Singapore says a regulated stablecoin pays no interest, and India is a week from letting agents spend on UPI

The Monetary Authority of Singapore opened a consultation today on amendments to the Payment Services Act 2019, setting out how a stablecoin issuer qualifies to be MAS-regulated and what it has to do to stay that way [1]. Comments close on 16 October 2026 [1]. The scope is narrow: single-currency stablecoins pegged to the Singapore dollar or a G10 currency, issued in Singapore [1].

Issuers would hold minimum capital and liquid assets, meet reserve-management and value-stability standards, run stress tests, and keep recovery and orderly wind-down plans for the day something goes wrong [1][2]. And they would not be allowed to pay interest on the coin [1].

The interest ban is the line that costs money

Capital floors and stress tests are compliance work, and you can staff compliance work. A ban on paying interest is a P&L decision taken on your behalf. An issuer holds the reserve, the reserve earns, and the rule says none of that yield reaches the person holding the token, so it stays with the issuer. Which moves the argument about who gets paid one step out, to whoever owns the customer relationship and can bill for it. If you are building on a Singapore-regulated coin, that is the negotiation you are actually in, and you want to know it before you pick a partner rather than after.

PYMNTS puts the framework alongside the EU's MiCA regime and the American GENIUS Act [2]. Ho Hern Shin, MAS deputy managing director for financial supervision, is quoted saying that “trusted and well-regulated stablecoins can serve as a credible settlement asset in tokenised financial markets, while mitigating risks to users and the broader financial system” [1].

The clause I would watch is the foreign one. MAS says it will consider recognising a limited number of foreign stablecoins supervised under comparable overseas frameworks, with the focus on cross-border wholesale use, and that a token jointly issued by a Singapore entity and a foreign one may qualify where the multi-jurisdiction risk is properly addressed [1]. That is the passporting question every issuer has been waiting on, and the operative words are “a limited number”. Nobody has published the list. I tried to read the consultation paper on the MAS site this morning [3] and the page was returning a service-unavailable error, so everything above is from the two reports that carried it.

India put the agent on the rails it already had

The second item is a report rather than an announcement. Reuters, citing unnamed sources, says the National Payments Corporation of India is preparing a Unified Agent Protocol that would let AI agents transact across the Unified Payments Interface, and that it is likely to be unveiled next week at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai [4]. NPCI declined to comment when Inc42 asked it [4], so read the detail below as reporting and not as a specification.

It does not build a new network. It leans on two things UPI already does: UPI Circle, which lets a primary account holder delegate payment authority to a secondary party, and Reserve Pay, which lets a customer block funds for a series of later debits [4]. Put those together and an agent is not a new category of payer at all. It is a delegate with a spending cap, which is a thing the rails could already express. The reported first use cases are low-value and high-frequency, groceries and routine digital purchases [4].

Set that against how the same problem is being solved in the United States, where Agent Pay, the Agentic Commerce Protocol, the Universal Commerce Protocol and x402 are all separate standards competing for the same job. India would be doing it once, at the level of the national rail, with agent registration and authorisation built in. Whether that is faster or slower in practice is an open question. It is cheaper for the merchant, who integrates nothing new.

MAS takes comments until 16 October. The Mumbai unveiling is next week, which means India will have shown its agent protocol with six weeks still to run on the Singapore consultation.