As Asia continues its rapid ascent to becoming the world’s economic powerhouse, the region’s fintech startups and financial institutions are revolutionising cross-border payments
The cross-border B2B payment space is valued at an astonishing US$150 trillion, which presents immense opportunities for innovation.
However, the challenges of high costs, lack of transparency, limited liquidity, and slow transaction speeds persist.
In response, Asia Pacific’s payment pioneers are leading the charge to build a faster, cheaper, and more transparent cross-border payment ecosystem.
The B2B cross-border payment frontier
The B2B cross-border payment space presents a vast opportunity, dwarfing the B2C space at US$100 trillion compared to US$2.8 trillion. Yet, inefficiencies abound.
Anupam Pahuja, Executive Vice President of APAC and MEA at Nium, highlighted,
“It takes upwards of four to five days for a payment to go from one case to another. The cost of it is just crazy, and there’s no transparency. You don’t know where your payment is.”
Nium, a Singapore-based fintech unicorn, has emerged as a powerhouse. Starting with consumer remittance in 2014, Nium has focused on B2B payments.
“We realise there’s a much larger space that we need to tackle on the B2B front than B2C fraud, and within that space, we’re the Intel inside. We’re not the computer. We’re not the outside space. We’re not the UI/UX. We are the infrastructure player that makes these payments happen,”
Anupam explained.
“Our revenue opportunity was US$80 million years ago, reached US$120 million last year, and we’re on target for US$170 million this year. Our travel business is booming in the Asia Pacific, growing at 100 percent, partly due to our status as one of the largest issuers of virtual credit cards globally,”
he added.
“We issued 40 million cards annually, and partnerships with companies like Tredd enable us to operate faster, better, and more cost-effectively,”
he said.
Empowering consumers through purpose-based spending
In the consumer space, fintech like BigPay innovates to “level up people’s lives one transaction at a time.”
Serving 1.4 million card consumers in Singapore and Malaysia, BigPay offers personal loans, micro insurance, card payments, and cross-border payments.
“We’ve uncovered that foreign domestic workers, I mean, the myth is they send small amounts monthly. They actually send about 80 percent of their salary. They send it in small chunks. This is because they don’t know what the other party will do with their funds.
said Mitherpal Sidhu, Chief Operating Officer at BigPay, disclosing this key insight.
“BigPay is building purpose-based spending functionality to address this, allowing funds to be earmarked for specific uses like education or medical fees. ‘That function is what we’re building. And the strategy comes into the picture,'”
Mitherpal added.
Building the highways for seamless cross-border payments in Asia
Companies like Nium and BigPay are not alone in pushing the needle of innovation. Institutions also play a vital role in achieving a faster, better, cheaper cross-border payment experience.
One example is PayNet, Malaysia’s national payment infrastructure, which has made many strides in cross-border payment.
Farhan Ahmad, Group CEO of Payments Network Malaysia (Paynet), envisioned “a world where commerce, trade, and travel are so fluid that the possibilities are endless to him.
“And I think that is a vision that will power the future of the planet,”
he said.
PayNet is collaborating on Project Nexus, a multilateral, non-cloud solution for cross-border remittances.
Farhan elaborated,
“Nexus is meant to be a pilot case for building a multilateral cross-border, non-cloud solution, mainly for remittances, P2P. We are working with Bank Negara Malaysia, supporting them on this mission to build this feature to make remittances seamless. I can send money to somebody in any other country using a phone number, for example. That has tremendous benefits for end users.”
By building the necessary infrastructure, PayNet and its partners ensure that Malaysians and others can use their existing payment devices across borders.
This effort is part of a broader global vision to create a seamless and transparent payment ecosystem, enhancing the ease of commerce, trade, and travel.
Enabling the payment pioneers
The players behind the scenes, like Thredd, play an equally important role. With their expertise, they make the payment magic happen.
They’ve helped ambitious innovators like BigPay and Nium become digital payment pioneers.
Cecilia Tan, Regional VP of Sales (APAC) in Business Development at Thredd, shared,
“We have actually, in the past, helped several fintech unicorns like Revolut to Nium expand from one market to multiple markets. I think Thredd, as the issuer processor, is well positioned to help fintechs drive cost efficiency and improve the payment experience.”
With over a decade of experience, Thredd helps Asian fintechs navigate payment complexities with its proven technical infrastructure, including APIs, transaction tools, and tokenisation.
“We have been in this industry for more than ten years. We are considered market-leading in our home market, in the EU, and in the UK, and we are able to leverage such rich experience and understanding of payment complexity to bring them across to the Asia Pacific,”
Cecilia emphasised.
The race to innovate cross-border payments in Asia
The race to innovate cross-border payments in the Asia Pacific is heating up, with the ecosystem collaborating to build a more efficient, transparent, and accessible payment future.
The impact of these innovations on Asia Pacific’s growth story cannot be overstated, as the value of cross-border payments is projected to reach US$250 trillion by 2027.
With cross-border payments still rife with inefficiencies, the demand for innovation in this space is intensifying. From traditional payment rails to DLT-based rails, we expect to witness rapid change over the next decade.
These advancements depend on the future of commerce, trade, and travel, promising a world where transactions are seamless, transparent, and instant across borders.
Watch “Asia Pacific’s US$80 Billion Cross-Border Payments” to see how innovation is transforming the region’s financial landscape.
Featured image credit: Edited from YouTube
