During Money 20/20 Asia 2026, Anupam Pahuja, Chief Revenue Officer at Nium, spoke to Payment Expert’s Senior Business Journalist Callum Williams, to discuss how varying trends and technologies are shaping cross-border payments in Asia.
The cross-border payment industry in Asia is vast, diverse and complex, consisting of many remittance corridors and processes which make it unique to any other region.
Anupam Pahuja, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Nium, believes there has been a shift in the 27 different cross-border corridors in Asia, particularly those pertaining to China.
Pahuja says people are diversifying their sources of supply outside of China, primarily due to geopolitics, and have shifted to conduct cross-border transactions to new emerging markets like Indonesia and Vietnam.
However, cross-border payments come with remittance fees, and with so many different corridors in Asia to navigate, this not only becomes costly for businesses but time-consuming too.
“Working capital is the lifeblood of a small business,” says Pahuja. “If it takes you a long time to move your money, and it takes you seven days, that is going to kill your business.”
Stablecoins have often been touted as a cost-effective and faster solution to those cross-border friction points, with the promise of providing 24/7 settlement, cheaper remittance fees and greater transparency and access to capital liquidity.
Pahuja believes stablecoins are “not a solution looking for a problem, it is actually solving a problem,” and the ability for these digital currencies to help cross-border flows to move across the world without the need for banks to be open, has now become a “necessity”.
While the market is heavily dominated by US dollar-denominated stablecoins and as it expands internationally, there could be an opportunity for the rise of multi-currency digital currencies to close market cap.
But Pahuja says that there may not be a need for so many different stablecoins in circulation at the moment, which may lead the cross-border payment industry “back to the chaos we have been trying to avoid”.
To close out, Pahuja reveals some of the key friction points financial institutions need to solve today in order to create a seamless cross-border payment system designed for everybody involved.
