The Infrastructure Imperative: How ASEAN's George Town Accord Forces Banks to Rethink 30 Years of Payment Architecture
- Sarah Huang
- Oct 22
- 14 min read
Updated: Oct 30
By Sarah Huang, Managing Partner H&F Advisers, October 22 | 2025
I spend most of my time helping companies figure out how to actually make money in APAC markets. Not the theoretical "if we build it, they will come" kind of planning, but the hard commercial reality of winning paying customers and driving revenue. So when I tell you that the George Town Accord, signed just a few days ago, is the most significant commercial forcing function I've seen in Southeast Asian banking in my 18-year career, I'm not being hyperbolic. I'm being coldly pragmatic about what's about to separate winners from losers in this market.
Here's what happened on October 16, 2025 that most bank executives are still underestimating: six national payment networks from five ASEAN countries signed a memorandum of understanding to build common standards for cross-border instant payments. Malaysia's PayNet, Singapore's NETS, Vietnam's NAPAS, the Philippines' BancNet, and Indonesia's Artajasa and RINTIS committed to a 50-year roadmap called Project Next50. This isn't another pilot program or bilateral agreement that will quietly fade away. This is a multilateral standards body with governance, enforcement mechanisms, and a clear mandate to standardise QR payments, account-to-account transfers, e-wallets, and mobile payments across 538 million people.
The commercial implications are brutal in their simplicity. If your bank's payment infrastructure can't meet these standards, you won't be able to participate in the fastest-growing payment corridors in the region. Your customers will move their business to competitors who can. Your revenue from payment services will decline while your costs to maintain legacy systems continue to climb. And unlike previous technology shifts where you could muddle through with workarounds, this time the market won't wait for you to catch up.I've watched too many banks in this region treat infrastructure modernisation as a cost center problem to be deferred indefinitely. That calculus just changed. This is now a revenue problem, and the clock is ticking.
Why the Commercial Stakes Have Never Been Higher
Let me start with the numbers that should terrify every bank CFO in Southeast Asia. The Asia-Pacific cross-border payments market was worth $12.8 trillion in 2024 and is projected to reach $23.8 trillion by 2032. That's not just growth; that's a fundamental reshaping of where payment revenue pools are forming. By 2032, this region will account for more than one-third of global international payment volumes. The question is which institutions will capture that revenue and which will be relegated to expensive, slow correspondent banking channels that customers actively avoid.
The cost structure of the status quo is already unsustainable. Banks globally are burning $36.7 billion annually just maintaining legacy payment systems, with that figure projected to hit $57 billion by 2028. That's pure waste. You're spending 70% of your IT budget keeping old systems alive and only 19% on innovation that could actually drive revenue. Meanwhile, every dollar you spend on legacy maintenance is a dollar you can't invest in the capabilities that would let you compete for that $23.8 trillion market opportunity.
The competitive gap is widening at an accelerating rate. Digital-first banks are launching new payment products in two to three months while traditional banks are stuck in 6-to-18-month cycles . That's not just a speed difference; it's a fundamental competitive disadvantage. In fast-moving APAC markets where customer preferences shift rapidly and new use cases emerge constantly, being six months late to market means you've already lost. The customer has already formed a habit with a competitor's product, and switching costs—even low ones—become insurmountable.
Accenture quantified the revenue at risk for banks that fail to modernise: up to $89 billion industry-wide. That's not evenly distributed. It will be concentrated among the laggards. Conversely, banks that have modernised their payment platforms are seeing a 42% increase in payment-related revenue.
This isn't a marginal improvement; it's the difference between growing your payments business and watching it slowly die.
Here's what that 42% revenue increase actually represents in commercial terms. Modern payment platforms enable you to launch new products faster, which means you can capture emerging revenue opportunities before competitors. They provide richer data, which means you can personalise offerings and improve conversion rates. They reduce operational costs, which means you can offer more competitive pricing and still improve margins. And they enable you to participate in new payment corridors like the ones being created by the George Town Accord, which opens entirely new revenue streams. This is a compounding advantage that grows over time.
The November Deadline That's About to Bite
There's an immovable deadline that most banks are still treating as an IT compliance issue rather than the commercial crisis it actually is. On November 22, 2025—31 days from now—SWIFT's coexistence period for ISO 20022 migration ends. After that date, legacy MT messages for cross-border payments are being decommissioned. Only the new ISO 20022 format will be accepted.
As of mid-2025, only 38.5% of global cross-border traffic on SWIFT was ISO 20022 native, and Asia-Pacific is lagging behind other regions. That means the majority of banks in this region are going to hit that deadline unprepared. The tactical response will be to use translation services that convert legacy MT messages to the new MX format. This is a terrible commercial decision disguised as a pragmatic technical solution.
Translation services strip out the data richness that makes ISO 20022 valuable in the first place. You lose the structured, granular data that enables straight-through processing, automated reconciliation, and AI-driven fraud detection. You're paying for a service that actively prevents you from capturing the efficiency gains and revenue opportunities that the new standard enables. It's like buying a smartphone and using it only to make voice calls. Technically functional, commercially not so smart..
The banks that are doing this right—and HSBC is the benchmark here, shout out to Manoj Dugar, Regional Co-head of Global Payments Solution, APAC at HSBC, processing over 4.5 million payments daily on a modernised platform—have made native ISO 20022 adoption the foundation of their operational model. They're using the rich, structured data to automate exception handling, improve liquidity forecasting, and support AI-driven fraud detection. These aren't just operational improvements; they're direct revenue enablers. Better fraud detection means lower losses and higher customer trust. Improved liquidity forecasting means better treasury management and lower funding costs. Automated reconciliation means you can handle higher volumes without proportionally increasing headcount.
This is the commercial reality that translation services completely miss. You're not just failing to capture upside; you're locking in higher costs and competitive disadvantage for years to come.
What Malaysia Just Taught Everyone About Competitive Positioning
On October 7, Bank Negara Malaysia did something that should have sent shockwaves through every banking boardroom in the region. They launched RENTAS+, a completely modernised real-time gross settlement system that operates 24/7, 365 days a year. Malaysia is now the first country in ASEAN with continuous, round-the-clock interbank settlement. This wasn't a minor upgrade. This was a fundamental re-architecture of the national payment backbone, built in-house using cloud technology. The commercial implications are profound. Before RENTAS+, retail payments in Malaysia were settled twice daily on a deferred net basis. This created credit risk and limited the types of payment products banks could offer. Now, every DuitNow transaction, the QR payments, fund transfers, e-commerce settles individually in real-time. This eliminates credit risk, enables new product offerings, and positions Malaysian banks to participate fully in the cross-border instant payment corridors being created by the George Town Accord.
Here's what this means in market positioning terms. Malaysian banks can now offer payment products and services that banks in neighbouring countries simply cannot match. They can settle cross-border transactions in real-time while competitors are still working with batch processing and next-day settlement. In consumer and SME markets where speed and certainty of payment are increasingly important, this is a decisive competitive advantage.
Bank Negara didn't do this because they love technology for its own sake. They did it because retail payment volumes in Malaysia have grown 49% since 2024. The old infrastructure couldn't handle that growth without unacceptable risk. The modernisation was a commercial necessity, not a technology vanity project. And now that they've done it, they've raised the competitive bar for everyone else in the region.
The lesson here is that infrastructure modernisation is not a cost to be minimised. It's a strategic investment that creates competitive differentiation and enables revenue growth. The banks that understand this are pulling ahead. The banks that don't are falling behind in ways that will become increasingly difficult to recover from.
The Technical Requirements Are Actually Commercial Requirements
I'm not a technologist. I'm a commercial strategist who's spent 18 years figuring out how to win paying customers in APAC markets. So when I talk about technical requirements, I'm really talking about commercial capabilities. The George Town Accord mandates specific technical standards because those standards enable specific commercial outcomes. If you can't meet the technical requirements, you can't capture the commercial opportunities.
Native ISO 20022 adoption isn't just about message format compliance. It's about having the data infrastructure to support the payment products that customers actually want. Structured, granular payment data enables instant payment confirmations, detailed transaction histories, and seamless reconciliation for business customers. These are table stakes for competing in modern payment markets. If your systems can't deliver this, you're offering an inferior product, and customers will choose competitors who can.
API-first architecture isn't just about technical elegance. It's about speed to market and ecosystem participation. When a new payment use case emerges and in APAC markets, they emerge constantly, you need to be able to build and deploy a product in weeks, not months. That requires an architecture where you can quickly connect to new partners, integrate new services, and expose new capabilities through APIs. Legacy monolithic systems can't do this. You'll spend six months just scoping the integration work while competitors are already in market capturing revenue.
Real-time settlement capability isn't just about operational efficiency. It's about enabling payment products that customers are willing to pay premium prices for. Instant cross-border remittances, real-time merchant settlements, immediate account-to-account transfers these are all products with clear willingness-to-pay in APAC markets. But you can only offer them if your infrastructure supports real-time settlement. If you're still working with batch processing and next-day settlement, you're locked out of these revenue opportunities entirely.
QR code standardisation isn't just about technical interoperability. It's about customer acquisition and retention. A Vietnamese tourist who can use their local banking app to pay seamlessly at merchants across Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines is a customer who has no reason to switch to a different provider. You've created lock-in through convenience. But if your app only works domestically while competitors offer seamless cross-border functionality, you're actively creating reasons for customers to churn.
This is why I get frustrated when I hear bank executives talk about infrastructure modernisation as an IT project. It's not. It's a commercial strategy that happens to require technology implementation.
The banks that frame it correctly are making smart investment decisions. The banks that frame it as a cost center are making decisions that will destroy shareholder value over the next five years.
The Four Paths Forward and Their Commercial Outcomes
Every bank in this region is now facing a strategic choice that will determine their commercial position for the next decade. There are four realistic paths forward, and I can tell you with reasonable confidence which ones lead to revenue growth and which ones lead to slow decline.
The first path is comprehensive modernisation. You commit to native ISO 20022, build cloud-native architecture, implement API-first design, and deploy 24/7 real-time settlement. This is what HSBC has done globally and what Bank Negara Malaysia just demonstrated regionally. The commercial outcome is clear: 42% increase in payment-related revenue, 90% faster product launches, and the ability to compete for the full $23.8 trillion market opportunity [2]. The challenge is execution risk and upfront investment. You need strong technical leadership, clear governance, and the organisational capability to manage a multi-year transformation. Most banks don't have this, which is why fractional expertise becomes critical. But if you can execute this path successfully, you're positioning for market leadership.
The second path is tactical workarounds. You use translation services for ISO 20022, add middleware to expose APIs from your legacy core, and hope you can defer the hard decisions for another few years. The commercial outcome here is predictable and grim. You're accruing technical debt that makes every future change more expensive. You're locked out of the revenue opportunities that require modern infrastructure. Your costs continue to climb while your revenue stagnates or declines. You become progressively less competitive until you're forced into a crisis-driven transformation at the worst possible time. I've seen this movie before. It never ends well.
The third path is hybrid modernisation through strategic partnerships. You keep your legacy core as a system of record but build a new, agile payment services layer on top using cloud-based platforms, often through partnerships with specialised fintech providers. About 40% of global banks are taking this approach, and it can reduce infrastructure costs by 30% while accelerating time-to-market. The commercial outcome is a balanced risk-reward profile. You get faster access to modern capabilities without the full execution risk of a complete core replacement. You can start capturing new revenue opportunities within 6-12 months rather than waiting 2-3 years. The trade-off is vendor dependency and the need for strong integration capabilities. You're managing a multi-vendor ecosystem, which requires different skills than managing a monolithic legacy system. But for most banks, this is the path that offers the best commercial return relative to risk.
The fourth path is managed decline. You don't consciously choose this, but it's the default outcome if you fail to commit to one of the other three. Your costs rise, your products become uncompetitive, your customers churn to more agile providers, and you're progressively marginalised in the market. The commercial outcome is a slow death spiral where you're trapped in a shrinking business with rising costs and declining revenue. Some banks will end up here not because they made bad decisions, but because they failed to make any decision at all. Sorry for the honesty in advance.
From a commercial strategy perspective, the hybrid modernisation path makes the most sense for most institutions. It offers the fastest path to revenue growth with manageable execution risk. But it requires making a clear decision and committing resources now, not six months from now when the competitive gap has widened further.
Why Fractional Expertise Is the Commercial Unlock
I've built my career on a simple insight: the traditional consulting model is broken, especially for execution-heavy transformations like payment infrastructure modernisation. The Big Four will sell you a beautiful strategy deck and a detailed project plan. What they won't give you is the hands-on expertise to actually build and deploy a modern payment platform. Their model is built around selling hours, not delivering outcomes. The incentives are fundamentally misaligned.
The alternative trying to hire all the expertise you need full-time is equally problematic. There's a global shortage of people with the right skills. You're competing with every bank, every fintech, and every tech company for the same small talent pool. Even if you can find them, you probably don't need them full-time for the long term. You need deep expertise during critical design and implementation phases, and then you need knowledge transfer to your internal team.
This is where fractional expertise becomes a genuine commercial advantage. Instead of hiring an army of generalists or trying to recruit a full-time team of expensive specialists, you bring in a small number of world-class fractional leaders who have actually done this before, like Arvind Dholani, who has spent over 20 years leading core banking and payment modernisation projects, can embed with your team for the critical phases. He brings battle-tested experience: what works, what doesn't, where the hidden risks are, and how to navigate the organisational and technical challenges that inevitably arise.
Yasir Mahmood brings 15+ years of deep expertise in open banking and digital payments, with specific experience in API ecosystems and regulatory compliance across ASEAN markets. Phisit Sucharitsopit served as CIO of Mula-X and held senior technology roles at JPMorgan, Standard Chartered, CIMB, and Citigroup over a 25-year career. He understands the unique challenges of modernising payment infrastructure in Southeast Asia better than almost anyone. Musa Chemah has delivered complex payment projects across Thailand and Southeast Asia and knows exactly how to navigate the regulatory, technical, and commercial challenges specific to this region.
These aren't people who will give you a strategy deck and disappear. They're people who will embed with your team, make the hard technical and architectural decisions, and ensure the transformation actually delivers commercial value. They bridge the critical gap between strategy and execution. And because they're fractional, you get world-class expertise at a fraction of the cost of hiring full-time or engaging a Big Four firm.
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The commercial math is compelling. A typical Big Four engagement for a payment modernisation program might cost $5-10 million and deliver a project plan. A fractional leadership model might cost, funnily a fraction of the amount and deliver an actually implemented, revenue-generating platform. The ROI difference is not marginal it's an order of magnitude.
The Regional Dynamics That Will Determine Winners
The George Town Accord isn't happening in isolation. It's part of a broader wave of digital infrastructure modernisation across Southeast Asia, and understanding these regional dynamics is critical for making smart commercial decisions.
Vietnam is moving aggressively on digital identity, targeting 100% adult digital ID coverage by 2026. As of October 2025, 62 million digital IDs have been issued, and 80% of public services are now online. This creates powerful network effects for digital financial services. Banks that can integrate with Vietnam's digital ID infrastructure can offer fully digital onboarding and seamless authentication. Banks that can't will be at a structural disadvantage in one of the region's fastest-growing markets.
Thailand has been a regional leader in instant payments through PromptPay, and the successful linkage with Singapore's PayNow proved the commercial viability of cross-border real-time payments. But Thailand isn't standing still. There's significant investment in upgrading infrastructure to support higher volumes and more complex use cases. Banks that have deeply integrated PromptPay into their core operations are capturing disproportionate payment revenue. Banks that treated it as just another payment channel are losing market share.Indonesia presents the largest untapped opportunity in the region. With its massive population and archipelago geography, the country has historically been fragmented and difficult to serve profitably. Both Artajasa and RINTIS signing the George Town Accord signals a commitment to standardisation that could finally unlock the full commercial potential of the Indonesian market. Banks that move early to build the infrastructure to serve this market effectively will have a significant first-mover advantage. Banks that wait will find the best customers and partnerships already locked up. The Philippines has one of the highest remittance inflows in the world, with millions of overseas Filipino workers sending money home regularly. The cost and friction of these remittances has been a persistent pain point. BancNet's participation in the George Town Accord signals a commitment to building more efficient, lower-cost corridors. For banks serving the Filipino diaspora, this is a massive revenue opportunity. The institution that can offer seamless, low-cost remittances through the new infrastructure will capture outsized market share. The institutions that can't will lose to digital wallet providers and fintech specialists.
My key takeway The Window for Action Is Closing Fast
I want to be brutally direct about timing because I see too many bank executives treating this as something they can address "eventually." The window for decisive action is measured in months, not years, and the commercial cost of delay is compounding. The ISO 20022 deadline is November 22, 2025. That's 31 days from now. If you're planning to rely on translation services, you're making a decision that will cost you revenue for years. You need a plan for native adoption, and that plan needs to be in motion right now.
The George Town Accord was signed six days ago. The Next50 Common Standards project is being stood up as we speak. The technical specifications for QR code interoperability, API standards, and settlement protocols will be developed over the coming months. If you wait until these standards are finalised to start building your infrastructure, you'll be 12-18 months behind institutions that are engaging now and building in parallel. In fast-moving APAC markets, that delay is commercially fatal.
Malaysia's RENTAS+ launch has set a new regional benchmark. Other central banks and payment networks are watching and asking why they can't offer the same capabilities. The competitive pressure is intensifying. Banks in countries that move slowly on infrastructure modernisation will find themselves at a structural disadvantage in cross-border payment corridors.
The market data is unambiguous. The $89 billion in revenue at risk isn't evenly distributed. It will be concentrated among the laggards. The 42% revenue increase for banks with modern platforms isn't a one-time bump. It's a compounding advantage that grows as they launch new products faster, serve customers better, and operate more efficiently.
This is not a situation where you can wait and see how things develop. The institutions making bold moves now, investing in modernisation, forming strategic partnerships, bringing in fractional expertise to accelerate execution—are the ones that will define the competitive landscape for the next decade. The institutions that hesitate will find themselves increasingly irrelevant in a market that has moved on without them.
The infrastructure imperative is here. The commercial stakes are clear. The time to act is now. The question is whether you'll do it on your terms with a clear strategy and strong execution, or whether you'll be forced into a reactive, expensive scramble when you realsze you have no other choice.
I know which option drives better commercial outcomes. The data is unequivocal.
About the Author
Sarah Huang is Managing Partner and Fractional Chief Product & Commercial Officer at H&F Advisers, where she specialises in helping businesses pitch and win paying customers across APAC markets.
