Asia Tech Podcast

Cross-border commerce is entering its fastest, most chaotic growth phase in history. The world’s smallest sellers now have global reach, but they are trying to scale on top of payment infrastructure that was never designed for them.In this episode of ATP recorded at SFF 2025, Nicholas Liao, the Founder and CEO of Whalet explains that today’s MSME sellers are not just exporting products, they are building global brands across DTC sites, marketplaces, and social platforms. But while demand is global, payment systems remain deeply local.Some of the topics that Nicholas covered in detail included:MSMEs are not just exporting anymore; they are going global as brands and Whalet is helping facilitate this.Cross-border eCommerce is exploding, but the payment rails are still missing.One of the most powerful threads in the conversation: payment localization is not a “nice to have.” It’s existential.APAC is home to a staggering 71 million MSMEs, but persistent barriers keep them from selling cross-border.The Belt and Road is no longer just railways and ports. It’s increasingly about digital trade corridors.

The idea of programmable money represents a fundamental shift in how value moves through the digital economy. Instead of money acting only as a static store of value or medium of exchange, it becomes a dynamic instrument capable of carrying rules, conditions, and logic.In this episode of ATP recorded at SFF 2025, Effie Dimitropoulos, the CEO of AUDD Stablecoin, notes that programmable money is not a sudden disruption but the next step in a long evolution of how value moves in the digital world.Some of the topics that Effie covered in detail:Programmable money can attach rules and logic as to where, how and when money can be used.Our comfort with digital money did not just appear. It was earned over time, largely through the rise of the smartphone and everyday digital behaviors.Australia’s economic ties to Asia are deep and complex. Yet the money behind those flows is often routed through a slow, expensive, opaque infrastructure.Tokenization and stablecoins are two sides of the same digital coin.No conversation about stablecoins is complete without talking about regulation. Regulation is not a drag; it’s the precondition for trust at scale.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the way money moves, turning payments from isolated actions into intelligent, context-aware interactions. Instead of searching, tapping, or navigating apps, users will increasingly rely on AI agents that understand their routines, anticipate their needs, and act proactively, often before they make a request.In this episode of ATP recorded at SFF 2025, Jiangming Yang, Chief Innovation Officer at Ant International, explains how AI-powered agents can understand a user’s context, anticipate needs, and act in advance.Some of the topics that Jiangming covered in detail included:Payments are becoming intelligent experiences, not transactions. Jiangming emphasized that AI changes the nature of interaction itself.Agentic AI Is redefining how consumers discover products, decide and make payments.A I will become the operating partner for global business expansion. Instead of consulting multiple advisors for growth, a business could ask a single AI agent for all of the help it needs.Collaboration among agents could fundamentally reshape global commerce.Every innovation pipeline should be gated and supported by security, permission controls and verification layers.

Payments are becoming both more complex and more interconnected, especially across a region as diverse and fast-moving as Asia. The landscape is defined by massive scale, deep fragmentation, and rapid innovation, all of which demand infrastructure that is global at the core but deeply local in execution.In this episode of ATP filmed at SFF 2025, Jeff Parker, CEO of Paymentology, explains how a single global platform can navigate successfully with different markets, cultures, and payment networks.Some of the topics that Jeff covered in detail included:Asia is huge but fragmented. This forces serious players to think beyond generic “global solutions” and build infrastructure that can flex, localize, and still stay coherent.Paymentology's deep configuration that lets each client shape products for their own needs and local nuances. Localization is a blend of platform design and human presence.Culture is not a side-issue, it drives how payment ecosystems actually work and thrive.One rovocative observation: the issuing market is about ten years behind the acquiring market.Embedded finance is really about orchestrating ecosystems.

Asia’s accelerating digital transformation has created an environment of unprecedented interconnection, and unprecedented vulnerability. Threats now move quickly across borders, clouds, and supply chains, exposing both large enterprises and SMEs to risks that often stem from the simplest gaps: weak authentication, exposed remote access, and misconfigured systems.In this episode of ATP, Paul Jackson, CEO of THEOS Cyber, argues defenders can keep pace when fundamentals are properly applied and Gene Yu, CEO of Blackpanda, frames resilience as the speed and effectiveness of ‘Readiness, Response, and Recovery’.Some of the topics that Paul and Gene covered in detail include:Resilience in the cyber space starts with “properly applied” basics, yet most organizations simply have not applied the fundamentals.Cyber insurance is essential, cyber preparedness should not be outsourced to a policy.Resilience is a rehearsed behavior...full stop.Business interconnectivity drives value, but third party risk is now first-order risk.Regulation matters, but enforcement of that regulation is the real lever.

Financial innovation in Asia is accelerating, but not in a uniform way. Markets across the region move at very different speeds, shaped by culture, regulation, and consumer behavior. At the same time, major technological shifts are underway.In this episode of ATP, Chee Beh, SVP & GM APAC at Yuno, explains how the center of gravity is shifting from Generative to Agentic AI, where autonomous agents do not just make recommendations but execute end-to-end actions.Some of the topics that Chee discussed in detail included:Last year’s frontier was GenAI. This year’s is agentic AI: autonomous, goal-oriented agents that don’t just suggest, but do. Autonomous commerce agents are only half the story. Payments agents will choose among your payment methods to optimize for your payment objectives.Payment or frankly any technological optimization is getting more and more personalized and multi-dimensional.For agentic commerce to complete the loop, merchant agents and consumer agents must communicate seamlessly, with payment orchestrators acting as the connective tissue.Southeast Asia markets behave like startups: price-sensitive, experiment-friendly, and hungry for growth. Japan behaves more like an enterprise: precision, trust in institutions, and measured adoption.

Artificial intelligence is forcing humanity to confront what truly makes us valuable. As machines become more capable of performing tasks once reserved for human intelligence, the definition of talent is shifting away from knowledge and efficiency toward qualities like judgment, empathy, creativity, and ethical decision-making.In this episode of ATP, Jeevika Makani, Francis Pẽna, and Kristen Lim posit that while AI levels access to information, it ultimately widens the gap between people who use it to deepen thinking and those who accept generic outputs.Some of the topics they covered in detail included:There is no room for nostalgia about grunt work. Offloading drudgery is progress if we use the time to think, decide, and connect.AI Tools do not replace creativity; they raise the bar for originality.The new premium skills are stubbornly human. Empathy, ethics, and relationship-building do not compress to an AI prompt.Mainstream exposure to AI is barely two years old. As a community, we will build collective intuition for what AI is good at and where it fails.AI is democratizing product creation for SMEs and other small companies.

Across Southeast Asia, small and medium-sized enterprises are the driving force of economic growth, yet many still face obstacles when accessing financing, managing payments, and expanding beyond their home markets. Fintech innovation is reshaping this reality by bridging gaps through digital payment infrastructures, data-driven lending, and localized financial tools.In this episode of ATP, Chen Yu (Nicholas) Liao, CEO of Whalet, and Vikas Jain, Country Head (Thailand) at Funding Societies, argue that the region’s fragmentation, multiple currencies, regulations, and languages, makes regional trade complex and that the path forward is “global vision, local rails”.Some of the topics that Nicholas and Vikas covered in detail include:Cross-border revenue is the most resilient, highest-quality revenue an SME can earn. The difference between aspiration and execution is whether you meet customers where they already areIn fragmented markets like Southeast Asia, trust is the conversion rate. Every mismatch between what a customer expects and what your business actually offers is silent churn.Payments data is the new collateral. Alternative data collapses the time it takes to earn credit trust. The faster an SME can turn “sales” into “creditworthiness,” the faster it can inventory up, hire, and expand.Lending and payments are two sides of the same coin. If a payment platform can provide verifiable, permissioned sales data to a lending platform, you can unlock pre-approved, one-click offers at the moment of need.AI could now be the SME’s unfair advantage if they know how to use it well. AI narrows the talent gap and turns lean teams into leverage.

WEB3 gaming has experienced a turbulent journey, from the early excitement of play-to-earn models and scholarship programs to the realization that crypto speculation alone cannot sustain an industry. The promise of digital ownership drew millions into the space, offering real economic impact for players, particularly in Southeast Asia, during moments of global crisis.On this episode of ATP, Chin Yaul Yu, co-Founder and CEO at W3GG, explains, many studios tied their survival to token prices; when crypto fell, earnings collapsed, treasuries dried up, and hundreds of projects shut down. The core lesson: speculation can’t substitute for product-market fit.Some of the topics that Chin covered in detail:Axie Infinity felt like a paradigm shift and it brought institutional capital and mainstream attention. But much of the surge rode on speculation.WEB3 games correlate tightly with broader crypto markets.Most WEB3 games are hybrids: gameplay lives on centralized servers, while ownership and trading sit on chain. As agentic AI improves, detecting and deterring non-human participation becomes existential across the WEB3 gaming landscape.For W3GG, the goal is to export great games from Southeast Asia, cultivate communities where contribution earns recognition and rewards, and manage a robust digital-asset treasury aligned to gameplay.

Digital transformation is often associated with industries that are already forward looking and generally technologically savvy. However, its greatest impact may come in areas that have traditionally resisted change.Grassroots football and the global seafood trade may seem worlds apart, but both face similar challenges. ATP was joined by Tariq Cassim, co-Founder and CEO of Koach Hub and Scott Chambers, a co-CEO at Seafood Souq to discuss how transformation is not about shiny new tools. It is about rethinking how value and opportunity are distributed across ecosystems that involve millions of lives.Some of the topics that Tariq and Scott covered in detail include:Before you digitize anything, understand the size and scope of the system you are impacting.If digital transformation threatens established advantage, expect pushback. Plan for trust-building as carefully as you plan for features.Stakeholder transparency forces clarity. Once they can see the benefits, adoption accelerates.If you want to sell digital transformation, do not sell dashboards, sell value recovery.Immutability builds trust. When stakes are high, data and the reports they produce need to be trusted.