. So we allow payments to be faster with longer operating hours and more operating days. So some of this more better actually works well because they can have very intense extensive impact in the Middle East, for example. So they generally have their weekends on Fridays and Saturdays, so now they actually have an extra day to transact on Sunday. So that was a very extensive impact to them. But ultimately this is really the usual thing about who is able to do it bigger, better and faster.

(16:46):

So traditional systems, they can also build incrementally to solve for this. So if you think in terms of real-time payment system today, they already enable faster real-time payments domestically. Once we start looking at connectivity of all this RTB system, you are going to enable that even for cross-border payments. So a lot of these capabilities that we built today in terms of making it faster, you can do it with traditional systems eventually as well, but programmability or programmable payments I think is a whole new different field altogether is a game changer. So with programmability, a client can then now deploy their logic into a bank.

Ari Redbord (17:22):

That's fantastic. And one thing we often hear about is this idea of like, well, this technology is going to rip and replace this thing that existed before, but the reality is that they're all going to have to work together in some type of concert, whether you're talking about CBDC, whether you're talking about private stablecoins, whether you're talking about public blockchains, tokenized deposits, the ecosystem is going to have to work together seamlessly for this to work. How do you think of interoperability, which you hear about as the holy grail of the space?

Wee Kee Toh (17:51):

We use the word interoperability probably way too much without actually describing what we mean. So when we look at interoperability, there's actually multiple layers of it. So you can think about the application and the platform that is deployed on. So from application perspective, I think when we think about interoperability, this is really around token standards. So how do we define token standards that you are able to reuse for all the different forms of payment tokens? So when you think about payment tokens, there's not just stablecoins. There's also CBDC that's deposit tokens, that's a lot of commonalities with some differences between them. But are we able to define a common token standard that we can actually use for all of these different tokens? I think from an interoperability perspective on the application layer, token standard is probably the most important. So today we are having this issue where we are having a lot of different blockchain platforms.

(18:44):

I mean, you look at the news over the last two months, every week we probably have a new L1 or L2 coming up. So we expect that in the coming years we're going to have a lot of all of this different blockchain platforms in the market itself. Now, the biggest value that we see all of blockchain is really this idea that all the different parties, you can issue tokens on a common network, they're able to interact directly with each other. So once we start having multiple of these blockchain platforms, how do we still enable that same old vision of seamless connectivity integration across all of these different smart contracts? I think that is the biggest question and that probably needs to solve on a much more technological level. How do we enable blockchains to, I guess, communicate with each other in a way that still preserve composability in a way that still preserve composability? I think that's probably going to be the biggest challenge in terms of interoperability on the platform level.

Ari Redbord (19:39):

We talk about technology challenges and there are certainly a lot, that's a huge one today. I am always been confident that technology as it evolves and it will continue to meet a lot of these challenges, there are also regulatory challenges and questions. I think it's very interesting. I would love your perspective. Having worked at MAS in the really early years of shaping crypto regulation, the US recently passed the GENIUS Act, which is the first ever piece of legislation, really meaningful legislation at all in the crypto space in the us. What does GENIUS mean globally and how are other regulators reacting to it?

Wee Kee Toh (20:12):

I really love that you asked this question because I'm starting to see that there's a US view of how US dollar stablecoins are going to benefit the rest of the world, but there's also a rest of the worldview of how US dollar stablecoins could put...

Ari Redbord (20:23):

Totally. You have to understand both views. That is a great point. Yes.

Wee Kee Toh (20:27):

Yes, yes. So this second part of it is not commonly discussed, so let's go a little bit deeper on that. So generally when you think about stablecoins, they're more useful for international rather than domestic payments. If you think about international payments, it's usually your major trade currencies, and actually most of them already have stablecoin regulations today. But even from that perspective, 98 or 99% of stablecoins today continue to be in US dollar. So I think this is going to continue into the foreseeable future. Most of the stablecoins will be denominated in US dollar and issue of the us. So what this is causing is this very interesting situation where you have us being a net issuer of stablecoins and the rest of the world being a net holder and user of stablecoins, and there's going to be this huge margin of difference between the two.

(21:16):

So I don't think that the central banks and regulators outside of US are entirely comfortable with how this is playing out. That's starting to be more concerns around monetary sovereignty, currency substitution, other effects of dollarization. There's also the concern around financial stability, especially if most of these stablecoins are issued out of their jurisdiction. So we are starting to see that already. For example, in Europe there was some recent discussion around risk of multi issuance scheme. I think this is really good. This is really indication that central banks, regulators outside of us are getting more and more concerned about the effects of US dollar stablecoins.

Ari Redbord (21:54):

I think it's really interesting. How do you think this all plays out?

Wee Kee Toh (21:57):

Well, I think a lot of central banks and regulators are starting to look at how they can impose certain more safeguards or potentially even restrictions around the usage of stablecoins. So Europe already has that as part of the MiCa framework. Actually, if you think about it from that perspective, even US and both US and Europe have those provisions within their stablecoin regulation itself, where they looked at stablecoin issue out of the country versus in the country itself. And a lot of time there are restrictions around stablecoins. They are issue out of the country. So I think more and more central banks are going to take a similar approach, which says that if you want to have your stablecoins circulating in my economy, you'll need to either be subjected to some level of supervision or you have to comply with regulations within my jurisdiction. So I think there's going to be a lot more, I guess, regulation relating to the usage of stablecoins, not just on the issuance of stablecoin.

Ari Redbord (22:51):

I think it's such an important perspective. What other challenges do you see out there that regulators should focus on as adoption, whether it's stablecoins or more broadly tokenized deposits or digital assets more broadly as they proliferate? What are some other challenges that are front and center for you for regulators?

Wee Kee Toh (23:09):

I think one of the biggest topic being discussed a lot today is singleness of money. This is one part of regulatory question, but another part, a general economy and commercial question as well. So if you think about just from an FX perspective, so when we talk about US dollar and Euro exchange today, we generally think of exchanging US dollar and Euro. You don't think about who's the underlying settlement bag that comes in later as part of settlement itself. But if you, you're thinking from FX exchanges of stablecoins. Now today you have some of the major stablecoins you have like USDC, USDT, and PYD. And if you look at some of the crypto exchanges overseas, they sometimes even have different rates for the three US dollar stablecoin. Now in a traditional financial construct, this should have never happened because you would think about it from a singleness of money perspective.

(23:57):

If you have one US dollar with one bank, it should be the same as a US dollar with a different bank. But from now when we think about stablecoins, because there are so many different stablecoins out there, you are actually essentially exchanging one specific stablecoin in one currency for another specific stablecoin in a different currency. So what this means is that there's going to be fragmentation of liquidity. I think FX using stablecoins is going to be really challenging and we probably need to figure out if there are mechanisms of making this a lot more efficient and seamless, perhaps some ability to exchange between different stablecoins of the same currency and how we could actually essentially enable singleness of money even with stablecoins, this will be very important questions that need to be worked out before stablecoins are able to gain much more usage, especially from a high value transaction perspective.

Ari Redbord (24:50):

Let's build on that a little bit. One of the reasons I love talking to you, and I'm having so much fun in this conversation is you are so energized and passionate and positive about this space, and it's probably because you saw those early days of innovation and now you've seen how much it's grown. What are you most excited about when you talk about digital payments, innovation and financial services? What are the things that gets you most excited right now, either that you're working on or you're seeing other great people work on out there?

Wee Kee Toh (25:13):

So the biggest benefit of blockchain is really the idea of integration. The idea that I could be having my US dollar deposit token, European bank would be having some Euro deposit tokens. Someone else could be acting as a market maker and then providing a automated mechanism for exchanging of this two deposit tokens. So if you look from a more traditional payments perspective, generally you have one single entity doing all of these activities. But in a blockchain world, we are able to all deploy our smart contracts, the smart contracts can interact with each other. So from that perspective, we are all able to essentially integrate a lot better and more seamlessly with each other. And to me, that's really the big benefit of blockchains because we are going to provide a much more integrated financial ecosystem. We're going to provide much better financial services to our clients. And that to me is really that big set of benefits around what blockchain brings to users.

Ari Redbord (26:07):

It just struck me as we're sitting here, we are in this really interesting moment with what's happening in APAC, but also what's happened in the United States with GENIUS. Do you feel like we're in a moment that's almost sort of like a lot of the work that you've done today to sort of culminating in this moment where you see JP Morgan, you're sitting right at a financial institution as we see this really interesting institutional adoption, right? Do you feel like you're made for this moment or something along those lines?

Wee Kee Toh (26:31):

I would say that I was at the right places at the right time. I mean, I was at MAS when the whole interest in crypto first started. So I was right in the start of it. So there was a whole period of time where there was a lot of experiments. I was in the middle of doing all of these experiments when there were all of these questions that needed to be answered, working with the brighter, smartest people on answering questions. I think that there was a good moment in time that I was at the right place. And then subsequently, once we start going from experimentation into live usage again, I was at the right place. Again, at JP Morgan, we're probably one of the largest banks that's big on this particular area. We built a live product. We're transacting close to $3 billion every day on our blockchain based payment system. So I would say these are probably good examples of really being at the right place at the right time.

Ari Redbord (27:18):

It's extraordinary. Well, let me end on a personal note then. We've talked a lot about digital payments, but when you're not thinking about digital payments, the future of money, what do you do for fun? What inspires you outside of your work?

Wee Kee Toh (27:27):

I actually love to read a lot and I also love to travel a lot. So those are the things that I really do. And actually the background is quite interesting because most of the time you see people with a bookshelf, all the books that they read. But actually, if you see behind me, those are most of my staff for traveling, for camping. Those are the things that I love doing on the weekends.

Ari Redbord (27:46):

Amazing. So tell me about camping. So you said you travel, but it's more than travel. You're camping often when you travel, what does that look like? Are youa glamper? Is this a fancy tent? Are you cowboy camping as they call it here? What are you doing?

Wee Kee Toh (27:58):

Actually, I do a mix of all of that. So I've done very simple camping and just going out over the weekends. Fall is really nice for camping, so we just bring our tents, drive out to somewhere and then camp somewhere and look at the Fall colors. So that's that. I was in Patagonia and of last year. That was really nice. And then we did some of the more premium or glamping kind of camping, a mix of that together with the hot so that was nice as well. And then couple of years back, I did Annapurna circuit hiking in Nepal. So that was hot to hot. Again, a different form of camping as well. Well, you have nice, because you have nice four walls, you are always in a good place to sleep at the end of the day. But at the same time, facilities are a lot more basic, but that's what you expect when you are like four or 5,000 meters altitude. So yeah, all forms of different campaigns. I love them all.

Ari Redbord (28:50):

I love it. Wee Kee, thank you so much for joining TRM Talks.

Wee Kee Toh (28:53):

Yeah, thank you, Ari.

Ari Redbord (28:58):

That was such a cool and really unique conversation. I mean, you talk about Wee Kee's journey from the very early days. We're talking pre-2016 MAS where they're really just building what crypto policymaking can look like and not in Singapore really in the world. And then you talk about his experience at BIS where they're doing sandboxes and experiment with digital payments and what the infrastructure should look like in CBDC. I mean, this is really early to be having these types of conversations. But then to take that decade-ish of expertise and take it to JP Morgan, which is really for years has been a real innovator in digital payments from a traditional financial institution. He mentioned JPCoin and now Kinexys. What a really extraordinary journey that takes him to this moment where we're seeing rapid accelerated adoption by traditional financial institutions. Really so many takeaways, and I think we got a little deeper than we do sometimes on some of the technology and some of the real importance of interoperability and programmability and what this technology means. So really grateful to have a conversation with someone who's been building in this space as a policymaker and now as a business leader for a long time.

(30:07):

On the next TRM Talks, I sit down with Circle APAC lead Yam Ki Chan. If you love the show, leave a review wherever you're listening to it and follow us on LinkedIn to get the latest news on crypto regulation, compliance, and investigations.

TRM Labs (30:24):

TRM Talks is brought to you by TRM Labs, the leading provider of blockchain intelligence and anti-money laundering software. This episode was produced in partnership with Voltage Productions. The music for this show was provided by iKOLIKS.

Ari Redbord (30:41):

Now let's get back to building.

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