The MoneyPot Live: Unpacking Asia's Payments Landscape with JUSPAY's James Lloyd

Join us for the latest episode of Money Pot recorded live at Money20/20 EU in Amsterdam, where we explore Asia's fast-moving payments world with someone who really knows it.

Oliver Smith, Head of Content, sits down with James Lloyd, Senior Director, International from JUSPAY, who spent over a decade in Hong Kong working across Asian markets. James shares what's really happening with payments across the region—and why it's more complicated and interesting than you might think.

What We Talk About:

• Why each Asian market is different—China's super apps, India's UPI, Thailand's PromptPay
• Project Nexus and connecting instant payment systems across borders
• Could stablecoins solve cross-border payment problems?
• Why super apps like WeChat work in China but won't work in Europe
• The real challenges with moving money between countries
• What Europe can learn from Asia's payment success stories
• Why customer experience matters more than infrastructure

Guest: James Lloyd, Senior Director, International, JUSPAY
https://juspay.io/us

Follow Money20/20:
YouTube: @Money2020Tv
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/money2020/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/money20_20
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Money2020
X: https://www.twitter.com/Money2020
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@money20_20

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to the Money Pot, the Money 2020 podcast, where we get under the skin of the people, ideas, and innovations reshaping the future of finance. I'm Oliver Smith, head of content at Money2020 Europe. And today we're coming to you live from the heart of Money 2020 Europe in Amsterdam, where the industry is meeting, debating, deal making, and deciding what comes next. And joining me today is a brilliant guest to help me unpack one of the most dynamic, complex, and fast-moving payment markets in the world, Asia. So let me introduce James Lloyd, Senior Director of International at JustPay. James brings deep expertise in payments, infrastructure, cross-border money movement, and the rails that sit behind some of the biggest shifts in how people and businesses transact. James, good afternoon.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Great to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

How are you finding the show today?

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Yeah, I'm finding it exhausting in a positive way. So yeah, always a very uh high caliber of attendees and speakers. So yeah, I've been pretty back to back. But um, yeah, as I say, it's been great. Always is.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Awesome. Um, James, I want to start by looking at what you've seen in the Asian market. What are the biggest shifts that you're seeing in how people pay and move money?

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Wow, okay, so a pretty uh expansive question, right? I mean, insofar as Asia, as you know, in itself is a pretty diverse collection of markets. Um, you know, maybe to provide context, I was based in Hong Kong for a bit over a decade, um, but covering the region both in an advisory capacity and then subsequently uh on a on a transaction banking side, um, and of course now on the fintech side. So I've operated in a bunch of the main markets across the region. And I would say to answer your question, you know, tremendous diversity amongst them, right? You have some developed, um, mature card markets, you know, Hong Kong, Singapore, uh, Japan, Korea, and so on. You have obviously the North Asian powerhouse that is China, where we've seen, you know, tremendous innovation and disruption, I would say, over the past, you know, 15, 20 years. Um, everyone will be familiar with Alipay and WeChaPay and those kind of ecosystems. Obviously, the digital RMB one and so on and so forth. Um, but then equally Southeast Asia, right? You have a kind of an interesting collection of markets that are increasingly looking to interoperate with each other, perhaps from a real-time payments perspective and so on. So I suppose the kind of larger answer is look, this there's you know, there's a lot of diversity and a lot of innovation happening. And then once you look at an individual sub-region or country level, we we can dive further. Probably if I were to pick one item, um, I think this interoperability around real-time payments is especially interesting. And you may be familiar with um, there's an initiative from the Bank for International Settlements called Project Nexus, which is now Nexus Global Payments. And the ambition there is to take a number of the instant payment platforms in some of these diverse Asia-Pacific markets and kind of join them together from a cross-border interoperability perspective. Can get into that in any level of detail because I think it kind of becomes relevant perhaps for for for this part of the world as well.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

Interesting. Yeah, we I I I mean, I what I think is fascinating, uh, as you say, is we often think about Asia as one payment story, one market. But of course, it is many markets and it is many behaviors, many consumers' behaviors and many infrastructures all developing at the same time in slightly different directions. Um what makes Asia's payment story different from Europe's? Because Europe, you could say, you know, started from a similar position, but we seem to have more convergence around you know, frameworks and with the single market, it feels like we have a lot more coming together. Is that what makes Asia so different?

SPEAKER_01 3:53

Um, look, again, it let's maybe cover off a couple of the larger economies to begin with, right? I mean, we spoke a little bit about China. China is the way it is for historical reasons as regards, like, you know, for example, credit card penetration has historically been very low in China relative to Europe or the UK, as an example. So therefore, there was considerable space for alternatives to emerge, right? Be that Alipay, which effectively started as an escrow payment service for e-commerce and has over time expanded into this kind of whole ecosystem of services. But the the point I'd make is, you know, China, mainland China was starting from a very different base. Um, so therefore, you know, I remember back in the day we used to refer to it as a kind of Galapagos of FinTech, right? It was kind of untouched by the rest of the region and by global trends, and therefore it was able to build its own kind of ecosystem of services. Um, that's then very different to the likes of an India, right? India, I should say just pay where where I'm building out the international efforts, we're headquartered out of Bangalore. We've been building services there on top of UPI since its inception. I mean, today we facilitate process about 400 million transactions a day on behalf of Amazon and Google and folks at that. But I mean, UPI in effect didn't exist 15 years ago. Similarly to China, there was very low card penetration, it was a very cash-led economy. Um, but unlike in China, where to some degree the model was the emergence of big tech companies who were moving laterally from e-commerce or gaming or messaging into payments. In the case of India, it was an initiative of the of the Central Bank of India and NPCI to build this underlying public financial infrastructure upon which private enterprise can build. Yeah. So even just taking those two examples, to some degree, they've ended up in a comparable place in that, you know, digital acceptance is now even more widespread than it would be in Germany or much of Europe, but they started from a different place, they've gotten to a similar endpoint, but through very different means, um, if that makes sense. So, you know, I think what's interesting for me now, um, based in Europe, back in Europe, um, is how applicable some of these insights or lessons are. Some of them are kind of directly comparable, but then of course some are very different for the reasons you you you set out.

SPEAKER_00 6:06

So hard to give a single answer, I would say, Ollie, but um before we get into the insights in particular, uh, now that you're you're working in in the European market, what are the biggest misunderstandings that you come across when people are looking at Asia? What what uh you know, our audience obviously today as European companies, European fintechs, what are they not getting understanding right about that market?

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Well, I mean, I again I would start with firstly that there is no such thing as the Asia market, right? I mean, it is quite literally um uh, you know, uh the diversity, not just from a uh national perspective, but obviously of a diversity of currencies, um, even currency regimes, right? I mean, I think people forget that most of the uh markets in Asia or many of the markets in Asia are also control currency regimes, which is kind of interesting perhaps if we come on to stable coins later. Um, so you have the diversity of markets, of regulations, of currencies, of uh consumer uh behaviors. Again, you know, if you go to Thailand, for example, prompt pay, which is the kind of local account-to-account scheme, is you know tremendously um uh you know favored by consumers. It's used in your ride hailing, it's used in your e-commerce and so on and so forth. That is not necessarily true, just one market over in Southeast Asia. So there's plenty of reasons for that diversity, but I would say when we think about Europe or at least the Euro system, we can at least talk in terms of a vaguely standardized regime when it comes to whether it be the digital euro or we opi, et cetera, et cetera. Obviously, the UK is in itself, uh, has got its own um system. So probably, yeah, I mean, I would say the main difference is there's no such thing as Asia. And then certainly even on a per-market basis, you can take, you can draw some insights and lessons, but then some others won't be applicable for for the for reasons.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna sort of wrongly say uh some of my questions will wrongly refer to Asia. So please correct me. No, it's a really good point.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

I'm happy to deep dive on a couple of those markets as as necessary, but equally, as I as I mentioned, some of the innovations happening in these individual markets, be it China, be it India, be it Thailand, wherever else, and then you have the overlay of some of that interoperability that I mentioned, which is kind of a perhaps that's a broader region-wide trend. But even if I if I take Project Nexus or or some of the other bilateral arrangements that are happening, even between the Eurosystem here and India's UPI, for example, um, I mean, these are obviously cross-regional initiatives. Uh, so you know, it's not to say that we can't, you know, generalize to some degree, but just uh we need to be cautious, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

What about the the trend which which I think really was pioneered in in certain Asian geographies, with payments living inside everyday digital platforms, um, which you know, the the so-called super app became very, very popular in Asia? I think uh, you know, we've seen elements of it, certainly in Europe. Um, but when payments become embedded to the point that they become invisible, they're part of your messaging app. What has to change to facilitate that? What what infrastructure is needed when payments become so embedded in our our daily digital lives?

SPEAKER_01 9:12

I mean, I suppose I have myself uh popularized a meme this past 10 years about, you know, every every time a Western organization says they're building a super app, I mean, there would at least be several of us who would take it as kind of just another uh another uh marketing gimmick, right? I mean, what I mean by that is specifically, I mean, the two most successful super apps in the world are both mainland Chinese for a reason. As I mentioned, there's historical and structural and cultural reasons why that's the case. Um, I think there are elements, as you rightly said, in certain, you know, in New Bank, let's say in in Latin America, you know, arguably in Revolute to a degree. But I mean, ultimately, I think if you're, let me say, a Western consumer in Europe or the UK, the reality is that you are very used to having a multitude of apps with effectively single-use uh capabilities. And for sure, payments is often embedded in that, but the apps themselves are not part of the same ecosystem. So I have been historically skeptical and I continue to be highly skeptical at this notion of a super app emerging anytime soon in this part of the world. Frankly, if it was going to, it would have by now. And as I say, the difference in terms of China, well, they're myriad, you know, we can go through them, but it's a it's a little bit of back to that galabicus of fintech. It is its kind of unique uh own ecosystem. Uh yeah, you know, even pretenders to the throne like Grab and others in Southeast Asia have never truly actually developed kind of beyond a primary or maybe a primary or secondary use case. Nobody is using one app for the diversity of applications there in China, I would argue anywhere in the world.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

Yeah, yeah. It's almost like the foundations were set early on, and that's what's led China in a certain direction.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

Absolutely. I mean, in in effect, you know, the Alipay WeChat Pay ecosystems are almost the operating systems of the phones themselves, right? And again, because I was working in the region for so long, I mean I would I would be operating with both um with both apps depending on on who you're engaging with, but you can do everything in it. I mean, it's well understood now that I'm not exiting my WeChat to, you know, ride a or to hail hail a ride or to or to order food or whatever else. That's all done within the app. It would be very hard to conceive of who could engineer that same ecosystem here because as I mentioned, there are already sector industry leaders across each of those verticals.

SPEAKER_00 11:33

So the reasons why that wouldn't work here were would be that we already have strong players in place to serve the consumer along all those metrics. So is it consumer behavior? Is the restriction?

SPEAKER_01 11:44

I think it's I think it's existing um propositions, but also consumer behavior and preference. I mean, you know, it sometimes people get led by, well, the X is happening in one market and therefore why isn't it happening in Y? I mean, I do people want a single app through which to interoperate all these services? I mean, it's it's an interesting question. You could argue, of course, that LLMs and AI, maybe with an agentic commerce future, we'll see more of that. Um, but in practical terms, at least in the short term, we envisage a situation where the agent is itself going off to these individual apps, if I'm to simplify, and executing services on your behalf. It's not that you, the consumer, are suddenly limiting yourself to a single ecosystem. Rather, you're limiting yourself, if I can put it like that, to a series of agents who are operating across multiple ecosystems.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

And I want to talk about the fragmentation question that we touched on earlier. Um, Asia's often described as a huge growth story, but it's also deeply fragmented. Different currencies, regulatory regimes, uh payment habits, um, banks and platforms. When we when we talk about fixing cross-border payments in Asia, what problem are we trying to solve? And is it is it a solvable problem, Project Nexus and otherwise? Yeah. Are there are there, do you think there are actually solutions that will work in market?

SPEAKER_01 13:00

I I do, I do. And I think especially in Asia, but we're seeing it obviously in Latin America as well with the picks and so on. I mean, you have tremendously successful instant payment rails in these markets. So UPI in India is obviously a very famous one. I've spoken about how you know we ourselves would would process a few hundred million transactions per day on top of UPI. Uh, I mentioned PromPay as an example in in Thailand. You've pay now in in Singapore, uh, FPS and so on in in Hong Kong. So you have these uh individual domestic market instant payment rails that operate very efficiently, right? Um, I mean, they're 24-7, they're real-time, you know, consumer journey can be built on top of it from an overlay service, et cetera. So I think domestically, a lot of these markets have, in some cases, kind of leapfrogged, I would say, where we're at in some of Europe, not all of Europe. I mean, we're sitting here in Amsterdam where ideal is functioning very effectively as a account-to-account payment method in in the case of e-commerce. Um, Europe has not yet come to account-to-account on point of sale. It's a big ambition of the Bank of England, for example. It's a big advantage, uh, a big ambition of the ECB um as regards or the euro system as regards digital euro. But in Asia, a lot of this has been kind of solved domestically. And now to your question, well, what about cross-border? Well, let me take two examples. I mentioned already um Project Nexus or or Nexus Global Payments Platform, which is its aim is to uh build an interoperability layer between a lot of these domestic payment systems. So when they launched, for example, they launched with uh India, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. So they've launched, as I say, to build interoperability between those income payment systems, and then their ambition is to expand beyond that into other parts of Asia and indeed into other regions. Again, as we're in Europe, I'll mention the Euro system, which is the kind of ECB and the national central banks under its remit, are have an observer status for that Nexus platform. So, you know, there may be a point at which they want to interoperate with that in future. So that's the multilateral approach. You know, whether it's going to work or not, I mean, I think you got to try. And I think there's plenty of scope for a kind of a so-called hub and spoke type operation whereby perhaps Nexus begins to um integrate some of the um, how would you say, long tail markets? Like what I mean by that is I mentioned that Eurosystem has observer status for um for Nexus, but at the same time, ECB have announced that they are building a bilateral connection with India's UPI. So UPI is so big, the ECB or the Eurosystem is so big, they have a bilateral linkage, but equally it can have a linkage into the multilateral linkage that is next. So sorry if this sounds a little bit technocratic, but the point being, domestic payments has been a tremendous benefit in individual markets. The problem to be solved to some degree has to answer your question, has been this uh cross-market delivery. Now you have multilateral and bilateral platforms that should facilitate that over the coming years.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

Some might be listening and thinking, surely the solution is is sort of staring us in our face. You know, stable coins are the the one of the biggest conversations of the show. And surely is there not, are they not the answer to this this challenge of of solving this cross-border issue in the region?

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Yeah, I mean, certainly they might be part of it. Um, I mean, yeah, I mean, one interesting thing about the show this year has been walking the floor and realizing that 30-40% of the of the fintechs that I hadn't heard of before now have stablecoin in the title. Um I mean, I think what's it what interests me about the stablecoin piece is I think unlike perhaps prior iterations of kind of crypto-related um initiatives, it feels like many of these stablecoin initiatives and companies are actually starting with a problem to be solved first, as opposed to the historic crypto for X, DLT for Y. So what I mean by that is yes, stablecoins may be a uh technical uh input into cross-border. Um I think what's kind of interesting, maybe if we look at stablecoin issuance in Asia to date, um unlike in in the US, and um, well, I guess US being the kind of primary uh originator of of stable coins today, but obviously in Europe we have Kavallas and a couple of other initiatives spinning up. In Asia, certainly you have, whether it be in Hong Kong, in Singapore, in Japan, uh, I believe in Korea now, there have been local denomination stablecoin issuance, typically via banks. Yeah. Um, whereas perhaps in the US it's been by these kind of crypto-native fintechs. Actually, it's banks in in in much of Asia where we've seen their participation, which is not unusual if you again understand some of the uh some of these markets. But the other interesting factor is in all of those currencies, or actually much of those currencies I just mentioned, you know, these are controlled currencies, they're pegged currencies. So, you know, the Hong Kong dollar is pegged to within a short bound of the US dollar, for example. So suddenly stable coins have perhaps an additional level of complexity. Maybe that's why you need the banks involved from an issuance perspective. But sorry, this is a roundabout way of answering your question, which is you know, much of much of the issues with cross-border in Asia across particular corridors hasn't really been a technical challenge so much as a liquidity challenge. And this is often the case in remittance and you know, some corridors that are well serviced today tend to have a low cost to serve for for volume reasons, and those that are a bit more exotic, it's hard to see why stable coins would solve that part. Switching the technology wouldn't actually change the dynamic of necessarily, but um, but again, yeah, as I say, I'm certainly um interested in in maybe what I can achieve, at least from a kind of a 24-7 perspective.

SPEAKER_00 18:38

And are are stable coins in your experience, are they starting to become a you know part of a credible payments infrastructure in Asia? How how developed is that market versus where we are in Europe at the moment or the US? Is it is it um or are they still mainly for sort of crypto native use cases?

SPEAKER_01 18:56

I think it's still pretty early days, to be honest, right? I mean, what I mentioned about um the issuance of stable coins in in yen or HKD or whatever else, it has been kind of centrally centrally driven by the but, you know, obviously by the local central banks, but in collaboration with the banks under their regulatory purview. So for me, it feels a little bit like experimentation right now. I would argue the same in Europe, for example, with the Gavallas Consortium. Um, probably just to kind of provide the geopolitical angle to this, because I know digital sovereignty is a tremendously important topic here this week as well. You know, I I I would imagine that dollarization by by other means is a concern in some of these markets as well, which is to say, you know, the vast majority of stablecoin issuance today is USD denominated. If we expect that to increase, does your local central bank used to issuing local currency look upon that favorably or not? Uh, I think that's gonna be a a question that we'll see some answers to in the coming months and years. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

And and if I had to put you on the spot and do a bit of a prediction, looking five, ten years ahead in Asia, do you do you see stable coins, cross-border payment rails, digital wallets all coexisting, or is there a harmonization that's gonna happen that that sort of simplifies the the landscape a little bit? Um are they competing with each other or are these complementary layers, I guess, of the same the same stack?

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Look, it's a great question. I I would are I I would suggest that they're both competing and complementary, by which I mean nobody envisages a single solution in in any of these markets, right? I mean, diversity is is generally a strength and a positive. I suspect if we look at the different end customers, then we're more likely to see the predominance of one over the other. What do I mean by that? In terms of consumers, you know, I would probably feel that the instant payment rails that have been built and are operating at kind of scale and resiliency today are the more likely option for consumers in many of these markets domestically and cross-border through that interoperability that I mentioned. Um, that may not be the case in a for a corporate, right? Like if you've got a large corporate operating across multiple markets or multiple regions and they're looking to um, you know, they're looking to improve the efficiency associate associated with their treasury function, notional pooling, whatever it might be, then it may be that stablecoin are actually a very um is a very useful consideration there. You know, the other way of thinking about it is well, Europe uh is about to go through a little bit of experiment on this itself, right? We've mentioned kind of stable coins in the European context, which are relatively nascent. Um, equally, you have the kind of uh European payments initiative and WIRO, which is the ostensibly the bringing together of multiple national account-to-account initiatives, building interoperability. We had an announcement here actually on the from the stage uh earlier today from EPI and some of that interoperability. So you have the kind of stablecoin piece happening, you have let's call it the account-to-account interoperability or wallet interoperability happening. And then of course you have the digital euro, which is a third rail. Um, again, quite a different proposition, you know, effectively a C a CBDC, but you know, wherein the issuance and management will be actually from the from the banking side. So I guess what I'm using that as an analogy to say is is there going to be one winner of those three? No, I expect there'll be usage across different um customer customer types. Um, I think there'll be some complementary aspects, but equally, I suspect some of those opportunities will suffer as a result of a lack of focus.

SPEAKER_00 22:33

James, we're running out of time. I've only got time for one more quick question. That's okay. That's okay. Um, my final question to you for our audience is what should Europe learn from Asia's payments evolution, revolution that's been going on? What should our key takeaway be? Again, you only have one minute.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

Okay, well, I am personally very interested in what's happening with the European Payments Initiative here within Europe, the UK Payments Initiative, um, which is kind of the commercial VRP being applied on top of open banking in the UK, and also indeed Delivery Co., which is a separate initiative in the UK for the purpose of potentially building uh a sovereign payments uh solution. So, what can we learn? Well, actually, let's look at in particular customer experience and customer adoption and the incentives associated with that, what's worked well in the likes of an India or a Thailand or China, wherever else. Because I think sometimes what uh if it's central banks or it's banks where it's regulators designing payment systems, sometimes what they leave till the end is customer experience. And in fact, as we all know, it's customer experience that drives adoption. So I think we can take some of those successful examples from Asia and apply them here.

SPEAKER_00 23:45

Thank you. James, thank you so much for joining us on the Money Pot.

SPEAKER_01 23:48

Great to be here. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 23:50

Thank you. This has been a fascinating conversation about why Asia's payment story is not just about faster transactions or wallets, but about how it's becoming embedded into platforms, communities, infrastructure, and everyday digital life. You can subscribe to the Money Pot wherever you get your podcasts, and you can find out more on money2020 at money2020.com.