'There Is No Shortcut': Fintech Founders on the Unglamorous Grind of Building in Southeast Asia

 

 

Three fintech leaders opened up at Money20/20 about patience, fragmented regulations, hard-won trust, and why AI cannot save you if your product is not yet good enough.

 

 

In a region celebrated for its digital growth story, three of Southeast Asia's most seasoned fintech founders gathered on Tuesday at Money20/20 Asia in Bangkok for a session that dispensed almost entirely with superficial optimism. 

 

What followed was a rare, candid hour of hard lessons about regulation, trust, scaling across borders, and the limits of artificial intelligence.

 

The "Founder Stories: Lessons from the Frontlines" forum brought together Aswin Phlaphongphanich of DeeMoney, Andrea Baronchelli of Aspire, and Aditya Haripurkar of HitPay — three entrepreneurs who, between them, have navigated punishing licensing regimes, product pivots, fragmented payment infrastructure, and the peculiar psychological demands of leading a fintech company in a region where patience is less a virtue and more a prerequisite for survival.

 

 

 

Regulation: the great equaliser

If there was a single word echoed throughout the session, it was "regulation." Baronchelli, whose Singapore-founded business now operates across roughly eight jurisdictions, described the regulatory landscape of Southeast Asia as one requiring not merely a licence but "a list of licences." 
 

For Aspire, which launched in 2018 and has spent the past few years expanding beyond the Asia-Pacific, the company's multi-market footprint has become its distinguishing advantage rather than its burden.

 

"Fintech, banking, and financial services are usually the fall guys because regulation pulls you into a single market," he said. "The rockets are thrown at you and you are basically grounded in a location." 
 

 

Aspire's answer, he explained, has been to position itself as the connective tissue between jurisdictions where local banking partners are typically weaker.

 

Haripurkar offered a complementary perspective. HitPay, now in its tenth year of operation, deliberately chose to obtain licences first before building out payments infrastructure in each new market – a decision that slowed early growth but, he argued, was essential to maintaining control over the full technology stack and ensuring the quality of customer onboarding. 

 

Relying on a go-to-market partner, he cautioned, creates a dependency that rarely ends well. "If success is your benchmark, then you need to think about what is going to get you there. It may not be the partner."
 

 

Aswin agreed, noting that Southeast Asia's fragmentation — in regulation, culture, payment methods, and consumer behaviour — makes the copy-and-paste expansion model used by Western firms essentially unworkable. 

 

"It's not that we're successful in Thailand; we can pick it up and paste it in Indonesia and think that it'll work," he said. "It's immense localisation and product-market fit understanding." 

 

He added that Singapore's reputation for having among the most stringent regulatory standards in the region had, counter-intuitively, proved advantageous for HitPay: building to that standard first made entering other markets comparatively easier.
 

 

 

 

Scaling slowly, by design

When asked for a blueprint for scaling, Baronchelli offered three principles forged through years of multi-market expansion. 

 

The first is patience.

 

 

 

 

Planning horizons of two to three years — covering licensing, operations, organisational build-out, and go-to-market — are entirely normal in fintech, he said, even if they feel alien to the startup mentality. 

 

"It's a planning timeline that sometimes goes into the multi-year, which is very rare for a young company to have. We learned the hard way — we were trying to go very fast and it doesn't work that much."

 

The second principle is modularity. Aspire now builds its product platform in a way that separates a centralised core from a localised layer that can be adjusted for each market. Roughly 80 per cent of the product is built and maintained centrally, with the remainder adapted to local requirements. 

 

"It allows the company to talk the same language instead of localising 100 per cent," Baronchelli explained. 

 

The third principle is operational simplification through AI tools — not for customer acquisition or product innovation, but to strip away the redundant administrative work in risk management and compliance that once made multi-jurisdiction operations feel near-impossible. 

 

This benefit, he was quick to note, applies primarily to companies that have already achieved meaningful scale.

 

Haripurkar added that managing patience is not solely an internal challenge — it extends outward to investors, employees, and every other stakeholder in the business.

 

"It's not only us learning about patience. It's about us educating everyone else about patience as well." 

 

Aswin put it most bluntly of all: "If you're impatient, being a fintech leader is a long job. In summary, it's just not going to happen."

 

 

 

Trust: built in years, lost in minutes

Perhaps the session's most sobering segment concerned trust — specifically, how long it takes to build it and how swiftly it can be undone. 

 

Haripurkar spoke at length about the challenges of serving small and medium-sized enterprises, a segment he described as "brutal." 

 

Unlike enterprise clients, who tend to absorb occasional service failures with relative equanimity, SMEs react with immediate churn and, increasingly, with complaints filed directly to regulators. 

 

"If you delay their payout, they're not only going to complain to us, they're going to complain to the regulator," he said. 
 

 

After a decade of operations, HitPay has earned a reputation it protects zealously — and Haripurkar was explicit that it could not be manufactured quickly. "We don't take it for granted."

 

Baronchelli's prescription for accelerating trust was blunt: earn it through word of mouth by simply not letting clients down. 

 

"If someone trusts you and tells another person that you are a trustworthy business, you immediately have an acceleration." 

 

Beyond that, he acknowledged, the industry demands time above all else. Moving people's money, he said, is a business where trust develops over a decade, sometimes longer, and where customer stickiness often reflects not loyalty so much as the sheer difficulty of finding an alternative provider. 

 

Aswin reached for a more poetic analogy. "It's like saying, can I have a great bottle of wine that is not a couple of years old? It's impossible, in my opinion."

 

 

 

The honest limits of AI

Asked whether artificial intelligence could lower customer acquisition costs and ease fintech's perennial growth struggles, the panel offered a notably restrained assessment. 

 

All three panellists use AI internally — across marketing, compliance, sales, and operations — and Aswin credited AI-powered digital marketing tools with significantly reducing DeeMoney's acquisition costs and enabling more targeted outreach to specific customer communities. 

 

But the consensus was unambiguous: AI can make the process of acquiring a customer marginally more efficient; it cannot make an untrustworthy or poorly fitted product attractive.

 

"Adopting AI does not mean that customer acquisition becomes easy," Haripurkar said. "A merchant or a customer only signs up if they trust the platform. AI doesn't solve for that." 

 

Baronchelli was similarly measured, suggesting that the real benefits of AI-driven cost optimisation are realised only once a business has found product-market fit and achieved a degree of scale.

 

In the earliest years of a company's life, the priority is not optimising operations but discovering whether the product belongs in a given market at all — and for that, he said, AI offers little help as yet.

 

 

 

What kills a fintech startup?

The moderator closed the formal session with a sharp challenge: one word each to name the single biggest "killer" of fintech startups.

 

The responses were as distinct as the speakers themselves, proving that while many outsiders point to regulation as the primary hurdle, industry insiders identify a far broader range of fatal factors.

 

Haripurkar cited “incompetency” as the leading threat. Baronchelli identified “adaptability”—or rather, the lack of it.

 

He argued that startups often fail when they lose the iterative mindset required in an industry where change is the only constant.

 

"You think you're going to start something, and it's ABC, but six months later it's XYZ," he noted. "Your brain starts to experience cognitive dissonance... but I imagine this happens every single year."

 

Aswin, given the final opportunity to elaborate, returned to a theme he had championed throughout the day: that founders who chase valuations over fundamentals rarely survive the "long, grinding timelines" that fintech demands.

 

It was, in essence, the thesis of the entire session—that building a fintech company in Southeast Asia is an exercise in sustained discipline, institutional humility, and a willingness to forgo the shortcuts that simply do not exist in this industry.