Asia’s commercial payments landscape is evolving quickly, with cross-border payments, FX, and compliance all playing an increasingly important role. TN Global takes a closer look at some of these developments, including an announcement from Hong Kong FinTech Week.
The momentum extends beyond traditional payment infrastructure. Sunrate, a leader AI and payments, is moving ahead with Mastercard to enable agentic commerce. And while the partnership is notable in its own right, a recent whitepaper from the company offers some good morsels into where the industry is headed.
Defining the Characteristics of AI Development in Commercial
Five defining characteristics of AI in corporate trading define the scope.
- Autonomy with Human Control. This is the most fundamental part of agentic AI for corporates. Human insight is evident at critical points to manage the trust layer with tokenization and Know Your Agent (KYA). The process is mature and tested.
- Unified Intelligence. Today, disparate systems need to be aligned so they operate with “one brain.” This will link layers, ERP systems, and treasury tools to reduce fragmentation and create efficiencies.
- Orchestrated Global Flows. In some markets, especially Asia, cross-border trade gets complicated with jurisdictional differences, FX, and liquidity allocation. This is an area receiving heavy attention from developers and is sprung from the Unified Intelligence layer.
- Compliance at Speed. This focus area varies across countries and is the next horizon for automation. The complexity comes from the wide range of rigor in some countries and lax standards in others. The design challenge is to shift this from being a time constraint to a growth enabler.
- Minimal to Zero Friction. It will take years before all friction is eliminated from the workflow, but there are early successes that make this aspirational goal important.
B2B Outpacing B2C
Retail bankers should take note on this metric. The whitepaper poses a view that B2B payments will experience a 335% compounded annual growth rate between 2026 and 2031, versus a not-so-shabby expectation for consumer payment growth of 211% during the same period. High growth areas in B2B and agentic AI center on procurement, treasury, and recurring payments.
Pay-In vs. Pay-Out
The whitepaper does a nice job of defining corporate payments into two distinct areas: pay-in and pay-out. Pay-in centers on sales collections and things like DSO. Here, the focus is on invoicing, payment processing, and collection capabilities, linking back to settlement, chargeback, and working capital management. Pay-out centers on procurement, T&E, and service payments. In this area, the keys are supplier enablement and onboarding, purchase orders and spend controls, and reconciliation, which tie directly to procurement, finance, and compliance.
Where This Is Going
Agentic AI has plenty of substance, along with plenty of hype. As it forms, the focus is on making the mechanics work. Down the field, though, are major milestones we need to tackle before we see autonomous—but highly monitored—decision-making.