Zip has been one of the biggest Australian buy now pay later (BNPL) success stories, second only to Afterpay. Zip, Afterpay and others have been so successful that other financial firms are hopping on the BNPL bandwagon, from PayPal to incumbent lenders like Commonwealth Bank. As the market grows more crowded and restrictive regulations loom, Zip is looking to expand overseas, including Canada, Europe and Southeast Asia.

South Korea’s digital banks are on a roll, buoyed by robust demand for digital financial services amid the pandemic. South Korea went cashless long ago with credit cards, but since the pandemic hit in early 2020, mobile banking has taken off. As a result, Kakao Bank, K bank and Toss have grown exponentially.  All three of South Korea’s digital banks are on track for IPOs in the next two years, with Kakao likely to go public first.

It was only a matter of time before bitcoin mining landed in China’s crosshairs. Beijing identified decentralized digital currency as a systemic financial risk in 2017 – for its use in skirting capital controls and links to money laundering - and promptly hobbled key parts of the crypto ecosystem, shutting down all exchanges and banning initial coin offerings. Mining does not pose the same immediate risks to the Chinese financial system, but its enormous power usage could crimp Beijing’s efforts to curb its carbon emissions – a major central government policy objective. With that in mind, the prospects for bitcoin miners in China look dim indeed.

The hype about China's digital yuan can obscure the reality, especially in the cross-border space. The most adamant supporters of China’s CBDC argue that it poses a challenge to the US dollar’s role as the world’s dominant international currency because, well, it is digital, has a technological edge and thus will perhaps redefine global payments rails. This argument exaggerates the benefits of digitization while overlooking the fundamentals of the dollar's paramountcy. 

Long lauded for its outstanding pandemic control, and accustomed to no community transmission, Taiwan is now fighting a truculent coronavirus outbreak that is averaging about 300 cases a day. As a result, Taiwan is in a quasi-lockdown state for the first time since the pandemic began. With the government telling people to stay inside and avoid face-to-face contact, this could be a turning point for cashless payments in Taiwan.

U.S.-China financial decoupling is an odd thing. Instead of a linear progression in which Chinese firms gradually eschew going public in the US and delist from its stock exchanges, we see some Chinese companies continuing to seek exits on the Nasdaq or NYSE, while others are seeking secondary listings in Hong Kong as a hedge against forced delisting. Still others are actually being forced to delist like the telecoms giant China Mobile, which is now looking at a new listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

It never felt so good to lose US$422 million. Just ask Sea Group. Southeast Asia’s most valuable listed company indeed went deeper into the red in the first quarter, but its revenue also grew 147% year-on-year to US$1.76 billion. Investors like what they see. Sea’s stock price has risen almost threefold to US$246 from roughly US$83 a year ago.

Australian regulators are stepping up the fight against financial crime after issuing a staggering US$921.59 million in fines in 2020. Disciplinary action against Westpac for serious breaches of Australia’s AML/CFT act accounted for US$920.7 million of that total.In the Asia-Pacific region, only Malaysia issued more fines than Australia in 2020, and that was because of the 1MDB scandal.

Singapore’s largest lenders have started the year off on a cracking note. First DBS reported record earnings and now OCBC has done the same. The city-state’s second largest bank posted a net profit of S$1.5 billion in the January to March period, compared to S$698 million during the same period a year earlier and well exceeding Refinitiv’s estimate of S$1.08 billion. 

Taiwan’s two top e-wallets, Jkopay and Line Pay, have grown exponentially in terms of transaction volume in recent years yet have failed to turn a profit. Data compiled by Taiwan’s Chinese-language Business Next show that Jkopay lost about NT$346 million, slightly less than the NT$347 million in losses a year earlier. Line Pay likely lost NT$424 million in 2020, up nearly 70% year-on-year.