Following the success of our report series with Money20/20 last year, this year we’ve built on our partnership with the leading fintech show with a new content series, which this week kicked off at Money20/20 Asia with the launch of our joint white paper The New Era of Asia’s Cross-Border Payments.
Featuring our own market sizing data, the paper saw us undertake deep, AI-assisted analysis of 1,000 industry articles published across 10 major Asia markets over the past year to identify the direction the industry is heading in the market and how current trends are driving innovation across the region. It shows that Asia is entering a decisive new phase, shifting from experimentation to execution across a number of critical technologies and projects.
Our market sizing data shows that in 2025 outbound cross-border payments from the Asia-Pacific region totalled $13.5tn – 31% of outflows globally – and are set to grow faster than global averages to reach $24tn, a 36% share, by 2033. Growth in Southeast Asia is set to be particularly critical to this, with ongoing digitisation driving B2B volume while increased tourism and online retail are expected to help boost C2B.
A critical driver of this is set to be interoperability, and our analysis shows an overwhelming emphasis on this across multiple approaches and technologies. This past year has seen a number of bilateral cross-border partnerships to enable QR code payments to be made in different countries across the region, while a number of initiatives to interconnect domestic real-time payments networks between countries in Asia are gaining momentum. Meanwhile, Project Nexus from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is set to bring multilateral cross-border connections to multiple major markets within Asia.
Blockchain technologies, along with AI, are also seeing increased interest to support growing payments interoperability and broader infrastructure enhancements, although the region is split between central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and stablecoins, depending on the market’s regulatory and strategic stance on the two.
The BIS’s wholesale CBDC initiative Project mBridge is helping drive CBDC interest, along with enhancements to China’s e-CNY retail CBDC. Meanwhile, stablecoins are drawing focus in markets such as Japan, where local currency-pegged stablecoins are in development.
Asia is notable for being a region with highly diverse financial systems and capabilities, due to the varied levels of economic maturity that different markets in the region have realised. However, the continent is now on a trajectory towards unprecedented interoperability that puts it in a powerful position to capitalise on its future cross-border growth.
The full white paper, which includes both country and trend-level analysis, as well as a review of the most-discussed companies in the region, can be downloaded via Money20/20’s website.
