Money20/20 Asia reminded me how far the payments industry has come, and how far we’ve got to go

Like much of the industry, I was in Bangkok for Money20/20 Asia last week. During my time there, I experienced something amazing. I took my phone out of my pocket, opened my DBS Singapore Paylah! app and paid a street food vendor through a QR code. They got a few baht in their e-wallet, I got some noodles. The exchange rate was decent, I spent no fees and almost no effort.

It felt so simple, but few outside the industry would appreciate how hard this mechanism was to achieve. And that’s the point.

What’s happened over the last few years is that some very complex things in payments have been made simple – at least for the end user. Building the infrastructure, getting different banks, fintechs and third parties to work together, making everything seamless and compliant… those things are definitely not simple.

While I was at the conference, Money20/20 and FXC Intelligence launched a white paper, The New Era of Asia’s Cross-Border Payments, which analysed 1,000 media articles to see what the industry is talking about.

The most-mentioned topics reflect this shift to simplicity. Real-time payments networks and QR payments/wallet interoperability came in second and third – both of which were the key enablers of my noodle convenience. But while those topics describe major shifts that have already happened, the topic sitting at the top of the mentions podium gives a clue as to where the industry is looking next: digital assets.

This won’t surprise anyone in payments – there isn’t an event or conference I go to where stablecoins aren’t discussed. But let’s couple that with another data point from the paper: 83% of the $13.5tn outbound cross-border payments from Asia-Pacific comes from B2B and B2C payments, not consumer remittances.

Businesses are by far the biggest source of cross-border flows, but they aren’t enjoying the simplicity and convenience consumers now take for granted. That’s especially true when it comes to very high-value payments, the type APA specialises in. Reliance on traditional banking rails introduces complexity and hurdles that make replicating the consumer experience almost impossible.

I’ve heard a colleague joke that we’re actually an AML company, because so much of our time is spent on things like KYC, source of funds and giving banks extra information, all to ensure our clients’ trades go through smoothly.

In a way, complexity is good for our business – being able to navigate it is why our clients stay with us, and why we’ve doubled in size over the last year. But less complexity would be better for everyone.

Expectations are also changing. The family offices we work with and corporate treasurers we serve are all consumers too, using RTP networks and QR payments – maybe even digital assets – in their everyday lives.

That’s why there’s so much discussion about the potential of digital assets, stablecoins in particular. The immutable nature of the blockchain means greater transparency, settlement is almost instant, and fees are much lower than those of traditional rails.

I won’t guess whether stablecoins are the future, but what’s certain is that traditional banking isn’t going away. That means if stablecoins have a place, it’s alongside the existing infrastructure. So while they might simplify or improve parts of the chain, the industry needs to integrate the technology as seamlessly as possible.

There’s a good contribution in the white paper from Chloé Mayenobe, Deputy CEO of Thunes, who argues that stablecoins are a transformative addition to the industry, but not a solution on their own. For the end-user, the underlying rail should be irrelevant.

That’s the principle we’ve been building towards at APA. Over eight years, we’ve invested in an ecosystem of payment rails, top-tier banking and liquidity partners, and technology providers, so that even the most complex, multi-jurisdictional payments feel simple and seamless. The next era of payments won’t be defined by any single rail or technology – it will be defined by the operators who can stitch them together and make them invisible.