Asia Tech Podcast

Across Asia, climate risk appears to be rising faster than the systems designed to manage it. Floods, fires, extreme heat, and storms are seemingly more frequent and more destructive, while large parts of society remain underinsured or completely unprotected. In this episode of ATP featuring Bernhard Kotanko, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, Hong Kong, and Shwetank Verma, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Leo Capital, discuss how climate risk is no longer a distant or technical problem for insurance in Asia. It is a daily, lived reality that is exposing deep structural weaknesses in how insurance protection is designed and delivered.Some of the topics that Bernhard and Shwetank covered in detail include:The insurance protection gap in Asia is real and it is getting larger, not smaller.GDP is becoming intangible, meaning that natural catastrophe losses can look less dramatic relative to GDP even while the physical economy absorbs bigger shocks.A lot of climate loss ultimately lands on public balance sheets and pretending this is “private” is fantasy.Loss prevention is cheaper to than reapir, but funding prevention is harder to finance.Insurance can be an “apex predator” that forces better building behavior through building codes and construction standards.

Insurance is undergoing a subtle but profound transformation, one that will ultimately redefine trust, customer experience, and the very nature of protection. It is entering a pivotal shift from slow, reactive processes to experiences that feel immediate, intuitive, and nearly invisible.In this episode of ATP, Julien Condamines, co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at NOVOai,  explains, trust is the core challenge. While Shwetank Verma, o-founder & Managing Partner, Leo Capital, highlights how Asia’s digital infrastructure is accelerating this transformation, from nationwide identity systems to frictionless payment rails.Some of the topics that Julien and Shwetank covered in more detail include:Claims continue to be the moment of truth when a policy holder is most vulnerableIn this context, claims at scale, still generally run on outdated systems and processesAI has reached a point where it is finally good enough to make sense of messy, real-world claimsThe claim form itself is becoming obsolete as true digital transformation takes shapeAs always, the biggest barrier to change isn’t technology, it is organizational fear

The value of the internet is being restructured, again. This time it is not just about information or communication. It is about ownership, identity, value, and agency. A big question we tried to answer was how Asia may be building the foundation of a new economic operating system for the world.The next era of the internet will not be defined by faster applications or richer interfaces, but by a fundamental shift in who owns the digital world. In ATP's conversation with Yat Siu, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Animoca Brands, and Kenneth Shek, Project Lead at Moca Network, a clear theme emerges: digital property rights, portable identity, and programmable value will form the new economic foundation of the internet.Some of the topics that Yat and Kenneth covered in detail include:How the early web democratized information but failed to democratize ownership, allowing platforms to capture nearly all of the economic upside.The internet's first revolution was the dissemination of information. The next phase will be driven by full digital property rights.Yat asserts that blockchain returns ownership to individuals in the same way that property rights created modern capitalism.Yat's belief that open source software created an arbitrage for those who knew how to code.The mistake that "digital identity" simply means a digital passport. Digital identity is the totality of your data, behavior, and reputation, and the value others assign to it.The assertion that tokenization will create the greatest financial literacy boom in human history.

Asia’s economic landscape is shifting in ways that no longer follow a clean, upward trajectory. Growth, opportunity, and digital adoption are accelerating for some, yet financial vulnerability is deepening for others.This episode of ATP with with Lito Villanueva (RCBC), Weili Dong (PayJoy), and Ramesh Jairam (OneConnect Financial Technology) brought clarity to what a K-shaped recovery looks like on the ground—and what it will take to build a path toward a more inclusive future.Some of the topics that Lito, Weili, and Ramesh discussed in detail included:Financial vulnerability is increasing even as digital connectivity deepens. This massive increase in connectivity has not been matched with improvements in wages or formal credit access.There are large economic differences between large urban centers and geographically isolated rural areas.Last-mile financial infrastructure can fundamentally transform previously under or unserved communities.Credit access is becoming the defining gap in k-shaped economies. The real economic divide is those with credit access and those without.Smartphones are no longer simply for communication and sharing. Smartphones are now the strategic engines of financial infrastructure.Alternative data is continuing to rewrite the rules and frameworks of credit analysis and underwriting.

Financial institutions are entering a new phase in which automation is no longer the goal, autonomy is. Instead of tools that simply expedite tasks, agentic AI is beginning to observe, reason, and take action across operational workflows. This shift can fundamentally change how work gets done.In this episode of ATP, Julien Condamines, co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at NOVO.ai and Chee Beh, SVP and GM of APAC at Yuno explain that agentic AI is beginning to handle not just tasks, but entire operational outcomes, freeing humans from repetitive workflows and pushing them toward higher-order judgment, empathy, and strategic thinking.Some of the topics that Julien and Chee discussed in detail include:Automation improves efficiency, but agentic autonomy changes the fundamental design of work.Expertise matters more than ever in an AI-Driven world and the quality of AI output depends on the quality of human input.Human intuition does not go away, it becomes much more valuable.Every transformative tech cycle predicts massive job losses; yet that has historically been wrong. As new tools increase productivity, organizations generate new problems for humans to solve.Removing tedious work suddenly frees teams to pursue ideas for which they never had time. Projects that had been stuck in “dream” mode now have the opportunity to flourish.

Asia’s financial landscape is evolving along uneven but deeply revealing lines. Southeast Asia is shaped by speed, experimentation, and the need for financial inclusion at scale, while Japan is defined by stability, institutional trust, and a deliberate approach to modernization.In this episode of ATP, Samantha Ghiotti, a co-Founder and CEO of Habitto and Shwetank Verma, a co-Founder and Managing Partner at Leo Capital, discuss how these differences illuminate why digital public infrastructure, identity systems, interoperable payment rails, and secure data-sharing frameworks, will be central to the region’s next phase of fintech growth.Some of the topics that Samantha and Shwetank discussed in detail included:Digital public infrastructure will be the primary catalyst of innovationIndia’s public digital infrastructure is more advanced than much of the rest of the worldSoutheast Asian startups still cannot scale like founders imagined back in 2012Data sovereignty is the next big battle and the markets where data portability becomes a norm will see faster innovationThe next decade of Asian FinTech will be defined by convergence, building infrastructure that prioritizes stability, trust, and long-term consumer protection

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming one of the most influential forces inside modern enterprises, and insurance is no exception. Its potential to automate underwriting, accelerate claims, and deliver unprecedented predictive insight is immense.While AI is starting to reshape insurance with speed and scale, it also exposes a hard paradox: the industry that prices uncertainty is hesitant to insure AI-driven uncertainty. In this episode of ATP, Bernhard Kotanko, Senior Partner at McKinsey and Asia-Pacific Insurance Practice Leader, and Julien Condamines, co-Founder & Chief Revenue Officer at Novo AI, argue that AI creates two intertwined risk fronts—enterprises deploying AI and insurers using it themselves. Some of the topics that Bernhard and Julien discussed in detail include:Although insurers may be stepping back from covering AI liabilities today, the industry’s history proves it eventually develop frameworks for new and unprecedented threats.Insurance contracts will be forced to change as AI inserts new third parties into every process and liability becomes fragmented.Both reject the idea that AI should autonomously make underwriting or claims decisions. Humans should remain in the loop.Artificial intelligence enables massive underwriting productivity, but only with good data.Insurance remains an emotional business. AI may be able to process documents, detect patterns, and generate proposals, but only humans can reassure someone in crisis.

Scam operations have transformed into highly organized, cross-border networks that function less like lone criminals and more like global enterprises. These groups build physical infrastructure, create vast fleets of fake or stolen accounts, and use AI to generate convincing messages, voices, and identities.As David Agranovich, Director, Global Threat Disruption at Meta, explains on this episode of ATP, today’s fraud ecosystem spans physical compounds in Southeast Asia, cross-platform digital infrastructure, and AI-accelerated content generation.Some of the topics that David covered in detail included:Scam networks now operate like multinational corporations. The are armed with hundreds of devices, routers, and workers...industrializing fraud.COVID did not just reshape work culture, it supercharged online crime.A scam is not a message, it is a carefully crafted lifecycle. Scams have a structured attack chain, similar to cyber-warfare kill chains.Modern, scaled scams are inherently cross-platform so combatting fraud requires coalitions, not silos.Fraud detection and defenses require tech companies to collaborate in this space, not compete.

The convergence of blockchain technology with real-world commodities is beginning to challenge long-held assumptions about who can access and trade strategically important assets. Uranium, once limited to large utilities and specialized traders because of regulatory and logistical barriers, is now being reimagined as a digitally native, globally accessible commodity.In this episode of ATP, Arthur Breitman, co-founder of Tezos and the visionary behind Uranium.io, reveals how tokenizing uranium is less about crypto experimentation and more about solving a long-standing market inefficiency. Uranium, one of the world’s most strategically important commodities, has historically been inaccessible to all but large industrial players.Some of the topics that Arthur covered in detail include:Tokenizing uranium is not about crypto. It is a structural improvement to an inefficient market.Arthur believes that tokenizing uranium is about building a new, global market, with custody, global accessibility, interoperability, and 24/7 rails and that there is simply no better infrastructure layer than a public blockchain to accomplish this.When we spoke about blockchains in general, Arthur posited that transparency was never a feature; it was a constraint of early design.Most tokenized asset projects fail because they underestimate the legal fabric required to bind the digital and physical worlds.Interest in uranium is driven by three large macro factors, 1) an aging memory of past nuclear disasters, 2) climate pressures, 3) AI-driven energy demand.

Compliance is often viewed as a necessary burden, something designed to prevent mistakes rather than enable progress. Yet the ideas explored here challenge that assumption by reframing compliance as a potential catalyst for trust, speed, and intelligent growth.In this episode of ATP, Martin Markiewicz, CEO at Silent Eight and Boon-Hiong Chan, Industry Applied Innovation Lead at Deutsche Bank discuss the increasing complexity of today’s regulatory landscape. Diverging rules across markets, strict data-localization requirements, and growing expectations for explainability demand a more thoughtful approach to automation.Some of the topics that Martin and Boon-Hiong covered in detail included:High-velocity organizations treat compliance as part of product design and competitive strategy.Intelligent automation in compliance can flip unit economics, expanding total addressable market and funding growth.Treat compliance AI as an operational risk instrument you continuously tune against policy, appetite, and outcomes.Data localization is a constraint. Architect for local data, global signal: keep sensitive data in-place while exchanging derivatives of truth.Elevate talent from doing the work to governing the work, with tools that surface reasoning, variance, and drift.