The Payment Expert Podcast team reports live from day one of Money20/20 Asia in Bangkok, covering tokenised deposits, cross-border fragmentation, and the limits of digital inclusion.
Thailand’s PromptPay has 92 million registered accounts in a country of 70 million people. Across the region, street vendors run QR code terminals from food carts. And yet financial inclusion remains one of the Bank of Thailand‘s stated priorities – because the infrastructure and the people it needs to reach are not always in the same place.
The Payment Expert Podcast team reports live from Bangkok on day one of Money20/20 Asia, where tokenised deposits, cross-border fragmentation and the limits of digital inclusion dominated the conversation.
News Editor Louis Thompsett is joined by Senior Journalists Callum Williams and Kieran O’Connor to break down the standout themes from the show’s opening sessions.
Tokenised deposits emerged as a key talking point, with banks identifying concrete use cases that carry fewer regulatory complications than stablecoins while still drawing on DLT settlement capabilities.
The team also covers the argument from Deutsche Bank’s Rachel Whelan that regulatory collaboration – not stablecoins – is the more realistic answer to cross-border fragmentation across Asia’s remittance corridors.
Money20/20: When the technology outpaces the people it is built for
On financial inclusion, the episode covers the Bank of Thailand’s push into rural and agricultural communities, a panel debate on whether tokenisation can serve populations without mobile banking access, and what an Azerbaijani fintech’s experience reveals about the gap between deploying technology and getting people to use it.
A keynote on Japan’s approach to tokenised money and Ant Digital Technologies’ vision for AI super apps round out day one.
Episode six of the Payment Expert Podcast is available now on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and all major podcast platforms. To make sure you don’t miss an episode, subscribe to the Payment Expert newsletter.
