Southeast Asia is quickly coming onstage as the top destination for tech companies and investors, flooding into the region to capture the opportunities that come with having young, diverse and tech-savvy populations. Many countries in the region are seeing positive demographic trends coupled with rising disposable incomes, in stark contrast to what is unfolding in developed markets in Europe or even in the U.S..
Countries of Southeast Asia are no longer snubbed as backwater destinations playing second fiddle to China and Japan, a recent Bloomberg News story proclaimed, citing high-profile visits by CEOs of major tech giants such as Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia, who have engaged with heads of state across the region, signalling strong commitment and exciting investment plans.
Beyond Big Tech, smaller and nimbler companies are already disrupting various industries across the region. They are especially hard to overlook in Asia’s vibrant financial services space, where innovative players are stepping up to provide modern services that legacy financial institutions either cannot, or will not, provide.
Salmon launched in 2022 with a mission to provide modern financial services to the ‘next billion’ in Asia. It started out by offering easier access to consumer credit in the Philippines. Two years later, Salmon is operating as a licensed bank with three credit products, preparing to launch lifestyle banking in the coming months, and actively exploring options for expansion into new markets across the region.
“Banking, particularly in Southeast Asia, must be reinvented to support every person’s right to pursue their dreams and achieve financial freedom. Legacy banks fail to provide quality of service the customers expect in the mobile-centric world. Our mission is enhancing the quality of life of 500 million underserved customers in Southeast Asia,’’ Salmon’s Co-founder and Executive Chairman, Pavel Fedorov, said by email.
“We are excited to be supported by world-class institutions in the pursuit of this vision. Salmon’s shareholders include IFC, a member of the World Bank, sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi ADQ, and many other blue-chip investors. With $60 million raised to date we will be driving financial inclusion across the region,’’ Fedorov said.
The scale of the opportunity in the region is tremendous and some predict that by the end of the decade, neobanks and other fintech players will account for 25% of the combined market cap of Southeast Asia’s traditional banks, currently totalling approximately $500 billion.
Consumer-focused fintech players are not the only ones excited about Southeast Asia. Yuno, the world’s leading payment orchestration platform, serving companies like McDonald’s, Rappi and inDrive, is also betting on Asia. First launched in Bogota, Colombia, Yuno quickly expanded across Latin America helping multinational companies accept and disburse payments securely, quickly and efficiently across 60 countries.
Last month, Yuno announced that it has scaled its footprint in the region, bringing its innovative payment orchestration solution to markets including Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Hong Kong, following its earlier launch in Malaysia and Indonesia. Yuno enables companies to access more than 300 payment methods worldwide, as well as integrate features such as one-click checkout, smart routing and anti-fraud tools through a single, easy-to-use interface.
“We are delighted to expand our regional presence in Asia,’’ said Juan Pablo Ortega, Yuno’s CEO and Co-founder. “Asia is a fast-growing market, with a rapidly developing digital economy and a rich payments ecosystem increasingly dominated by e-wallets. We look forward to helping companies tap into this vibrant ecosystem to reach new customers and accelerate their regional growth.”
Southeast Asia is experiencing significant growth in digital consumption, projected to reach $1 trillion by 2030 according to the e-Conomy SEA 2023 report. This growth is driven by a young and increasingly digitally-savvy population that is boosting demand for digital products and services.
Digital payments using e-wallets in the region have surged dramatically in recent years, with forecasts indicating a fivefold increase from $22 billion in 2019 to $114 billion in 2025 according to PwC, providing fertile ground for Yuno to expand its payments offering and help companies tap new customer bases to propel their regional growth, according to Finextra.
“At Yuno, we are committed to making companies’ lives easier when it comes to payments. With our strengthened presence in Asia, we are staying true to this commitment, providing our customers with easy access to a wide range of regional payment providers through our user-friendly, unified interface,’’ added Julián Núñez, Yuno’s Co-founder.
So why is Southeast Asia booming? For one, the geopolitical landscape is certainly shifting. With China adopting a more insular approach towards Western companies and India presenting complex political challenges, Southeast Asia offers a more welcoming environment for foreign investment. But perhaps most importantly, the region is home to about 675 million people and while it has been traditionally open to investment, it is finally starting to reap the benefits of its favorable investment climate.
“The governments [across Southeast Asia] are pro cross-border investments and there’s a deep talent pool,” Sean Lim, a managing partner at Singapore-based NWD Holdings, which invests in AI-based projects and other areas, told Bloomberg News.
Thanks to this convergence of foreign investment, strategic geopolitical positioning, great talent, and burgeoning digital consumption, as well as innovative tech companies flooding into Southeast Asia, it seems that the region’s moment in the tech spotlight has decisively arrived.