Emerging Payments Association Asia (EPAA) has released a new report based on insight revealed during the most recent APAC Fintech Payments Forum. The report, which covers the ‘best practice for cross-border payments’; hears from five payment markets and looks at their cross-border payment solutions.
On Tuesday 7 February, the EPAA hosted the third APAC Fintech Payments Forum on Best Practice for Cross-Border Interlinkage. The forum brought together five domestic payment rails with five representatives from paytechs from Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand to discuss their vision and best practise for interoperability in cross-border payments.
Participating in the forum were representatives from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), PromptPay, PayNet, PayNow, Bank of Indonesia, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the Indonesia Fintech Association, the Fintech Association of Malaysia (FOAM), the Fintech Alliance.ph, the Singapore Fintech Association, as well as the Thai Fintech Association.
Payments forum panels
EPAA also revealed that between two panels, there was a distinct difference between the perspective on cross-border payments: the focus of the respective stakeholder.
The infrastructure panel focused on what each jurisdiction has been doing concerning cross-border payments and why cross-border payments have been a driver for GDP growth. The discussion focused on two key drivers to ensure this outcome:
- The size of cross-border flows – which encompasses more money being transacted and transferred.
- The speed of the flows – the faster money can be moved between geographies, the more it can assist GDP growth.
Meanwhile, the paytech panel focused on different use cases and looked to understand the user experience. Regulators largely drove the infrastructure panel, which focused on providing connectivity and a framework. The panel also explored:
- Factors to turn the vision of the Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in Regional Payment Connectivity (RPC) into practise
- Collaboration and partnership between traditional stakeholders and emerging fintechs
- Lessons policymakers outside ASEAN can learn from the region’s progress.
Forums and reports
The Fintech Payments Forum aims to provide a space that brings together different fintech associations and their members in the APAC region. The forum provides a voice for many fintechs involved in payments and gives an opportunity for members in the region to meet with each other and learn and collaborate with them.
The APAC Fintech Payments Forum Report 2023: Best Practice for Cross-Border Interlinkage report covers all of the issues and solutions discussed at the forum, as well as insight from some experts across the space.
Nigel Lee, EPAA advisory board member and SVP APAC at Ingenico, who moderated the infrastructure panel, gave an overview of the payments markets in the region in the report’s foreword: “The focus of the region has been on creating bilateral linkages between domestic payment networks. While this is a step in the right direction towards addressing the frictions associated with cross-border payments, it will become increasingly difficult to manage individual linkages as the number of linkages increases. Project Nexus by the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub is also an important development that could address the issues associated with maintaining many bilateral linkages.”
