Crossborder
How Cross-Border Payouts Trap Working Capital
A payout corridor is a balance sheet before it is a payment rail. Prefunding, buffers, and settlement calendars decide how much cash a company immobilizes to pay reliably, and who carries it.
Technology
Crossborder
How Stablecoins Move Money Across Borders
Stablecoins can make the cross-border settlement leg faster and more programmable, while USD funding, FX conversion, PHP liquidity, compliance, local payout, and beneficiary-account credit remain essential parts of delivering money across borders.
Essay
What I Learned at Stripe Tour Singapore 2026
The real opportunity is not a new financial universe; it is a better settlement layer between familiar fiat endpoints—one that reduces the exception tax of cross-border payments: delays, FX leakage, prefunding, reconciliation, and capital trapped in transit.
AI
What the Slop Backlash Actually Shows
A close read of the AI-slop backlash data shows most of what marketing leaders are being told to do about it outruns the evidence — except one part.
Fintech
Which financial product your software company should launch first
Wallet, card, checkout, or passthrough capital — your first financial product is determined by how deep your customer relationship is and who controls the payment data today.
Embedded Finance
How Grab, Sea, and GoTo really make their money
Grab is still only at 9% financial-services revenue, but the pattern across Sea, GoTo, and Maya is clear: once the audience is built, the wallet line is the one that quietly takes over the P&L.
Essay
The Bill Hiding Behind the AI Bargain
Enterprise AI’s $20 seats are not a bargain but a temporary subsidy that will snap back into usage-based bills big enough to shock any company that built core workflows on fake prices.
Embedded Finance
Embedded finance Southeast Asia: How software companies launch a second revenue line
Embedded finance is not a future adjacency for software companies; it is a second revenue line unlocked the moment you have weekly engagement, money flowing through your product, and user trust to hold a balance.
Essay
The Philippines Built a $40 Billion Industry It Doesn't Own
The Philippines built a $40 billion IT services industry — and almost none of the ownership. AI is about to expose that gap.
Essay
The Structural Case for the Philippine Female-Led Economy
This article is based on a conversation with Niña Terol Aquino, CEO and Co-Founder of FoundHer, and the gap that's costing the Philippines one of its biggest economic opportunities.
Ecosystem
The Trust Tax: How Indonesia's Startup Scandals Repriced an Entire Ecosystem
Indonesia’s startup boom didn’t just stall — it got repriced, as the eFishery and TaniHub scandals turned “growth at all costs” into a permanent trust tax on every Indonesian founder raising capital.
Funding
How LP Mandates Rewired Southeast Asia's Venture Market
For anyone building in SEA over the next 24 months: incorporate in Singapore and engineer unit economics for 12-month payback, or accept that institutional venture capital is structurally unavailable.