Asia Tech Podcast

Asia’s financial landscape is evolving along uneven but deeply revealing lines. Southeast Asia is shaped by speed, experimentation, and the need for financial inclusion at scale, while Japan is defined by stability, institutional trust, and a deliberate approach to modernization.

In this episode of ATP, Samantha Ghiotti, a co-Founder and CEO of Habitto and Shwetank Verma, a co-Founder and Managing Partner at Leo Capital, discuss how these differences illuminate why digital public infrastructure, identity systems, interoperable payment rails, and secure data-sharing frameworks, will be central to the region’s next phase of fintech growth.

Some of the topics that Samantha and Shwetank discussed in detail included:

• Digital public infrastructure will be the primary catalyst of innovation
• India’s public digital infrastructure is more advanced than much of the rest of the world
• Southeast Asian startups still cannot scale like founders imagined back in 2012
• Data sovereignty is the next big battle and the markets where data portability becomes a norm will see faster innovation
• The next decade of Asian FinTech will be defined by convergence, building infrastructure that prioritizes stability, trust, and long-term consumer protection

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming one of the most influential forces inside modern enterprises, and insurance is no exception. Its potential to automate underwriting, accelerate claims, and deliver unprecedented predictive insight is immense.

While AI is starting to reshape insurance with speed and scale, it also exposes a hard paradox: the industry that prices uncertainty is hesitant to insure AI-driven uncertainty. In this episode of ATP, Bernhard Kotanko, Senior Partner at McKinsey and Asia-Pacific Insurance Practice Leader, and Julien Condamines, co-Founder & Chief Revenue Officer at Novo AI, argue that AI creates two intertwined risk fronts—enterprises deploying AI and insurers using it themselves.

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

• Although insurers may be stepping back from covering AI liabilities today, the industry’s history proves it eventually develop frameworks for new and unprecedented threats.
• Insurance contracts will be forced to change as AI inserts new third parties into every process and liability becomes fragmented.
• Both reject the idea that AI should autonomously make underwriting or claims decisions. Humans should remain in the loop.
• Artificial intelligence enables massive underwriting productivity, but only with good data.
• Insurance remains an emotional business. AI may be able to process documents, detect patterns, and generate proposals, but only humans can reassure someone in crisis.

Scam operations have transformed into highly organized, cross-border networks that function less like lone criminals and more like global enterprises. These groups build physical infrastructure, create vast fleets of fake or stolen accounts, and use AI to generate convincing messages, voices, and identities.

As David Agranovich, Director, Global Threat Disruption at Meta, explains on this episode of ATP, today’s fraud ecosystem spans physical compounds in Southeast Asia, cross-platform digital infrastructure, and AI-accelerated content generation.

Some of the topics that David covered in detail included:

• Scam networks now operate like multinational corporations. The are armed with hundreds of devices, routers, and workers...industrializing fraud.
• COVID did not just reshape work culture, it supercharged online crime.
• A scam is not a message, it is a carefully crafted lifecycle. Scams have a structured attack chain, similar to cyber-warfare kill chains.
• Modern, scaled scams are inherently cross-platform so combatting fraud requires coalitions, not silos.
• Fraud detection and defenses require tech companies to collaborate in this space, not compete.

The convergence of blockchain technology with real-world commodities is beginning to challenge long-held assumptions about who can access and trade strategically important assets. Uranium, once limited to large utilities and specialized traders because of regulatory and logistical barriers, is now being reimagined as a digitally native, globally accessible commodity.

In this episode of ATP, Arthur Breitman, co-founder of Tezos and the visionary behind Uranium.io, reveals how tokenizing uranium is less about crypto experimentation and more about solving a long-standing market inefficiency. Uranium, one of the world’s most strategically important commodities, has historically been inaccessible to all but large industrial players.

Some of the topics that Arthur covered in detail include:

• Tokenizing uranium is not about crypto. It is a structural improvement to an inefficient market.
• Arthur believes that tokenizing uranium is about building a new, global market, with custody, global accessibility, interoperability, and 24/7 rails and that there is simply no better infrastructure layer than a public blockchain to accomplish this.
• When we spoke about blockchains in general, Arthur posited that transparency was never a feature; it was a constraint of early design.
• Most tokenized asset projects fail because they underestimate the legal fabric required to bind the digital and physical worlds.
• Interest in uranium is driven by three large macro factors, 1) an aging memory of past nuclear disasters, 2) climate pressures, 3) AI-driven energy demand.

Compliance is often viewed as a necessary burden, something designed to prevent mistakes rather than enable progress. Yet the ideas explored here challenge that assumption by reframing compliance as a potential catalyst for trust, speed, and intelligent growth.

In this episode of ATP, Martin Markiewicz, CEO at Silent Eight and Boon-Hiong Chan, Industry Applied Innovation Lead at Deutsche Bank discuss the increasing complexity of today’s regulatory landscape. Diverging rules across markets, strict data-localization requirements, and growing expectations for explainability demand a more thoughtful approach to automation.

Some of the topics that Martin and Boon-Hiong covered in detail included:

• High-velocity organizations treat compliance as part of product design and competitive strategy.
• Intelligent automation in compliance can flip unit economics, expanding total addressable market and funding growth.
• Treat compliance AI as an operational risk instrument you continuously tune against policy, appetite, and outcomes.
• Data localization is a constraint. Architect for local data, global signal: keep sensitive data in-place while exchanging derivatives of truth.
• Elevate talent from doing the work to governing the work, with tools that surface reasoning, variance, and drift.

Treasury is undergoing a fundamental shift as global businesses operate across more markets, more banks, and more currencies than ever before. The old model, built on spreadsheets, manual reconciliation, and after-the-fact reporting, cannot keep pace with real-time payments, 24/7 liquidity demands, and increasingly complex cross-border flows. 

In this episode of ATP recorded at SFF 2025, David Hanna (Finmo), Kriti Jain (Deutsche Bank), and Jessie Toh (Coda) paint a picture of Treasury as an ecosystem role, data-driven, modular, compliant, and deeply strategic, where Treasurers become designers of liquidity and key partners in how global businesses grow.

Some of the topics that David, Kriti and Jessie covered in detail included:

• Treasury is moving from hindsight to foresight. The CFO, controller and treasurer are no longer just reporters of what happened; they are becoming strategic enablers.
• Fragmented data is the silent enemy of modern treasury. Centralizing data is the prerequisite for every other kind of sophistication.
• Connected financial intelligence is a better language than “treasury systems”, “Connected Financial Intelligence and Control” for the modern CFO.
• AI isn’t a buzzword for Finmo. It’s woven into how modern treasury actually gets done, designed to give finance leaders what David calls “financial second sight.”
• Cross-border liquidity is now a 24/7 discipline, not a monthly exercise.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how information is created, processed, and acted upon, but it is also eroding the foundations of trust that business systems have relied on for decades. In the past, documents, signatures, and deterministic software offered predictable and auditable outputs.

In this episode of ATP recorded at SFF 2025, Ben Stein, the CEO of Staple.ai, explains, this shift from predictable, rules-based systems to probabilistic, black-box models has created a widening “trust gap”, one that becomes especially dangerous in domains like finance, insurance, or government, where proof matters more than almost anything.

Some of the topics that Ben discussed in detail:

• Artificial intelligence execution is abundant, but trust remains scarce. The isn’t about what AI can technically do, it’s about what we can confidently rely on when the stakes are high.
• In many cases, artificial intelligence is not merely hallucinating, it’s industrializing fraud.
• Systematic trust cannot be bolted on later. It has to start at the data layer.
• Meta-structured data, a cryptographic marker embedded directly into a file, is the source for embedded data trust.
• Trust will become a competitive advantage.

Cross-border commerce is entering its fastest, most chaotic growth phase in history. The world’s smallest sellers now have global reach, but they are trying to scale on top of payment infrastructure that was never designed for them.

In this episode of ATP recorded at SFF 2025, Nicholas Liao, the Founder and CEO of Whalet explains that today’s MSME sellers are not just exporting products, they are building global brands across DTC sites, marketplaces, and social platforms. But while demand is global, payment systems remain deeply local.

Some of the topics that Nicholas covered in detail included:

• MSMEs are not just exporting anymore; they are going global as brands and Whalet is helping facilitate this.
• Cross-border eCommerce is exploding, but the payment rails are still missing.
• One of the most powerful threads in the conversation: payment localization is not a “nice to have.” It’s existential.
• APAC is home to a staggering 71 million MSMEs, but persistent barriers keep them from selling cross-border.
• The Belt and Road is no longer just railways and ports. It’s increasingly about digital trade corridors.

The idea of programmable money represents a fundamental shift in how value moves through the digital economy. Instead of money acting only as a static store of value or medium of exchange, it becomes a dynamic instrument capable of carrying rules, conditions, and logic.

In this episode of ATP recorded at SFF 2025, Effie Dimitropoulos, the CEO of AUDD Stablecoin, notes that programmable money is not a sudden disruption but the next step in a long evolution of how value moves in the digital world.

Some of the topics that Effie covered in detail:

• Programmable money can attach rules and logic as to where, how and when money can be used.
• Our comfort with digital money did not just appear. It was earned over time, largely through the rise of the smartphone and everyday digital behaviors.
• Australia’s economic ties to Asia are deep and complex. Yet the money behind those flows is often routed through a slow, expensive, opaque infrastructure.
• Tokenization and stablecoins are two sides of the same digital coin.
• No conversation about stablecoins is complete without talking about regulation. Regulation is not a drag; it’s the precondition for trust at scale.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the way money moves, turning payments from isolated actions into intelligent, context-aware interactions. Instead of searching, tapping, or navigating apps, users will increasingly rely on AI agents that understand their routines, anticipate their needs, and act proactively, often before they make a request.

In this episode of ATP recorded at SFF 2025, Jiangming Yang, Chief Innovation Officer at Ant International, explains how AI-powered agents can understand a user’s context, anticipate needs, and act in advance.

Some of the topics that Jiangming covered in detail included:

• Payments are becoming intelligent experiences, not transactions. Jiangming emphasized that AI changes the nature of interaction itself.
• Agentic AI Is redefining how consumers discover products, decide and make payments.
• A I will become the operating partner for global business expansion. Instead of consulting multiple advisors for growth, a business could ask a single AI agent for all of the help it needs.
• Collaboration among agents could fundamentally reshape global commerce.
• Every innovation pipeline should be gated and supported by security, permission controls and verification layers.