Not so long ago, when Hong Kong was struggling with the impact of civil unrest and strict Covid-19 controls, other cities in Asia sensed an opportunity to bolster their respective financial center credentials. Not Singapore, which is already an established Asian financial center – and has grown in recent years – but cities such as Tokyo and Taipei.

Indonesia has no shortage of digital banks, but it is also a huge market with a significant population that has limited access to formal financial services. It is a key market for Southeast Asian platform companies as well. While Grab has digital banking licenses for Singapore and Malaysia, Indonesia is where it has the best opportunity to prove the skeptics wrong.

Across Asia Pacific, criminals are using cryptocurrency to fund increasingly nefarious schemes. While early crime involving digital assets tended to target crypto exchanges themselves, the most infamous being the 880,000 Bitcoin stolen from Japan’s Mt. Gox between 2011 and 2014 now worth $45 billion – today digital assets are linked to money laundering, large-scale scams and funding of illegal arms programs. Crypto proponents usually insist that proper regulation can do much to mitigate this problem. Though regulation can boost investor protection and establish rules of the road, we believe that decentralized virtual currencies’ inherent nature means that potential for abuse will remain high. Regulators in some major jurisdictions in the region have come to similar conclusions and are acting accordingly.

Singapore has become one of Asia’s most important green finance centers, which is well exemplified by its third sale of green bonds in late May. The S$6 billion order book for the city-state’s third sale of green bonds was 2.45 times the amount offered to institutional investors. In addition, the offering of S$2.5 billion in bonds reached the maximum of the S$2.1 billion to S$2.5 billion range provided by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). The Singapore government has said there there is a pipeline of up to S$35 billion in sovereign and public-sector green bonds that will be issued by 2030.

How long has Revolut been saying it has big plans for Asia Pacific? At least six years, if not longer – by our calculations. It has a presence in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore and India and at one time planned to set up shop in many other Asian countries. Yet this ethos originated in a time of low interest rates and near infinite VC funding. Revolut did not have to worry too much about profitability back then, so it could devote most of its attention to growth. At the same time, the multicurrency wallet that lies at the core of Revolut’s value proposition may not be that attractive to customers in emerging markets more focused on gaining access to core retail banking services.

China’s fintech crackdown has been going on in some form or another since 2017. First, the cryptocurrency industry was hobbled. Then peer-to-peer (P2P) lending was reined in and effectively eliminated. The third act in this play has been the forced restructuring of China’s fintech giants, who have been accused of monopolistic practices – which is not untrue – but whose greater offense has been getting a little too large for their own good. Thus far, Alipay has fared much worse than Tencent’s fintech business, but one wonders if the omnipresence of the WeChat app might be a growing risk for the Shenzhen-based company. According to a recent Nikkei Asia report, it already is. 

Despite the best lobbying efforts of certain industry players, Australia is moving forward with long-running plans to rein in the buy now, pay later (BNPL) segment of digital financial services. Provided that the bill introduced on June 5 becomes law, BNPL firms in the country will be required to run credit checks on borrowers and hold an Australian Credit License (ACL).

China’s cashless evolution is a remarkable story, as the country transitioned in less than two decades from a cash-first society to one with an 86% mobile payments penetration rate. The comprehensive ecosystems of Alipay and WeChat Pay have made payments in China among the most convenient and frictionless in the world with one important caveat: One must be within the domestic Chinese payments ecosystems, with a Chinese bank account that can be tied to the payment apps.

With three of Asia’s most successful digital banks, South Korea is now considering adding a fourth. Though the country was well banked before the arrival of the digital challengers, Kakao Bank, K Bank and Toss Bank have all found a way to build market share rapidly without burning an inordinate amount of cash. The former two are profitable, while the latter should reach that milestone soon. Consumer interest in digital banks in Korea is such that the market can very likely support a fourth online lender.