Asia Tech Podcast

For many years, automation inside businesses followed simple rules. If something happened, a system performed the next predefined step. That model created enormous efficiencies, but it was limited by rigid logic and narrow workflows. Today, a new generation of artificial intelligence is emerging that can reason about problems, plan tasks, and take action across multiple systems.

In this episode of the Asia Tech Podcast, Raymond Ngan, Regional Vice President at Appian for Singapore and Asia, explains why the conversation about AI in business is shifting from simple automation to something much more powerful: agentic operations.

Some of the topics that Raymond covered in detail:

• Agentic AI Is Not Just Automation, It’s Autonomy
• The Future of AI in Business Is Orchestration
• Trust in AI Is Built Through Guardrails and They Must Be Manufactured
• Deploying AI at the Right Speed and in the Right Situations Is Key
• Data Strategy Continues to Be the Real Foundation of AI

FinTech headlines often focus on consumer apps, but the bigger economic story in Asia may be happening in business finance. B2B fintech targets the problems that shape real growth: helping companies get paid, manage working capital, move money across supply chains, and access services like lending, payments, and treasury in a reliable way.

In this episode of the Asia Tech Podcast, Daniel Keki, Head of Revolut Business Singapore, and Raunak Dembla, a founding member at Decentro, explain why B2B FinTech may be Asia’s quiet economic engine.

Some of the topics that Daniel and Raunak discussed in detail included:

• Southeast Asia’s real challenge is not “competition”—it’s fragmentation
• In India, the regulator’s north star is simple: protect the consumer and prevent system stress
• The most underappreciated innovation in B2B is not “new products”—it’s onboarding
• Agentic AI doesn’t kill platforms—it makes APIs more valuable and shifts the “front end” into conversation
• B2B FinTech in Asia is not a sprint—it’s a marathon built under pressure from customers

Automated traffic is starting to outweigh human traffic online, and a growing share of it is not harmless. Attacks are no longer occasional or manual—they are constant, adaptive, and increasingly powered by AI.

In this episode of the Asia Tech Podcast, Guy Brown, Staff Enterprise Security Architect, APJ at Fastly, and Tony Jarvis, Field CISO, APJ at DarkTrace, describe a “bot war” defined by three forces: volume (more attacks), velocity (attacks move at machine speed), and variety (tactics mutate constantly).

Some of the topics that Guy and Tony covered in detail include:

• Automation turns crime into an industrial process. And AI turns that process into something adaptive.
• LLMs did not just improve attacks. They changed the economics of attacks.
• "Static defenses” don’t map to an adaptive attacker. Importantly, behavior and intent matter more than patterns.
• Effective cyber defense increasingly means modeling what normal looks like, then detecting what doesn’t belong.
• Agentic AI changes the blast radius because it sits inside the system with permissions.

Instant payments are often described as the new baseline in modern finance. But speed alone does not define progress. In many cases, “real-time” only applies within narrow limits, small transaction sizes, or pre-funded domestic rails. Cross-border flows remain constrained by liquidity requirements, fragmented standards, and compliance bottlenecks.

In this episode of the Asia Tech Podcast, featuring Kanupriya Sharda, Chief Business Officer at Tazapay and Abhishek Padhy, Head of Product Payments and FX at Aspire we cut through the noise around “instant payments” to reveal a deeper truth: speed alone is no longer the real frontier in payments.

Some of the topics that Kanupriya and Abhishek covered in detail:

• “Real-time” is often real-time only for small money and with a crucial caveat: it’s mostly true for domestic payments in parts of Asia, but it breaks down fast when you zoom out to cross-border and B2B.
• Pre-funding is the hidden architecture of “instant” payments and it’s incredibly expensive.
• Stablecoins aren’t just a “crypto” story, they’re a liquidity and settlement story.
• The next advantage isn’t only speed, it’s certainty and transparency.
• AI isn’t replacing compliance, it’s compressing time and expanding context.
• The contrarian view on consolidation: payments aren’t commoditizing as fast as people claim.

Digital organizations today are surrounded by data, yet many still struggle to understand what their numbers truly mean. Traffic, engagement, and conversion rates are carefully tracked, but often without clear insight into whether they reflect real progress or hidden problems. High activity can mask confusion. Familiar metrics can reinforce outdated thinking.

In this episode of the Asia Tech Podcast, Jeffrey Lin, Senior Manager, Solutions Consulting APAC at ContentSquare discusses why digital experience benchmarking has moved from dashboards to boardrooms.

Some of the topics that Jeffrey covered in detail:

• Digital experience is a board topic because the investment cycle is demanding proof that the metrics they are using are relevant.
• Man teams self-deceive because KPI culture hardens into habit and a KPI can be internally consistent and still externally wrong.
• Digital engagement can spike even when your experience is failing.
• "The right metric” starts with a baseline user journey, not a dashboard, because what counts as “good” depends on context.
• Premium experiences are not a fleeting trend. They are the logical response to distraction at scale.

Across Asia, climate risk appears to be rising faster than the systems designed to manage it. Floods, fires, extreme heat, and storms are seemingly more frequent and more destructive, while large parts of society remain underinsured or completely unprotected.

In this episode of ATP featuring Bernhard Kotanko, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, Hong Kong, and Shwetank Verma, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Leo Capital, discuss how climate risk is no longer a distant or technical problem for insurance in Asia. It is a daily, lived reality that is exposing deep structural weaknesses in how insurance protection is designed and delivered.

Some of the topics that Bernhard and Shwetank covered in detail include:

• The insurance protection gap in Asia is real and it is getting larger, not smaller.
• GDP is becoming intangible, meaning that natural catastrophe losses can look less dramatic relative to GDP even while the physical economy absorbs bigger shocks.
• A lot of climate loss ultimately lands on public balance sheets and pretending this is “private” is fantasy.
• Loss prevention is cheaper to than reapir, but funding prevention is harder to finance.
• Insurance can be an “apex predator” that forces better building behavior through building codes and construction standards.

Insurance is undergoing a subtle but profound transformation, one that will ultimately redefine trust, customer experience, and the very nature of protection. It is entering a pivotal shift from slow, reactive processes to experiences that feel immediate, intuitive, and nearly invisible.

In this episode of ATP, Julien Condamines, co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at NOVOai,  explains, trust is the core challenge. While Shwetank Verma, o-founder & Managing Partner, Leo Capital, highlights how Asia’s digital infrastructure is accelerating this transformation, from nationwide identity systems to frictionless payment rails.

Some of the topics that Julien and Shwetank covered in more detail include:

• Claims continue to be the moment of truth when a policy holder is most vulnerable
• In this context, claims at scale, still generally run on outdated systems and processes
• AI has reached a point where it is finally good enough to make sense of messy, real-world claims
• The claim form itself is becoming obsolete as true digital transformation takes shape
• As always, the biggest barrier to change isn’t technology, it is organizational fear

The value of the internet is being restructured, again. This time it is not just about information or communication. It is about ownership, identity, value, and agency. A big question we tried to answer was how Asia may be building the foundation of a new economic operating system for the world.

The next era of the internet will not be defined by faster applications or richer interfaces, but by a fundamental shift in who owns the digital world. In ATP's conversation with Yat Siu, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Animoca Brands, and Kenneth Shek, Project Lead at Moca Network, a clear theme emerges: digital property rights, portable identity, and programmable value will form the new economic foundation of the internet.

Some of the topics that Yat and Kenneth covered in detail include:

• How the early web democratized information but failed to democratize ownership, allowing platforms to capture nearly all of the economic upside.
• The internet's first revolution was the dissemination of information. The next phase will be driven by full digital property rights.
• Yat asserts that blockchain returns ownership to individuals in the same way that property rights created modern capitalism.
• Yat's belief that open source software created an arbitrage for those who knew how to code.
• The mistake that "digital identity" simply means a digital passport. Digital identity is the totality of your data, behavior, and reputation, and the value others assign to it.
• The assertion that tokenization will create the greatest financial literacy boom in human history.

Asia’s economic landscape is shifting in ways that no longer follow a clean, upward trajectory. Growth, opportunity, and digital adoption are accelerating for some, yet financial vulnerability is deepening for others.

This episode of ATP with with Lito Villanueva (RCBC), Weili Dong (PayJoy), and Ramesh Jairam (OneConnect Financial Technology) brought clarity to what a K-shaped recovery looks like on the ground—and what it will take to build a path toward a more inclusive future.

Some of the topics that Lito, Weili, and Ramesh discussed in detail included:

• Financial vulnerability is increasing even as digital connectivity deepens. This massive increase in connectivity has not been matched with improvements in wages or formal credit access.
• There are large economic differences between large urban centers and geographically isolated rural areas.
• Last-mile financial infrastructure can fundamentally transform previously under or unserved communities.
• Credit access is becoming the defining gap in k-shaped economies. The real economic divide is those with credit access and those without.
• Smartphones are no longer simply for communication and sharing. Smartphones are now the strategic engines of financial infrastructure.
• Alternative data is continuing to rewrite the rules and frameworks of credit analysis and underwriting.

Financial institutions are entering a new phase in which automation is no longer the goal, autonomy is. Instead of tools that simply expedite tasks, agentic AI is beginning to observe, reason, and take action across operational workflows. This shift can fundamentally change how work gets done.

In this episode of ATP, Julien Condamines, co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at NOVO.ai and Chee Beh, SVP and GM of APAC at Yuno explain that agentic AI is beginning to handle not just tasks, but entire operational outcomes, freeing humans from repetitive workflows and pushing them toward higher-order judgment, empathy, and strategic thinking.

Some of the topics that Julien and Chee discussed in detail include:

• Automation improves efficiency, but agentic autonomy changes the fundamental design of work.
• Expertise matters more than ever in an AI-Driven world and the quality of AI output depends on the quality of human input.
• Human intuition does not go away, it becomes much more valuable.
• Every transformative tech cycle predicts massive job losses; yet that has historically been wrong. As new tools increase productivity, organizations generate new problems for humans to solve.
• Removing tedious work suddenly frees teams to pursue ideas for which they never had time. Projects that had been stuck in “dream” mode now have the opportunity to flourish.