The payment landscape in Asia-Pacific (APAC) is undergoing a significant transformation, fueled by real-time payment rails, government initiatives, and evolving customer preferences.
This collection of reports and interviews offers a comprehensive snapshot of the region’s payment ecosystem, painting a picture of resilience, innovation, but also emerging risks. They tackle emerging trends and critical topics including the mass adoption of biometric “face pay” in China, the regulatory challenges of instant cross-border payments, and the proliferation of AI-driven fraud activity.
These resources aim to provide industry stakeholders with the essential intelligence needed to navigate this rapidly evolving landscape.
Digital-First by Design: How Asia is Redefining the Future of Payments – HPS and Datos Insights
This whitepaper, released in March 2026 by Moroccan payment company HPS and research firm Datos Insights, explores how Asia has emerged as a global leader in payment innovation, characterized by a shift towards digital-first financial services, mobile-first experiences, and real-time payment networks.
The report highlights how Asia has become a preview of evolving global standards, outlining key strategic imperatives for financial institutions aiming to capitalize on the region. It explores Asia’s unique customer requirements, competitive market dynamics, and the critical role of data and analytics.
The report also emphasizes that partnering with innovative technology companies is essential for organizations to keep pace with rapid changes in payment methods, regulations, and consumer expectations.
Cross-Border Account-to-Account Payments in Asia-Pacific: Innovation, Partnerships, and Real-Time Solutions – Visa Direct
This blog post, published in November 2025 by the payment network, examines the rise of instant cross-border account-to-account (A2A) payments in Asia, highlighting the trends driving this, and the challenges hindering fast, secure, and transparent A2A transactions across the region.
The post underscores the critical role of remittances in APAC’s financial future, and explores how the region’s digital-first culture is providing a fertile ground for digital payment services. It also emphasizes the acceleration of ecosystem partnerships, which is broadening corridor coverage, and enhancing customer experiences.
However, the report also identifies signfiicant challenges in APAC’s cross-border payment market, emphasizing the region’s fragmented infrastructure, the need for robust risk management, and regulatory complexity arising from diverse legal requirements across the region.
In payments, implementation is strategy – OpenWay Group
This post, by digital payment software vendor OpenWay Group and released on April 2026, examines why payment platform transformations typically fail, highlighting poor delivery and implementation practices as the main culprits.
The post argues that ineffective delivery does more than cause delays. It also slows time to market, inflates the cost of future change, limits scalability, and constrains the business models an institution can support later. By contrast, disciplined delivery creates compounding value through faster launches, more efficient scaling, less disruption and stronger platform economics over time.
The post highlights OpenWay Group’s focus on disciplined execution alongside technical features, and shares several successful case studies. For example, OpenWay Group’s Way4 platform was delivered in nine months for a processor whose acquiring base later grew to 2 million customers. Another case is a digital multi-bank processing platform which went live on AWS in just four months. Finally, a third case involves a wallet platform launched in nine months and scaled to 40 million consumers and 700,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in three years.
Face Pay vs. Tap to Pay: Which Method Will Win in Asia? ft. Sam Su, Sunmi – Fintech Fireside Asia
In this interview conducted in January 2026 by the Fintech News Network, Sam Su, CMO of Sunmi, a China company that provides business Internet-of-Things (IoT) hardware solutions including payment terminals, point-of-sale (POS) systems, and mobile devices for merchants, discusses the current state of the payment industry in Asia and Sunmi’s offerings.
Sunmi operates in more than 200 countries and regions globally, deploying various payment devices including face recognition payment terminals, with over half a million such devices deployed in China through partnerships with the likes of Alipay.
The discussion also explores how payment preferences vary significantly across Asia. For example, in China, “face pay” is seeing massive adoption, while in Southeast Asia, QR codes and softPOS are still dominant. Finally, markets like North America and Europe still heavily rely on payment cards.
The Next Chapter in Payments: Safety, Experience & Speed ft. Hasan Khan (Trust Bank) – Fintech Fireside Asia
In another interview conducted by the Fintech News Network in December 2025, Hasan Khan, business head for cards and unsecured lending at Trust Bank, explores what’s next for the payment industry, delving into pivotal trends reshaping the industry including embedded finance, real-time payments, instant credit decisioning, hyper-personalized customer experiences, and rising scam activity.
Khan also details how Trust Bank utilizes cloud-native infrastructure to achieve fast onboarding and gamification to make financial wellness engaging.
APAC Fraud 2026 – Sumsub
The APAC Fraud 2026 whitepaper, produced by identity verification platform Sumsub and released in April 2026, examines prevailing fraud types, their evolution, interconnections, and key areas of focus for prevention leaders.
The paper highlights a shift in attackers tactics from crude forgery to convincing AI-made deepfakes and synthetic identities that bypass traditional checks. It also explores the devastating scale of schemes like romance scams and pig butchering, and looks at what these integrated threats mean for banks, lenders, payment providers, and marketplaces.
The paper warns of the widening gap between how attackers operate and how organizations are defending themselves, highlighting it as one of the biggest risks heading into H2 2026. Its goal is to equip professionals with the tools and knowledge to combat AI-driven fraud more efficiently.
The 2026 APAC Payments Outlook: Building a Foundation for Growth – Adyen
This blog post, by Dutch payment firm Adyen released in February 2026, looks at the trends shaping the payment landscape in APAC in 2026.
It highlights how trust is no longer built solely on the payment method, but now depends on recognizing shopper behavior, patterns, and context across the entire journey. It also explores how digital growth is increasingly paired with innovation in in-person payments, particularly through the expansion of mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) solutions, and Tap to Pay on iPhone.
The post looks at the rise of agentic commerce, exploring how the focus is now shifting from discovery to delegation, requiring merchants to upgrade their payment infrastructure to securely handle transactions initiated by AI agents. Finally, it addresses the urgency of fraud activity, framing it not just as a security issue but as a critical revenue problem.
Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by bookzv via Freepik
