Asia-Pacific players embrace partnership to win customer share in cross-border payments

"The strength and longevity of a financial brand depends on its ability to deliver the fast, convenient cross-border payments expected from today's customers. Partnership offers the quickest way to achieve this and enable banks and businesses to bring new solutions to market with ease.”

This powerful statement, delivered by Tyme Group CEO and Founder Coen Jonker at Wise Connect Singapore, cuts to the heart of the challenge facing financial institutions across Asia-Pacific.

Building resilient cross-border payment infrastructure is hard – it’s slow, costly, and complex. For many financial institutions, the reality is telling: without access to modern infrastructure, they risk losing customers across their product ecosystems and in some cases, the relationship altogether. However, the narrative is changing rapidly.

What unites many innovators is that they're taking their first steps to delivering great global payments experiences by embracing industry partnerships with the next-generation of correspondent service providers. These providers have focussed on solving the sole challenge of delivering fast, low-cost and convenient payment experiences.

Through collaboration with these tech-driven correspondent service providers, banks and online platforms alike are gaining access to an established global network of direct connections into domestic payments systems, enabling them to meet their customers’ growing demands quickly and with ease.

This important shift was the central theme at our annual Wise Connect Singapore conference, where over 200 senior payments leaders gathered to discuss the trends and innovations shaping the future of how we move and manage money across borders.

Customer experience: essential to retail engagement

Throughout the afternoon, attendees heard just how rapidly retail experiences are evolving, and the important role customer experience plays in enabling banks to increase deposits.

Without this solid experience, customers will leave a product ecosystem and start looking elsewhere for more competitive services.

Panellists from BNI Group, GoTyme Bank and MBSB Bank discussed how retail customer experience has become front and centre for banks, and the investments required to truly win over this market.

The benefits of taking a strategic approach to customer experience were noted by MBSB, whose recent partnership announcement with Wise Platform comes at a time when the business is making significant investments into its service delivery.

As a building society, MBSB couldn't take deposits until five years ago when it became a bank. That's when the financial institution realised it needed to change its proposition to take on deposits and develop a new product suite that reflected the needs of its customers.

As Rafe Haneef, Group Chief Executive Officer at MBSB Berhad explained: "Winning customers' deposits, and getting them to hold day-to-day money with the bank, was tough and that's precisely why we decided to invest in our global payments services."

Why speed, transparency, and cost matter
 
This focus on enhanced service offerings extends beyond retail customers to SMEs, who represent approximately 97% of all regional businesses. For these businesses, cross-border payments often block international expansion, and ultimately growth.

With many SMEs operating on limited working capital, delayed, costly payments simply aren't an option. They're bad for business, supplier relationships, and even employee retention. However, there's good news: many payment service providers are responding with customer-centric solutions aimed at helping businesses grow globally.

Speaking on the challenges of building an international payments infrastructure to keep SMEs within their product ecosystem, Giovanni Casinelli, Co-founder and President at Aspire, shared: "Our customers needed access to specific currencies, and the ability to make global payments with speed and ease. But expanding our network to increase coverage, getting the right licenses and direct connections into local payments systems, and understanding the regulatory environments? Doing this ourselves would be complex, costly and slow."

"By leveraging Wise Platform's  global network of direct connections into faster payments systems and banking partners, we've been able to provide competitive experiences to our SMEs," Casinelli continued.

"Expanding our network to increase coverage, getting the right licenses and direct connections into local payments systems, and understanding the regulatory environments? Doing this ourselves would be complex, costly and slow," noted Casinelli

Also joining us at the conference, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CEO of Paytm, shared how the company pioneered mobile payments in a country as vast and demographically diverse as India. He explored how Paytm didn't just solve a merchant problem, it brought modern technology to a country dominated by cash, giving both customers and businesses a way to transact with speed, ease, and at a low cost.

The solution was simple and inexpensive: Enable customers to pay or accept money simply by scanning a Paytm QR code linked to their account. Much like Wise, Paytm began by solving personal pain points in traditional systems. A homegrown idea that reshaped behaviour for millions of merchants and everyday Indians, influencing the future of mobile payments globally.

These journeys all possess a common thread: prioritising customer experience drives SME growth and retention.

Transparency and meeting G20 transparency targets

Another resounding theme along with speed, ease, and affordability, transparency also plays a critical role in winning customer trust.

Customers and policymakers alike are demanding change, making this a priority for the industry. In fact, according to Swift research, 31% of customers rate a lack of transparency, particularly on fees, as a key driver for leaving their bank or provider. The challenge? When payments pass through multiple intermediaries, visibility becomes nearly impossible.

Jennifer Fowler, Member of the Secretariat of the Financial Stability Board, offered banks and payment service providers practical takeaways on transparency, noting its importance in light of the upcoming G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-border Payments.

Fowler explained: “The roadmap is here to make payments faster, lower-cost, and more transparent — we want to see the public sector working actively towards this. Five years on, we’ve made progress, but there are still major challenges, and end users aren’t reaping the benefits of this roadmap just yet. While policy work is done, there’s still a lot more to do on the implementation level.”

Direct participation: the path to visibility and lower costs

Fowler went on to say that direct access to local payments systems is one area that is moving in the right direction, with CPMI data showing an increasing number of industry players connecting to these schemes to process payments instantly. This principle of direct access drives the strategy of Wise as a correspondent service provider. This model, where payment providers connect directly to domestic systems rather than routing through intermediaries, reduces both cost and complexity of processing cross-border payments while increasing transparency.

Fowler advises: "Five years on, we’ve made progress, but there are still major challenges, and end users aren’t reaping the benefits of this roadmap just yet. While policy work is done, there’s still a lot more to do on the implementation level.”

At Wise, we're so focussed on building these connections that we've now secured direct participation in eight domestic payment systems, enabling our partners and their customers to send money quickly, reliably and at low cost in AUD, BRL, EUR, GBP, HUF, SGD, PHP, and JPY. This infrastructure delivers 74% of payments instantly — reaching recipients in just 20 seconds — and 96% of payments in less than 24 hours.*

But for many banks taking their first steps in modernising cross-border payments, building this infrastructure isn't feasible, especially when payments are just one of many financial products they offer.

Partnership: reducing complexities

This is where industry partnerships become essential.

As MBSB's Haneef acknowledged, "It would have been impossible to build all this infrastructure internally. That's why we partnered with Wise Platform." Similar challenges around securing licenses and coverage led Aspire to pursue this approach as well.

Continuing on the theme of partnership, we were delighted to announce our recent collaboration with GoTyme Bank at the conference, yet another testament to how banks and businesses are leveraging trusted global infrastructure to enhance their cross-border payments capabilities.

Talking about this evolution, Jonker shared his perspective on the competitive landscape: "Cross-border payments will become one of the most competitive arenas in financial services. Those who adapt quickly to customer demands will be best positioned to succeed."

Partners such as Aspire, MBSB, and GoTyme benefit not only from the competitive advantage that comes along with speed and convenience, but increased customer engagement, retention and growth.

But the work doesn't stop here

There's still a lot of work to be done to make payments fast, affordable and transparent to everyone, everywhere. 

It’s evident from this year’s discussion that industry collaboration is serving as the cornerstone of developments in this landscape, enabling banks and businesses to not only achieve real-time payments but also access wider coverage, achieve greater transparency and enable faster go-to-market for new products and services. 

Wise Platform is proud to lead the charge in partnership, helping banks and businesses around the globe take their first steps in delivering great customer experiences at speed.

Ready to explore how partnership could transform your cross-border payments capabilities? 

Talk to the team

Or register your interest to attend our upcoming 2026 conferences in North America and Europe at www.wiseconnect.io

*Transaction speeds cited not available for all transactions.