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Population
22.9M
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Online population
22.3M
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Currency
TWD
Population - 22.9M
At the start of 2026, 80.9% of Taiwan’s population lived in urban centres, whereas 19.1% lived in rural areas.
Internet penetration - [96.7%](https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2024-taiwan#:~:text=Population of Taiwan in 2024,of the population is male.)
There were 22.3 million internet users in Taiwan at the start of 2026.
Taiwan already has a highly developed banking and payments infrastructure, so the opportunity in 2026 is to make a great digital financial system even smarter and more interconnected, an ecosystem where banks, tech companies and regulators are learning to innovate together.
Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) has taken an unusually hands-on role, using regulatory sandboxes, expanded business trials and its FinTech Development Roadmap to push collaboration between incumbents and fintechs. The result is a market where large financial groups remain powerful, while fintech innovation increasingly happens around them—in digital payments, open banking, digital identity, AI, fraud prevention, insurtech and embedded financial services.
Payments are particularly mature: as of July 2026 Taiwan had 10 dedicated electronic-payment institutions alongside 19 banks and other institutions offering electronic-payment services. What is changing is the regulator’s willingness to let the industry experiment: rules for financial-sector trials were broadened in late 2024, digital-insurance entry requirements were relaxed in 2025, and recent industry initiatives have focused heavily on AI and anti-fraud technology.
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Taiwan’s Banks Team Up on AI
Taiwan is taking an unusual approach to financial AI: instead of letting every bank solve the same problems alone, the regulator is pushing the industry to collaborate. Banks are experimenting with shared AI for fraud detection, including technology that lets models learn across institutions without exchanging raw customer data. Taiwan is also developing a shared AI language model specifically for finance — think of it as a specialised ChatGPT that understands Taiwanese financial terminology, regulations and practices, which banks could eventually use for tasks such as compliance, document analysis or customer service.
It captures Taiwan’s fintech philosophy nicely: banks compete for customers, but increasingly build the technology underneath together.
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Taiwan has a mature and crowded banking sector, split between large state-linked banks and powerful private financial groups. Government-owned Bank of Taiwan is the largest individual bank by assets, while CTBC, Cathay United, Taipei Fubon and E.SUN are among the major private players. Many belong to financial conglomerates that also span insurance, securities and investments, giving them enormous reach across Taiwanese finance.
Taiwan’s big banks have already digitalised extensively, offering sophisticated apps, digital accounts and increasingly AI-powered services. Cathay United’s CUBE app, for example, brings payments, cards, investments and other financial services into a single interface.
Now the industry is moving into a second phase of digitalisation: AI and big data are becoming priorities, while the regulator is pushing banks toward greater data sharing, digital identity and more open financial services.