Asean has a cross-border payments dream that is slowly moving closer to coming true. Despite the very real interoperability challenges, Southeast Asian countries nonetheless seem determined to build a payments rail of their own that can boost the use of local currencies – perhaps at the dollar’s expense – while speeding up transaction time, lowering transaction costs and strengthening connectivity among their respective financial systems. The latest countries to sign onto this project are the Philippines, Vietnam and Brunei.

Just when it seemed Capital A had put aside its digital banking ambitions, the ever-ambitious airline/platform company announced its partnership with the Philippines’ ascendant online lender UnionDigital Bank. The tie-up between Capital A and UnionDigital Bank comes amid a growing travel recovery in Southeast Asia and strong demand for digital financial services in the Philippines.

Most of the time when we write about Singapore’s rise as a wealth management hub, the news is overwhelmingly positive. But every so often, the risks inherent to taking on that role become glaringly apparent. Singapore is no stranger to money laundering risks, especially after several banks in the city-state were involved with the 1MDB mega scandal. However, in the S$1 billion money laundering investigation Singapore is currently undertaking, it seems the city-state is the center of the alleged crimes rather than Malaysia or another country.

Investors seem happy with Grab’s Q2 results. Since the self-proclaimed Southeast Asian super app said last week that it expects to break even in the third quarter rather than the fourth quarter, while its quarterly losses narrowed and revenue rose 77% to US$567 million, its shares have risen 17%. But questions remain about the long-term viability of Grab’s business model.

With its announcement of stablecoin regulations, Singapore is betting that these “safer” cryptocurrencies have staying power and will play an increasingly important role in the future of financial services. The decision is consistent with the city-state’s interest in developing itself as a digital asset hub for institutional investors. It also gives Singapore a leg up on Hong Kong, which is also trying to be a cryptocurrency hub of sorts, but has yet to introduce any regulatory framework for stablecoins.

Cambodia’s Project Bakong is unique if only for the fact that it is a functional blockchain-based CBDC – one of the few in the world along with the digital renminbi and the Bahamas’ sand dollar. In its first few years of existence, Bakong mainly been used domestically and with reasonably good – if not pathbreaking – results: 8.5 million users (more than half of the Cambodian population) and US$15 billion in transactions as of the end of 2022. It is no surprise that Bakong’s creator, the Japanese fintech firm Soramitsu, now wants to expand Bakong’s presence regionally by making it the centerpiece of a regional digital payments network connecting Japan with Southeast Asia.

What goes up must come down says Newton’s law of gravity. It doesn’t technically apply to fintech funding, but can, at least in figurative sense, be a useful paradigm for exploring why the funding spigots in the Asia-Pacific region are no longer gushing forth large capital injections. According to a recent KPMG report, fintech funding in the region fell to just US$5.1 billion in the first half of the year, a dramatic decrease from the record-breaking US$45 billion raised during the same period a year earlier.

Sea Group’s stock took a pummeling on Tuesday, falling almost 29% to US$40.58 as investors reacted to a second quarter earnings report in which the company missed revenue forecasts though made a profit of US$331 million. In a nutshell, Sea’s triumvirate of digital services that once looked unassailable now seems a bit shaky as consumer spending in many of its key markets is not robust. We think the fintech business still has plenty of potential, and probably the same holds true for e-commerce, but the erstwhile profitable gaming arm has become a laggard.

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) has surged in Indonesia over the past few years, plugging a large lending gap and in many cases acting like a credit card in all but name. BNPL has grown so briskly in Indonesia that some analysts believe it will replace credit cards altogether.Perhaps not.

Who says digital banks cannot make money? We often do – because it tends to be true. But Kakao Bank is a notable exception to the rule, and all the more unusual because its success has come in one Asia’s best-banked countries. Kakao Bank is one of the few digital lenders that has reached profitability and stayed there, as it showed with its solid second-quarter earnings.