Scaling Across Asia: The Real Fintech Moats
Three founders, three hard problems: closing the protection gap, moving money faster, and lending through real cycles
Asia’s fintech story is entering a different phase. The era of app-led land grabs and growth-at-all-costs is giving way to something more institutional: interoperable rails, durable distribution, and credibility with regulators and partners.
As platforms consolidate and compliance expectations tighten, the competition is clearer. The winners won’t be the loudest disruptors. They’ll be the ones that can intermediate responsibly, owning customer relationships and proving they can manage risk at scale.
With that context, Asia Tech Lens spoke to three founders operating at different layers of the stack: embedded protection, stablecoin payments, and SME credit. Together, they point to the same pattern: fintech advantage now looks like infrastructure plus trust, earned over time.
The Multi-Trillion-Dollar Protection Gap | Rob Schimek, bolttech
Rob Schimek brings a problem-first lens to insurance, often borrowing the idea that most of the work is understanding the problem before rushing to a solution.
The problem he is now focused on is the “global protection gap” – a multi‑trillion‑dollar disparity between the level of protection people need and the level of protection they are actually able to obtain. He argues the protection gap is global, but in parts of Asia expectations for transparency, convenience and a better buying experience are rising faster than traditional insurance models can match.
Schimek frames bolttech as protection rails: an enabler layer that helps incumbents and platforms match buyers and sellers of coverage more efficiently, including through newer tools like AI. In a market where expectations for speed, transparency, and convenience are rising faster than legacy models can adapt, rails matter more than rhetoric.
Why it matters now: As insurance becomes embedded into devices, mobility, travel, and commerce, the protection gap becomes a distribution and experience problem—and the companies that can provide trusted “pipes” for protection will compound advantage through partnerships and repeatable operating standards.
Catch Rob’s entire conversation with Miro Lu here:
From Remittances to Stablecoins | Eric Barbier, Triple-A.io
Eric Barbier is a serial fintech founder who treats every problem as a business opportunity—and in payments, he sees stablecoins less as a crypto narrative than as regulated infrastructure.
Stablecoins are increasingly useful when treated this way: operational payments rails that enable faster settlement, always-on availability, and fewer cross-border frictions, without forcing merchants to abandon fiat workflows.
Barbier’s model with Triple-A.io is explicitly designed around familiarity and compliance: businesses can accept and send stablecoins while settling in fiat, so finance teams don’t need to redesign how they reconcile and report. The wedge is practical cross-border use cases—merchant and B2B flows where speed, failure rates, and banking cutoffs are real constraints.
Why it matters now: As regulation and enterprise risk standards tighten, the stablecoin winners will be the ones that behave like payments infrastructure: licensed, auditable, and interoperable, rather than speculative crypto products.
Catch the full conversation here:
The Hard Part Isn’t Capital, It’s Distribution | Kelvin Teo, Funding Societies
Kelvin Teo’s view of Southeast Asian fintech is grounded in a simple observation: if you are underwriting SMEs, you are not just shipping a product, you are continuously proving you deserve trust. From the start, Teo says the operating requirement was clear: move fast on execution, stay conservative on risk and compliance.
He frames distribution as the “zone of death” for SME finance. Offline acquisition is expensive, while online channels can be inefficient and skew toward smaller, riskier borrowers. That reality is why he’s skeptical of fintech-as-disruption narratives. In his world, the real moat is building credit and distribution rails that are efficient, disciplined, and repeatable.
Why it matters now: As Southeast Asia’s fintech market matures, SME lending will be judged less on growth headlines and more on whether models hold up under stress. The winners will be those who keep acquisition efficient, credit performance stable, and partnerships durable—cycle by cycle.
Catch the full conversation between Kelvin and Miro here:
The thread across protection, payments, and credit is consistent. Asia’s fintech winners will look less like disruptors and more like institutions—scaling by building infrastructure others can rely on, operating with risk discipline, and earning regulatory credibility market by market.