A quiet revolution is transforming the way Southeast Asia handles money, yet much of the world remains largely unaware. This revolution is driven by the rapid adoption of digital payment systems, mobile wallets, and fintech innovations, reshaping economies and empowering millions. From bustling urban centers to remote rural areas, people are embracing cashless transactions, fostering financial inclusion and creating new opportunities for businesses and individuals alike.

Key Takeaways

• ASEAN’s digital payments boom: By 2023, digital payments made up 50% of transactions in ASEAN, projected to reach $416.6 billion by 2028.
• Interoperability as a foundation: Public-sector leadership ensured systems like Thailand’s PromptPay were designed to be interoperable, low-cost, and widely usable, avoiding fragmented closed-loop systems.
• Regional connectivity: Thailand and Singapore launched the world’s first bilateral real-time payment linkage in 2021. Since then, ~20 bilateral linkages have been established across ASEAN for remittances and QR payments.
• Limits of bilateral systems: Bilateral agreements are not scalable. Multilateral projects like Project Nexus aim to standardize cross-border payment connections.

These aren’t numbers generated by a single tech giant or a Silicon Valley moonshot. They are the product of deliberate, state-led infrastructure building that deserves serious examination.

The Interoperability Imperative

The story begins with interoperability, and it begins with a deceptively simple insight. As Pariwat Kanithasen, former Deputy Director of Payments & Fintech at the Bank of Thailand, puts it: without the public sector push for interoperability as a core design principle, the region would most likely have ended up with fragmented, closed-loop systems run by individual players, the payment equivalent of proprietary phone chargers, where no universal standard exists. 

That analogy deserves to land with full force. Much of the fintech world, from the United States to Europe, has spent years trying to retrofit interoperability onto systems built for competition and exclusivity. ASEAN, at its best, built it in from the start.

Thailand’s PromptPay is the clearest embodiment of this philosophy. Designed with low fees, phone-number-based transfers, and broad use cases spanning person-to-person, business-to-business, and government payments, it achieved something that purely market-driven systems rarely accomplish: it generated network effects powerful enough to pull the entire economy along. 

This is not an accident. It is what happens when public infrastructure is treated as public infrastructure.

A Truly Connected Region

The results at the regional level have been equally striking. The world’s first bilateral real-time payment linkage, connecting Thailand’s PromptPay and Singapore’s PayNow, went live in 2021. Since then, countries across Southeast Asia have established around 20 such bilateral payment linkages, covering both remittances for migrant workers and QR payments for tourists. For a region as geographically fragmented and economically diverse as ASEAN, this is a genuinely remarkable achievement.

But this is precisely where honest analysis must complicate the celebration. Bilateral linkages, for all their success, carry the seeds of their own limitations. 

They are not scalable in the long run, and industry leaders know it. The shift toward multilateral solutions like Project Nexus, which aims to create a plug-and-play model for cross-border payments, standardising the way instant payment services connect, is the acknowledgment that twenty bilateral agreements are not the same as one coherent regional network. 

The math of connectivity is brutal: every new participant in a bilateral-only world requires a new set of negotiations, integrations, and legal alignments. Multilateral architecture solves this problem in principle. Executing it is another matter entirely.

The obstacles are neither trivial nor purely technical. Fragmentation persists on the technical side, with differing levels of adoption of ISO 20022 standards and misaligned QR frameworks. On the business side, foreign exchange settlement and pricing remain pain points. 

And on the legal side, differences in payment laws and regulations across jurisdictions must still be overcome. None of these challenges is insurmountable, but none of them will resolve themselves through market forces alone. This is fundamentally a governance problem, which means it requires governance solutions.

Leveraging Payments to Strengthen Economic Sovereignty

There is also the question of what digital payments are actually for. The economic case is compelling enough on its own terms: faster, cheaper, more transparent transactions benefit businesses and consumers alike. 

But Kanithasen points to something deeper. When payment systems are connected, transactions no longer need to pass through multiple jurisdictions, which reduces foreign exchange costs and improves speed and transparency. More importantly, this supports the use of local currencies, allowing parties to transact directly with each other rather than routing through a third currency, which strengthens local currency usage and makes cross-border payments more accessible, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises.

This is not a minor point. In a world where the Global South is actively reconsidering its dependence on dominant reserve currencies and the geopolitical leverage they carry, regional payment connectivity becomes a tool of economic sovereignty, not just operational efficiency. The ability to settle trade in Thai baht and Indonesian rupiah, rather than routing everything through dollars, represents a quiet but meaningful shift in how regional economic relationships are structured.

Trust is the Foundation That Can’t Be Replicated or Downloaded

None of this happens automatically. As systems scale, outages can have a wide systemic impact, and fast payments also enable fast fraud, making it essential to put preventative safeguards and responsive measures in place that evolve just as quickly as the systems themselves. The infrastructure, in other words, is only as good as the trust built around it.

ASEAN has done something genuinely difficult: it has built a regional payment infrastructure that works, that people use, and that is already changing lives for migrant workers sending remittances home and small businesses trading across borders. 

The temptation now will be to declare victory. The wiser path is to treat what exists as a foundation, not a finish line. Being in a leadership position in payments in ASEAN isn’t about going first. It is about bringing others along and helping shape shared standards. That is as good a principle for regional integration as any, and the region would do well to hold onto it.

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Gold and silver prices opened sharply higher on the Multi Commodity Exchange of India (MCX) on Wednesday, tracking gains in global bullion markets after U.S. President Donald Trump agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, easing concerns over energy-driven inflation.

MCX silver futures due May 2026 were up Rs 13,422 or 6% to Rs 2,44,770 per kg. Meanwhile, gold futures for June 2026 delivery gained Rs 3.655 or 2.4% to Rs 1,53,944 per 10 grams.

In the international market, yellow metal prices rose to a near three-week high on Wednesday. Spot gold was up 2.3% at $4,812.49 per ounce as of 0215 GMT. Earlier in the session, bullion had surged more than 3% to its highest level since March 19. U.S. gold futures for June delivery also advanced 3.4% to $4,841.60. Among other metals, spot silver climbed 4.9% to $76.48 per ounce.

The shift in stance came just ahead of Trump’s deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a key route that carries 20% of the world’s oil supply, or face broad attacks on its civilian infrastructure. “This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE!” Trump wrote on social media. Earlier on Tuesday, he had warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if his demands were not met.

How should you trade gold?

Manoj Kumar Jain of Prithvi Finmart said that both gold and silver are witnessing heightened volatility, though key support levels are expected to hold. He noted that silver could sustain above $62.00 per troy ounce, while gold may hold $4,420 per troy ounce on a weekly closing basis.
He added that precious metals are likely to remain volatile this week due to fluctuations in the dollar index, movement in crude oil prices, and the upcoming U.S. Fed meeting minutes. For gold, support is seen in the $4,664–$4,615 range, while resistance is placed at $4,840–$4,910 per troy ounce. Silver, meanwhile, has support at $69.10–$66.60 and resistance at $76.00–$80.00 per troy ounce for the day.
On the MCX, Jain highlighted that gold has support at Rs 1,48,500–Rs 1,47,200 and resistance at Rs 1,53,350–Rs 1,55,000. Silver is seen finding support at Rs 2,27,700–Rs 2,24,000, with resistance at Rs 2,36,650–Rs 2,44,000.
In terms of strategy, he recommends buying gold above Rs 1,51,100 with a stop loss below Rs 1,48,500 for targets of Rs 1,55,000–Rs 1,56,600. For silver, he suggests buying above Rs 2,36,000 with a stop loss below Rs 2,30,000, targeting Rs 2,42,000–Rs 2,45,000.

Gold rates in physical markets

Gold Price today in Delhi

Standard gold (22 carat) prices in Delhi stand at Rs 1,09,992/8 grams while pure gold (24 carat) prices stand at Rs 1,19,984/8 grams.

Gold Price today in Mumbai

Standard gold (22 carat) prices in Mumbai stand at Rs 1,09,872/8 grams while pure gold (24 carat) prices stand at Rs 1,19,864/8 grams.

Gold Price today in Chennai

Standard gold (22 carat) prices in Chennai stand at Rs 1,10,872/8 grams while pure gold (24carat) prices stand at Rs 1,20,952/8 grams.

Gold Price today in Hyderabad

Standard gold (22 carat) prices in Hyderabad stand at Rs 1,09,872/8 grams while pure gold (24 carat) prices stand at Rs 1,19,864/8 grams.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)

A new report from Gallup finds that U.S. workers are less optimistic about the job climate and their level of engagement with their current jobs has remained relatively flat.

Gallup released its 2026 State of the Global Workplace report on Wednesday, which showed that while 51% of global workers think it’s a good time to find a quality job, the sentiment among U.S. workers declined to 28% in the fourth quarter of 2025.

That figure represents a notable decline from 46% in the fourth quarter of 2024, continuing a steep downward trend from the 70% reading in the second quarter of 2022.

“Folks with degrees, they’re having a particularly difficult time finding a job,” Jim Harter, chief scientist of workplace management and well-being for Gallup, told FOX Business. “So there’s really a kind of interesting dynamic going on right now where unemployment is fairly low, it’s on the uptick a little bit, but hiring isn’t happening.”

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“The job climate, just in terms of people’s freedom, they’re feeling stuck where they’re at. Part of the solution to that is organizations need to get better at driving systems of really solid performance management and good communication between managers and employees,” Harter said.

When workers feel stuck and like they don’t have a choice about finding another quality job, Harter said that their “engagement will start to drop, and active disengagement will start to go up when people lack choice because they’re stuck in jobs that they don’t want.”

Workers who said they’re looking to find a new job reported not getting much of a response even after applying for multiple jobs, Gallup found.

“We do see that people are applying for jobs, but they’re just not getting much response. There’s just not much out there from a hiring standpoint right now,” Harter said. “It’s just not a really good time right now on the hiring end and, again, unemployment’s fairly low, so people are in jobs – but they’re jobs that they don’t consider to be high quality jobs.”

AMERICAN WORKERS’ WAGE GAINS LOST MOMENTUM IN MARCH DESPITE STRONG HIRING, ECONOMISTS SAY

Harter noted that among respondents who say they have the ability to do multiple things, their perception of the job climate was more favorable. 

“I think that there’s a big factor in terms of upskilling related to AI that could be a big component of people being able to find jobs going into the future,” he added.

The report’s findings also demonstrated conditions that Gallup has called the “Great Detachment” in which people are actively looking for work or watching for openings while also reporting low levels of satisfaction with their current employer.

“Even though the employees have less choice in terms of leaving their employer to go somewhere else, there’s psychological turnover meaning they’re not bringing their whole selves to help the organization improve,” Harter said.

US ECONOMY ADDED 178,000 JOBS IN MARCH, WELL ABOVE EXPECTATIONS

The report also found that the three-year rolling average of engaged workers declined a point to 31%, with 52% of workers not engaged and 17% actively disengaged. At 31%, the level of engagement among U.S. workers is at its lowest level since 2014, while the share of actively disengaged workers at 17% was also at 2014 levels.

By contrast, Harter said that the top organizations have 70% or more of their employees engaged, along with managers who are engaged to an even greater extent.

“When you look closely at organizations that are really doing a great job right now, they are figuring out ways to get it done,” he said. “They actually upskill their managers, they get people into the right managerial role – that helps when you flatten the organization and people can take on a higher span of control as managers. They help people see how their work connects to the bigger purpose of the organization.”

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“What we’re talking about here is very solvable, but it’s an uphill, kind of against-the-wind battle right now where leaders need to be very intentional about what they do with their staff and particularly with their managers and how they get prepared to coach people on a regular basis and help people feel like they’re a part of what the overall organization is trying to get done,” Harter added.

The Reserve Bank of India’s latest policy stance has drawn attention for its balanced approach, combining optimism on growth with caution on inflation and foreign exchange volatility. Analysts noted that the central bank’s projections, particularly for fiscal year 2027, appeared more optimistic than market expectations.

Speaking to ET Now, Anubhuti Sahay from Standard Chartered highlighted the growth outlook: “The MPC has projected 6.9% growth for FY27. We are at 6.4%. It looks optimistic, but RBI aims to stabilise market sentiment. Sharp downgrades are not typical for central banks, so a gradual adjustment was expected.”

On the tone of the policy, she said: “This is a very good, balanced policy. The MPC is on wait-and-watch mode, noting upside risks to inflation, downside risk to growth, and staying vigilant on FX volatility. The communication is clear and comforting for the markets.”

Addressing the impact of global energy supply and the war, Sahay said: “Two big ifs remain—the timeline of the war and its aftermath. Even if the war ends, energy prices could stay high if infrastructure is damaged. We can’t predict this precisely.”

On the realism of projections, she added: “The MPC has highlighted downside risks. Growth may be revised lower and inflation higher as clarity emerges, but the gradual approach supports market sentiment. Right now, growth is 6.4% and inflation 4.7%, and the direction indicated by the RBI remains key for markets.”

Analysts say that while the RBI’s growth projection may appear optimistic compared with market estimates, its cautious and measured communication provides reassurance to markets amidst ongoing global uncertainties.

In a policy announcement that was brief, concise, and directly addressed multiple concerns, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) left markets with a clear sense of direction amidst global uncertainties. Speaking to ET Now about the key takeaways from the monetary policy, former RBI Deputy Governor R. Gandhi shared his insights on the tone and implications of the latest moves.

“The MPC’s assessment and the final decisions were all on expected lines. There is no surprise in terms of their assessment or the final action, so that is the first thing. What further information that we can derive out of MPC is the projection, so their forecast both on GDP and inflation—that is where the likely discussion is going to be among people in all the stakeholders, how to assimilate those changes vis-à-vis the earlier forecast. That is what a quick reaction that much,” Gandhi said.

The Monetary Policy Report (MPR) revealed an upward revision in crude oil price assumptions, from $75 to $85 per barrel, reflecting heightened uncertainty from the West Asia crisis. On navigating policy in such scenarios, Gandhi noted the RBI’s comprehensive approach.

“Obviously, the central banks having access to various data points. Their model is much-much larger in terms of parameters that are being watched and fed into the model. Whereas just now, as I mentioned, the analysts who have their own model, they will have a very quick assessment kind of. Because obviously being part of the policymaking hierarchy, they get access to all such parameters, that is one. And two, their research team is also very-very focused, longstanding, credentials in terms of expertise built over the period, so that way their assessment will always be more sanguine in terms of not volatility or their intention to keep the assessment slow, that is not the intention, that model itself brings out that kind of stability. So that is one point.”

Gandhi emphasized that markets need to assess their own stance based on their risk appetite but should remain mindful of the RBI’s proactive posture.

“So, what you are asking is that based on this, what the market should think about, how to reassess their own stance, their own actions based on this assessment, that is of course depending upon each entity’s risk appetite and risk-taking capacity—they may have a different view on that. But one thing what everyone should be clearly keeping in mind is that anything going to extreme, the pulse maker will always come in the way. Just as we have seen in the last two weeks when the rupee was quite volatile, and to bring in a sense of sanity, the Reserve Bank had to use certain tools which are harsh in normal course. Obviously, sometime when the restoration takes place, they will definitely be revisiting that and drawing those tools in operation. That is par for course that way. So that way, market should take cue from the strong message MPC and Governor Reserve Bank is telling—that we are watchful, we will be proactive, and we will be pre-emptive also. So, those are the three things always remember.”
Analysts see the RBI’s current stance as a stabilizing force for markets, signaling that while global shocks may persist, the central bank is prepared to act decisively to mitigate volatility and maintain economic equilibrium.

The fashion brand is planning to open 15 shops in Britain this year

Fashion brand Mango has opened a new store in Cheltenham, creating 10 jobs. The branch is based in the town’s Regent Arcade and sells clothing, footwear and accessories designed at the company’s Barcelona studio.

The opening of the 4,500 sq ft branch comes as the brand targets further international expansion, including in Britain. According to the business, the move is part of its 2024–2026 4Es Strategic Plan, which aims to drive sales growth.

It is understood the UK remains a priority growth market for Mango which said it was “on track” to open 500 new stores globally by the end of the year, including 15 in the UK.

Fiona Cullen, international regional director for the UK & Ireland, said: “Our new Woman store in Cheltenham is a confident step forward for Mango, building on the strong progress we have made over the last year to broaden the appeal of Mango to even more customers across the UK.

“Cheltenham is the perfect new home to introduce our Woman collection to customers in the Cotswolds, in a store format that truly represents the Mediterranean soul of our brand.”

Last year, Mango reported global turnover of €3.8bn – up 13 per cent year-on-year or 16 per cent at constant exchange rates. In the UK, Mango reported close to 20 per cent turnover driven by its strategy, it said.

At the end of 2025, Mango had over 100 points of sale across the UK, including standalone stores and concessions.