Cashless: Fintech, CBDC and AI at the speed of Asia

This next paper shows why the ECB is concerned about stablecoins and monetary sovereignty, a driving force for the digital euro. Will the world accept USD stablecoins and the dollarization that they bring?

Stablecoins And Monetary Sovereignty

289KB ∙ PDF file

New this week!

Ing Think Stablecoins 101 Uncertain Growth But The Stakes Are High

1.39MB ∙ PDF file

Read this before you call stablecoins the future of payments. ING's new research series lays out the bull case: $300bn market cap, $250bn added in five years, forecasts reaching $4.2tr by 2030. Then it lays out the wall: three major jurisdictions building three incompatible regulatory regimes, a universal ban on paying interest to holders, and 99% of the market pegged to a single currency that half the world is trying to reduce exposure to. The growth story is real. So are the constraints.

Report On Self Custody Wallets And Their Role In Digital Finance

5.26MB ∙ PDF file

Global Digital Finance, Block, TRM Labs, and Coinbase analyzed $40.6 billion in self-custody wallet transactions and found 1% illicit exposure, roughly $400 million. Meanwhile, 43.8% of the volume they analyzed was categorized as "unclassified," meaning they could not determine what nearly half the money was doing. In parallel, the IMF found that 75% of self-custody wallets have no identifiable owner and 89% have no attributable country. FinCEN designated a single operation, Cambodia's Huione Group, as a primary money laundering concern after confirming at least $4 billion in laundered crypto since 2021. The core limitation is methodological: blockchain analytics only tags funds as illicit after law enforcement identification. The UNODC estimates Asian scam compounds generate hundreds of billions in flows through USDT and self-custody wallets, nearly all of which would appear as ordinary payment activity in any on-chain analysis until an investigation traces them backward from an arrest.

For more on self-custody wallets, read my article below:

Asia is Still the World's Most Important Fintech Story

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 09:30:36 GMT

I post daily, but deliver to your inbox every Sunday. Browse past newsletters HERE. Book Rich. Bring the speed of Asia to your next event HERE

Read me first

Asia is “a hotbed of fintech experimentation and innovation which other regions should observe, develop, and adopt.”

Z/Yen and the Seoul Metropolitan Government just released a report on Asia’s fintech that both new and long-term readers of this newsletter should download.

This report lays out clearly why Asia’s fintech is the model the rest of the world needs to study.

Most importantly, it confirms that it’s not just me saying this anymore!

Why is Asia the global epicenter of fintech?

The West digitized banking by layering apps on top of legacy systems, with results designed to favor incumbents. Asia took a different path and leapfrogged the West with brand-new technology. Most of the region went straight from cash and limited-coverage branch banking to mobile-first finance, building entirely new rails rather than patching old ones.

Yes, Asia had massive unbanked populations and lacked the financial architecture that exists in the West. This created a vacuum for fintech to fill as wealth in the region grew.

Instead of fighting entrenched infrastructure, countries like India and China, as well as nations across Southeast Asia, deployed fintech to connect hundreds of millions of people to formal financial services for the first time.

Many in the West assume that Asia’s fintech is too different to be relevant, a significant strategic error that my readers don’t make. I often hear managers ask, “What will happen to this fintech product in a few years?” The question is often answered by looking to Asia, where it has been running at scale for years.

Why fintech matters even more for Asia

Because the economic stakes are enormous. Asia is driving roughly 60% of global growth according to the IMF’s 2025 Regional Economic Outlook.

Fintech is not a sideshow here. It's a path to higher GDP and is seen as critical by the governments, the public, and regulators who actively spur its growth

It is core infrastructure powering GDP expansion, unlike in the West, where fintech is viewed more as taking market share from incumbents rather than expanding the economy.

The Asian Development Bank links improved payment infrastructure directly to deeper regional economic integration and economic growth. Fast and cheap payments are no longer just fueling domestic growth, but are now connecting entire national payment systems, further fueling growth.

Nothing is perfect

The report does not sugarcoat Asia’s challenges, and with 50 separate countries, regulations remain deeply fragmented. How much more different can two countries like Singapore and Myanmar be?

There are no common regulatory standards within the region, and scams, money laundering, and human trafficking are real. So let’s not skip over the region’s many flaws for the sake of fintech.

The region is obsessed with AI, yet AI governance encompasses everything from Singapore’s model risk management guidelines to nations with no practical regulation at all. Asia’s fintech is astounding, but it’s messy and highly regional.

Where it’s heading

AI is rapidly becoming an embedded utility across Asian finance. The report makes a rather tame prediction that agentic AI will automate risk, compliance, and operations. This is already happening in Huawei’s cloud banking services. GenAI assistants are already standard across banking customer service and will break into wealth advisory for client services.

But it makes one prediction that is far bolder. It predicts that federated learning will allow institutions to share fraud intelligence across borders without exposing raw customer data. This will have a material impact on the region’s fraudsters, which is precisely why we should hope it comes to fruition and doesn’t face regulatory pushback.

This report is a strong case for why Asia's fintech is still on top, why I write about it, and why you should read it.

While the rest of the world debates what fintech strategy will best preserve incumbents, Asia is busy knocking down their walls and forcing them to evolve.

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Measuring AI ROI? Most Companies Count the Wrong Value

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:28:29 GMT

I post daily, but deliver to your inbox every Sunday. Browse past newsletters HERE. Book Rich. Bring the speed of Asia to your next event HERE

Read me first

This is a three-part series on AI ROI.

Most companies are slavishly chasing AI ROI by pouring money into short-term efficiency gains and missing the long-term returns of better decisions.

This is the third part of a series on AI ROI. In Part 1, we showed that very few companies actually have it. In Part 2, we looked at why. In this final part, we ask whether ROI is even the right measure.

Companies are chasing AI ROI as though it will lead them to AI nirvana. But what if they’re chasing the wrong thing entirely?

Simon Torrance, CEO of AI Risk, looks at ROI and sees it as only part of a larger picture. ROI captures just one of three kinds of value that Agentic AI produces.

The other two go unmeasured and unfunded. He calls the missing piece “Intelligence Capital.”

Agentic AI produces three distinct things:

1️⃣ Efficiency gains — doing today’s work more cheaply

2️⃣ Operational capacity — doing more work without hiring

3️⃣ Intelligence Capital — better decisions, built from judgments only your firm has made

Now ask one question: what happens to this value once every rival buys the same tools?

Efficiency gains depreciate first. What was your margin eventually becomes the market’s baseline. Operational capacity expands and buys you time, but competitors build the same capability and close the gap.

Only Intelligence Capital appreciates, because it is built from the accumulated judgments your firm has made. No competitor can buy that. They can only build their own, and every month you’ve been recording decisions is a month they haven’t.

Cost savings translate directly into dollars and ROI, which is why every AI implementation that reduces headcount gets funded. AI efficiency and staff reductions are the focus because they’re easy to measure.

In the process, they’re completely discounting better decisions because they defy easy quantification.

But better decisions accumulate and their value compounds. They pay out long after the quarterly review is over.

This takes us back to McKinsey’s survey from Part 1. Half the respondents say AI helps them make better decisions.

This statistic is tossed out like an aside and followed up with: “That’s nice, now show me the money.”

Meanwhile, the same survey asks for enterprise value. It asks for dollars: profit, cost reduction, revenue.

Nobody is asked for the money saved due to better decisions.

We’re all slavishly following the money, but missing its greatest source.

If you know someone who would like this newsletter, please share it with them and help grow our Asia, CBDC, and AI aficionados community!

Searching for AI's ROI? Chase Transformation, Not Illusions

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:28:01 GMT

I post daily, but deliver to your inbox every Sunday. Browse past newsletters HERE. Book Rich. Bring the speed of Asia to your next event HERE

Read me first

This is a three-part series on AI ROI.

Everyone is looking for AI’s ROI, yet nobody can find it because they are looking at the illusion of AI busywork rather than actual transformation.

McKinsey says 89% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function. 80% of individuals say it has improved their productivity. Yet only 6% of companies report any significant financial return from AI.

What McKinsey reveals is that almost everyone is using it, yet almost no one is making money from it.

Rillion’s new report, “The Finance AI Illusion,” gives us the best explanation yet for why. The report hits home because it isn’t about AI use in complex client-facing use cases.

Instead, this report is about AI in the finance back office, where it should be easily transforming all functions, but isn’t.

Let’s be honest: if AI can’t handle invoice processing, reconciliation, and accounts payable, how can we trust it with more complex banking functions like credit decisions or portfolio allocations?

The illusion isn’t that AI can’t transform finance. It’s that companies mistake activity for transformation and assume they’re further along than they are. This is McKinsey’s 89% using AI, with only 6% profiting from it.

The first illusion is trust. 81% of finance leaders report moderate or high trust in AI. Sounds great until you learn only 39% are comfortable letting AI act independently. That’s not trust. If the AI works and you still won’t let it act, the problem isn’t the technology.

The next illusion deepens with automation. Finance teams haven’t eliminated manual work, they’ve simply moved it. 45% still rely on human review after automating processes.

As the report puts it: “companies bought the licenses and got nothing, because they bolted AI onto a broken process and got faster broken.”

The illusion peaks with a false belief in transformation. 68% expect significant change within three years. But when asked what that looks like, 59% say “more data interpretation.”

Really? AI that can solve the world’s most complex math problems should be used to replace existing dashboards?

This is AI busywork. Dashboards are prettier, reports arrive faster, and boxes get checked. But the underlying processes haven’t changed, the manual work hasn’t disappeared, and the ROI everyone is hunting for remains a mirage, completing the self-fulfilling illusion.

The search for AI ROI won’t end until companies stop confusing adoption with transformation. If the illusion holds in the simplest use case any company has, imagine where it hides in the complex ones.

The illusion is seductive and easy to believe. People are using AI throughout the company and are busier than ever, so it must be making us better, and the ROI is right around the corner.

AI ROI is dependent on transformation, not busywork, yet far too many believe the illusion.

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The Road to AI ROI Has a Detour and No Map

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:01:44 GMT

I post daily, but deliver to your inbox every Sunday. Browse past newsletters HERE. Book Rich. Bring the speed of Asia to your next event HERE

Read me first

This is a three-part series on AI ROI.

McKinsey says companies are on the path to AI ROI, but their own data says otherwise.

McKinsey’s State of AI report is a classic case of the glass being either half full or half empty. McKinsey, the perpetual optimist, sees it as full.

More objective readers, and I count myself as one, may not be so sure.

The numbers tell a more complicated story than the headline reveals.

The good news is that 89% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function. 80% of individuals say AI has improved their productivity. Adoption is broad, real, and accelerating.

But when we look at the financial impact of this adoption, the glass starts to look empty.

The share of respondents reporting enterprise-level financial impact from AI is unchanged at 37%.

Most telling is that AI “high performers,” those actually seeing significant EBIT returns, remain flat at just 6% of all respondents.

You’d expect the number of high performers to increase, not be stuck at 6%. It calls into question the candor of survey respondents, rather than McKinsey’s integrity.

So companies are using AI everywhere, employees love it, yet the bottom line hasn’t moved.

Why are companies stuck in AI ROI limbo?

About 20% of respondents say AI-related operating costs, including token costs, are now constraining their usage. AI vendors should take note: the days of “AI at any cost” are over.

Financial institutions capture the report’s ambiguity perfectly. 24% say costs are constraining usage, 69% plan to increase investment anyway, but only 36% attribute “at least some” positive EBIT impact to AI.

36% showing “at least some” positive impact is hardly a slam-dunk win.

But here’s the deeper problem that McKinsey doesn’t address. An Adobe survey I covered last week found that just 14% of banks measure AI ROI comprehensively.

It’s hard to claim you’re “on the road to ROI” when you don’t have a map or a way to measure if your AI is performing.

Now for the unambiguously half-full part of the glass.

32% of respondents have decided against buying software because AI coding tools let them build it in-house. For technology companies, that number hits 41%, and for financial institutions, 36%.

This is a big win for AI. Companies are saving real money on software procurement. The problem remains that they are not counting it as AI ROI. The software and AI budgets aren’t connected to the returns.

Most important for workers is the question of jobs.

The good news for workers is that the predicted AI apocalypse seems to be on hold. Last year, 32% of respondents predicted AI-driven workforce declines, while only 14% reported real cuts.

This year, 39% predict workforce reductions ahead. Whether these numbers will materialize is anyone’s guess, but companies seem to be eager to rid themselves of expensive humans.

AI expectations keep outrunning reality for employment, and that’s the story of this entire report.

Optimism about being on “the road to ROI” is tempered by conflicting data.

Is AI delivering ROI? Probably.

Can anyone prove it? Apparently not.

Banking Is Very Wrong About the AI Timeline: 60% Are Already Stuck

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 11:04:27 GMT

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Thanks for reading the “Cashless” newsletter, an insider’s view on Asia’s fintech, CBDC, and AI for anyone serious about “the Asia Century.” I’m Rich Turrin, and these are my hard-hitting insights designed to help you, whether you’re in finance, tech, or consulting, stay ahead of the pack. Free is great. Premium is your unfair advantage.

Topics:

Banking Is Very Wrong About the AI Timeline
Four Types of Human Fear Are Holding Back Agentic AI, But Not in China
Who Trusts AI with Their Money? Nobody Asked the Clients
Banks Losing Payments to Fintechs as Customers Revolt
Internet Money: The Stablecoin Story Nobody in the West is Writing
Dive into the Knowledge Vaults — Start with two free reads
Chart and Art of the Day — Stablecoin Treasury Purchases Won’t Dent $40T in US Debt When 40% of Holdings Aren’t Even Real

Happy Sunday,

This week’s newsletter focuses on AI and the gap between the industry’s claims of imminent disruption and the reality on the ground, which looks very different.

Sam Altman admitted he was “very wrong” about the AI timeline, and a new Adobe survey suggests banks owe their investors the same confession. Sixty percent are stuck in what Adobe calls the “Frozen Middle,” unable to scale past pilots while pretending everything is on track.

That story anchors this issue because it connects to almost everything else in it. Employees are afraid. Clients don’t trust AI with their money. And management is stuck between promising transformation and punishing anyone who fails trying to deliver it. Then there’s China, where the fear barely registers, and the reasons why might be the most important read this week.

Meanwhile, McKinsey is quietly writing banks’ obituary on payments, and a new book reminds us that the stablecoin revolution starts with a nurse in a queue at Singapore’s Lucky Plaza, sending money home, not in a boardroom.

The “Chart of the Day” is a reality check on stablecoin hype. The numbers behind Treasury purchases look a lot less impressive once you read the fine print, which shows how stablecoins will not meaningfully help fund the US’s massive debt.

When I write this newsletter, I always look for the gaps between industry narratives and the reality on the ground. That’s why I write and hopefully why you read it.

Thanks for reading. I’m grateful you’re here.

Rich

P.S. You read it, I write it. If there’s a topic I’m missing or a report I ought to know about, tell me. The best ideas come from readers.

Banking Is Very Wrong About the AI Timeline

60% of banks are stalled with AI pilots or deployments that are unable to scale

Sam Altman recently admitted he’s been “very wrong” about AI timelines, and a new Adobe/Incisiv survey of 528 financial services executives suggests banks should make the same confession. 60% are stuck in a “Frozen Middle,” unable to scale past pilots. Only 15 out of every 100 proposed AI use cases reach production, and just 14% measure ROI comprehensively. The managerial dysfunction runs deep.

Four Types of Human Fear Are Holding Back Agentic AI, But Not in China

73% of young Americans fear AI will take their jobs, versus only 5.7% in China.

McKinsey’s latest report names four specific fears paralyzing the workforce around agentic AI, and Pew data confirms the anxiety is surging. Among Americans 18 to 29, 73% now expect AI to lead to fewer jobs, up from 61% two years ago. Meanwhile, only 5.7% of Chinese Gen Z say they are “very worried” about AI replacing them. The contrast between East and West is striking, and the reasons why are even more revealing.

This article is behind a paywall because the real value here is the East-West comparison. Everyone is writing about fear of AI in the workplace. Almost nobody is asking why an entire region isn’t feeling it, or what they’re doing about it that the West isn’t. That’s a read worth going premium for.

Who Trusts AI with Their Money? Nobody Asked the Clients

From Gen Z to boomers, confidence in AI financial advice barely breaks 30%

A new Gallup study surveyed Americans and Canadians on AI financial advice, and the results should worry anyone betting on AI-powered advisors. Only 33% of U.S. adults have any confidence in AI chatbots for financial guidance, while 71% trust their human advisors. Even younger adults, the heaviest AI users, show the same low confidence. The only source AI manages to beat? Social media influencers, at 29%.

Banks Losing Payments to Fintechs as Customers Revolt

Payments represent 41% of global banking revenue, but not for much longer.

McKinsey’s latest payments report is brutally honest: fintechs now capture 53% of retail cross-border payments, up from 43% a decade ago, and they’ve quadrupled SME market share from 5% to 20%. With payments representing 41% of global banking revenue, this isn’t a minor disruption. Neobanks are capturing close to 40% of new banking relationships globally. Nobody is shedding tears for banks, and the revolt is just getting started.

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Internet Money: The Stablecoin Story Nobody in the West is Writing

A rare Asia-focused read on stablecoins that makes them personal.

I rarely review books, but Kenneth Bok’s “Internet Money: The Rise of Stablecoins” earned the exception. What sets it apart is that Bok starts not in a stablecoin issuer or a bank but in a Sunday queue at Singapore’s Lucky Plaza, where a nurse compares exchange rates to figure out how much of her paycheck reaches home. The book covers Asia’s stablecoin story as few Western authors do, and I’ve included the first chapter in the post for my readers.

Go Premium and step inside the Vault

Dive into the Knowledge Vaults. Start with Two Free Reads

Knowledge Vaults are your curated edge across six high-impact themes: AI, banking, CBDC/tokenization/payments, stablecoins, macrotrends, and Asia.

Every resource is hand-picked for quality, no filler, no padding. These are living documents, updated weekly and growing fast.

Premium members get exclusive access to all six vaults and a first look at all future additions.

This Week in the Vault: New Reads Worth Your Time

New to the Vault this week: 11 reads. Two are free, and both are critical. The first shows why ASEAN+3 is the world leader in connecting instant payment systems for effortless cross-border transfers, with 30+ live retail links and mBridge already processing $55.5 billion in wCBDC transactions.

The second is a free eBook that proves AI is far more than who has the smartest LLM. Johns Hopkins maps a world where AI has become a weapon of statecraft, cartels wield frontier models, and machine-speed escalation outruns human control. Read this because AI is so much bigger than most of us know.

Inside the premium reads, the numbers tell a story most Western analysts are missing. Chinese AI models now account for up to 46% of US companies’ token spend, China’s AI safety research output jumped 60% in a single year, and the IMF projects that emerging Asian economies could lose half a percentage point of annual growth before they even adopt AI.

If you want to understand where Asia’s AI landscape is actually heading and not where the headlines say it is, the Vault is the place to go. Go premium to get the complete picture.

🔓 Every week I unlock the first two articles for free.

This Week’s Free Reads from the Vault: Step inside

ASEAN+3 Cross-Border Payments: AMRO shows project mBridge has processed $55.5 billion in wCBDC transactions and the region has 30+ live retail payment links, but only 25.6% of wholesale payments clear within an hour. The gap between retail speed and wholesale drag is where disruption hits next.
AI as Statecraft FREE EBOOK: So what does it look like when AI stops being a business tool? Johns Hopkins maps a world where machine-speed escalation outruns human control, cartels wield frontier AI, and the real competition is bipolar, not multipolar.

Read both for free. Then ask yourself what else you’re missing.

Click on the Vault link below👇

Chart and Art of the Day!

Chart of the Day ✦ Stablecoin Treasury Purchases Won’t Dent $40T in US Debt When 40% of Holdings Aren’t Even Real

News this week that the US debt topped $40 trillion sent a few stablecoin proponents into full propaganda mode, claiming that US stablecoin purchases would materially impact US Treasury sales.

The charts below show the bad news. Of the industry’s $222 billion in total Treasury exposure, only 60.5% represents actual ownership of securities. The remaining 39.5%, roughly $88 billion, is either overnight repo lending or money market fund shares.

In other words, nearly 40 cents of every dollar that gets cited in Congressional testimony as “stablecoin Treasury demand” isn’t a purchase at all. As usual, the numbers surrounding crypto shouldn’t be taken at face value.

With Treasuries, the gap between the headline number and reality widens further when you look at who holds what and how. Read the last bullet to see how stablecoins won’t put a dent in the US’s debt problem.

Key points:

Tether holds $114.96 billion in direct Treasury securities, making it a genuine buyer of US government debt. Circle holds just $8.52 billion directly, parking $52.53 billion in reverse repo instead.
In a reverse repo, Circle lends cash overnight to a counterparty who already owns Treasuries. No new Treasury is purchased. The bill was already bought by someone else.
The GENIUS Act’s projected $900 billion in stablecoin Treasury demand treats direct holdings and repo as identical. They are not.
The irony is sharp: Tether, the issuer Washington trusts least, actually buys US debt. Circle, the regulated darling, mostly recycles existing Treasury collateral through overnight lending markets.
At $40 trillion in national debt, even the full $222 billion in stablecoin Treasury exposure represents just 0.55% of the total. The $134.5 billion in actual ownership? That’s 0.34%.

Stablecoin Treasury Composition Analysis

Source: Walleti, The global stablecoin market: a structural map

Art of the Day: The Summer, Poppy Field, Claude Monet, 1875

Today’s art is in honor of the last days of summer….

“I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”

― Claude Monet

Claude Monet painted “The Summer, Poppy Field” in 1875 during one of the most productive stretches of his career in Argenteuil, just northwest of Paris. The canvas captures a sun-drenched meadow alive with red poppies, figures half-dissolved into the landscape, and a sky that feels like it’s breathing.

What makes this painting endure is how unfinished it feels by the standards of its time, and how complete it feels by ours. The poppies aren’t painted petal by petal. They’re dabs of vermillion scattered across green like sparks. The figures could be anyone.

Banks Losing Payments to Fintechs as Customers Revolt

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:21:07 GMT

I post daily, but deliver to your inbox every Sunday. Browse past newsletters HERE. Book Rich. Bring the speed of Asia to your next event HERE

Read me first

Banks’ cross-border payment business is in the midst of a revolution as prices trend toward zero and customers flock to fintechs and non-banks for better deals.

McKinsey’s report is brutally honest for banks: “It’s becoming clear that for many, moving money will no longer be a viable stand-alone product.”

The numbers back it up and show that banks are losing payments to fintechs, which now capture 53% of retail cross-border payments, up from 43% a decade ago.

And the fintechs aren’t just going after retail. They’re coming for SMEs, where they quadrupled market share from 5% to 20%, and corporate accounts, where they’re just prying open the door.

But what McKinsey leaves out is that no one is shedding tears for banks.

In McKinsey’s Global Payments Report 2025, the figures show that payments represent 41% of global banking revenue.

So don’t think of this as poor banks being abandoned, but rather as a bloody user revolt after years of high prices customers couldn't do anything about.

The revolt is so pervasive that banks have lost institutional support, with the G20 setting an aggressive mandate for retail payment costs below 1 percent, including all fees and FX spreads.

So what is left for banks if payments, a perpetual cash cow, are going away?

McKinsey recommends a pivot to advisory, workflows, and orchestration.

This isn’t bad advice, but every “new frontier” McKinsey prescribes is already being challenged by fintechs eager to take a piece of banks’ fat margins.

McKinsey acknowledges this and cites Airwallex expanding into business accounts, particularly for SMEs, AP/AR, and corporate cards. Ebury moved into treasury advisory. Flywire owns education payments end-to-end. Thunes and Nium are building the orchestration layer.

Banks’ fintech headache doesn’t end with payments.

McKinsey flags that as customers separate deposits from where they execute payments, banks aren’t just losing the fees but the deposits behind them.

How big is the problem? In McKinsey’s Global Banking Annual Review, fintechs have claimed 17% of total industry revenues.

McKinsey’s own words: fintechs were ‘mostly an irritant to incumbents for the past 20 years, until 2025, when irritation became something more acute.’

And this shift is accelerating. Neobanks now capture close to 40% of new banking relationships globally, with 2 in 5 consumers expecting a neobank to become their primary bank within three years.

You didn’t think fintechs would just stop at payments, did you?

So the question remains: exactly what pivot can banks make as payment revenue declines and fintechs eat their lunch?

Banks’ glory days are over, and bankers near retirement should look forward to passing this problem off.

If you know someone who would like this newsletter, please share it with them and help grow our Asia, CBDC, and AI aficionados community!

The Knowledge Vault: Asia & China 2026

Rich Turrin — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:47:00 GMT

Knowledge Vaults are your curated edge across five high-impact themes: AI, banking, CBDC/tokenization/payments, stablecoins, and Asia.

Every resource inside is hand-picked with only the highest-quality, most valuable material I uncover, no filler.

With just five articles per week in the newsletter, I can’t cover everything, so the rest of the best stuff lands here.

These vaults are living documents, updated weekly and growing fast (already over 600 pages and counting).

Why a vault? One single, always-accessible place to find exactly what you need — no more endless searching or lost links.

Whether you’re a fintech founder, investor, policymaker, or simply stablecoin-curious, these vaults fast-track your understanding, cut through the hype, and deliver a serious competitive advantage.

What’s inside this Asia Vault:

The definitive Asia vault — curated, data-rich resources, institutional reports, and no-hype analyses that show how “tomorrow in the West is today in Asia.”
Resources that cut through the noise — reports written in Asia highlighting how technology is key to the region’s incredible growth.
Asia and China aren’t copying the West but showing the West what the future will look like.
Over 600 pages of high-quality material as of early 2026 — and growing by leaps and bounds each week because this is “tech at the speed of Asia.”
Why a vault? Saves you hours of scattered searching — centralizes the best insights so you stay ahead.
I do the digging — you get the gold. Need a specific report, chart, graph, or passage? It’s probably already here.
One-click access to the exact resource, stat, or insight you need — no more endless tabs or handing over your corporate email to advertisers.

If you care about Asia and China’s rapid adoption of fintech and AI, this is required reading with a collection of resources you can’t find by yourself.

Dear premium subscriber,

Look to Asia today to see tomorrow’s West.

Once dismissed as lagging in tech, Asia now leads the world in the implementation of many technologies, from instant payments, including India’s famed digital public infrastructure, to AI innovation.

My Asia AI Vault curates the latest, hardest-to-find papers on how the region is using AI, stablecoins, CBDCs, and emerging tech in its own unique, forward-looking way — not copying, but pioneering.

This living document is continuously updated to provide value to you and is already packed with high-signal insights and growing weekly.

It’s smaller than some of my other vaults, because Asia-specific papers are so hard to find, but arguably the most important.

Why? Because it is your crystal ball for understanding the technologies and trends that will shape 2026 and beyond.

The future isn’t coming from Silicon Valley anymore. It’s already here in Asia.🚀

Two reports to put Asia in perspective

The WEF Chief Economist Report is not designed to put you to sleep! I included it for its summaries on Asia’s economic health, and to show how it is driving the world’s GDP growth:

“Growth expectations among chief economists surveyed were the second-highest overall for East Asia and the Pacific, with 45% of respondents anticipating strong growth and 55% expecting moderate growth in the year ahead.”

And India in the lead:

South Asia returns to the top of the regional growth outlook. Two-thirds of chief economists surveyed expect strong (60%) or very strong (6%) growth, a substantial improvement compared to 31% in the September edition. South Asia remains the brightest growth spot among emerging regions.

See also the AI adoption outlook on page 20.

Wef Chief Economist's Outlook 2026

4MB ∙ PDF file

What about China? China’s 5% GDP growth is nothing to sneeze at, even if way down from peak numbers. China is still the single largest driver of global growth. This McKinsey report does a great job of showing where China is in 2026 and why tariffs and decoupling aside, it remains critical to global growth.

Mckinsey China Brief 4 Questions Ceos Are Asking About China

1.11MB ∙ PDF file

Note China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam in the top 10 contributors to global real GDP growth below:

The latest Asia insights you can’t afford to miss this week:

ASEAN takes the global lead in linked cross-border payment systems

Asean+3 Cross Border Payments, Regional Connectivity

955KB ∙ PDF file

AMRO just showed how ASEAN+3 is taking the global lead in bilateral payment connectivity, and the numbers back it up. Project mBridge has processed $55.5 billion in cross-border wCBDC transactions. The region now has over 30 live retail payment links. Yet Asia-Pacific wholesale payments are among the slowest globally, with only 25.6% credited within an hour. The gap between retail speed and wholesale drag is where the next wave of disruption lives.

AI is so much more than who has the smartest LLM

E Book Geopolitics Of Ai

3.15MB ∙ PDF file

Johns Hopkins University Press just dropped the definitive field manual on how AI is rewriting the global power map. Read this if you still think AI is a productivity tool and not a weapon of statecraft. In early 2026, AI-enabled capabilities made US operations in Caracas and the Iran campaign faster and more lethal than anything before. Sixteen chapters from top-tier strategists lay bare the real stakes: bipolarity not multipolarity, cartels armed with frontier AI, and South China Sea crisis simulations where machine-speed escalation outruns human control. This is the book your national security contacts are already reading.

Who Trusts AI with Their Money? Nobody Asked the Clients

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:23:56 GMT

I post daily, but deliver to your inbox every Sunday. Browse past newsletters HERE. Book Rich. Bring the speed of Asia to your next event HERE

Read me first

AI is replacing financial advisors. Or is it? Nobody asked the clients.

Every day another headline screams that AI will take over financial advice. More personalization, lower cost, available 24/7, and free from bias.

The pitch is relentless, but somewhere between the futuristic visions of investment nirvana proposed by AI providers and a few high-profile investment companies, the industry forgot to ask the people who actually use financial guidance what they want.

Gallup asked and just released a new study surveying Americans and Canadians on where they turn for financial guidance and how much they trust each source.

The results are not kind to the AI hype machine and didn’t get the media play they deserved.

The lack of trust in AI is a big problem. Only 33% of U.S. adults have any confidence in AI chatbots for financial guidance. In Canada, it’s 27%.

The trust gap with human financial advisors is massive: 71% of Americans and 75% of Canadians express confidence in their human advisors.

This certainly doesn’t mean AI advisors won’t be a growing force in investing, but the reality is that most people still don’t trust AI and doubt its ability to deliver unbiased advice.

The good news for AI?

The only source AI manages to beat is social media influencers, at 29% in the U.S.

AI just cleared the lowest bar in finance.

Even younger adults, who use AI the most, don’t trust it, with only 33% expressing confidence. Unsurprisingly, only 7% of older boomers find it trustworthy.

So while there is an age gap, it is only in the degree of distrust.

AI is still new, and there is certainly more work to be done on usage. Only 18% of Americans have even tried AI for financial guidance. In Canada, 12%.

So here is the question the AI-will-replace-advisors crowd keeps dodging.

Yes, they can make AI smarter, but if clients don’t trust AI with their money, does it matter?

We live in an era of digital distrust. AI advisors will have a tough time reversing that trend.

If you know someone who would like this newsletter, please share it with them and help grow our Asia, CBDC, and AI aficionados community!

Internet Money: The Stablecoin Story Nobody in the West is Writing

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 09:16:33 GMT

I post daily, but deliver to your inbox every Sunday. Browse past newsletters HERE. Book Rich. Bring the speed of Asia to your next event HERE

Read me first

The nurse at Singapore’s Lucky Plaza is not a stablecoin case study. She is in a Sunday queue, comparing the whiteboard exchange rate with the rate on her phone, figuring out how much of her paycheck actually reaches her family back home.

This is what the Asia stablecoin story is really about. Not the labs in Singapore and Hong Kong. Not the endless sanctions and bans between Washington and Beijing. It’s about the hundreds of millions working abroad who move money through systems that were never built for them.

I rarely review books, but “Internet Money: The Rise of Stablecoins” by Kenneth Bok earned the exception. Full disclosure: I wrote a blurb for the jacket. I wouldn’t have if I didn’t believe in the work. The first chapter is available below for my readers.

What sets this book apart is that Bok personalizes stablecoins. They are not just tokens but tools for real workers sending money home after hard work.

Domestic wallets transformed domestic payments across Asia, yet across borders, the plumbing is still stuck in 1985. Ordinary people are not fixated on the technology. They care about rates and whether it’s fast and cheap.

One observation my regular readers won’t miss is how the East and West are heading in opposite directions. The US is pushing dollar-backed stablecoins to widen the dollar’s reach, while China is quietly rolling out the digital yuan as “Plan B” should dollar corridors close down.

Now, in the early days of “Operation Economic Outcast,” Washington’s total ban on business with Iran, China’s digital yuan seems prescient.

Bok names the risks the hype machine prefers to skip. And while I wish he covered stablecoins’ role in human trafficking in Asia, he covers far more risks than most. He is not a stablecoin cheerleader.

Instant payments have already taken over Asia. Banks can’t sell high-priced remittances anymore when clients migrate to the lowest-cost provider, regardless of technology.

Western commentary on stablecoins often treats Asia as a footnote. For stablecoins, Asia is helping write the next chapter.

All because of nurses at Lucky Plaza, one transfer at a time.

If you know someone who would like this newsletter, please share it with them and help grow our Asia, CBDC, and AI aficionados community!

Banking Is Very Wrong About the AI Timeline

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 09:15:52 GMT

I post daily, but deliver to your inbox every Sunday. Browse past newsletters HERE. Book Rich. Bring the speed of Asia to your next event HERE

Read me first

Sam Altman just made the news by admitting he’s been “very wrong” about the AI timeline, and this report from Adobe suggests banks owe their investors a similar confession.

Altman told a podcaster: “The economy just has so much inertia... we’ve all been too ambitious on timelines.”

Altman is correct, and while he was talking about the broader economy, those comments fit banking perfectly, as regulated environments like banking come with their own inertia.

Adobe and Incisiv surveyed 528 financial services executives and found that 60% of financial services organizations are stuck in the “Frozen Middle,” stalled at piloting or deploying AI but unable to scale.

Then, just to bring up the rear, there are another 14% that are still exploring or haven’t started at all.

Adobe shows that the delays are real and taking their toll, with only 15 out of every 100 proposed AI use cases reaching production.

For many, the 85 failed use cases are learning lessons that can’t be avoided. Failure in AI and innovation is high, and it’s normal. Still, for bankers who see AI as an IT project, these failure rates cause real problems.

Banking’s historical passion for punishing all failures hasn’t gone away, and Adobe finds that 29% respond to AI failures with blame rather than learning. This is a holdover from banking’s past that has no place in a modern agile organization.

Bank management of AI is demonstrably terrible and can be justly blamed for some of the delay.

Only 20% have named a formal AI owner with title and budget authority, while 75% manage business-IT collaboration through handoffs rather than shared accountability.

But just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, just 14% measure AI ROI comprehensively, meaning that most AI projects don’t even have a reasonable metric for long-term profitability.

The picture that Adobe painted is one of banking managerial dysfunction at the highest level.

But who are we kidding? Who thought banks would ever smoothly adopt and deploy a complex new technology like AI when it took them nearly a decade to build a sharp new banking app?

This doesn’t mean AI in banking is failing. It means the predictions of agentic banks that are right around the corner will be more delayed than many will admit.

AI needs more time to develop and be implemented in banking than anyone predicted, and that goes for everyone from consultants like McKinsey to AI vendors themselves, who were brimming with optimism.

Altman again: “People keep doing the same things, buying from the same company, wanting to use their tools the same way.”

That is the banking industry in one sentence, even if he didn’t intend it.

Will banks follow Altman’s lead and admit the timeline was always too aggressive, or keep pretending that the pilot that they show investors will be up and running any time now?

If you know someone who would like this newsletter, please share it with them and help grow our Asia, CBDC, and AI aficionados community!

Four Types of Human Fear Are Holding Back Agentic AI, But Not in China

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 13:41:50 GMT

I post daily, but deliver to your inbox every Sunday. Browse past newsletters HERE. Book Rich. Bring the speed of Asia to your next event HERE

Read me first

McKinsey says agentic AI adoption is slow-going because employees are afraid, and the latest Pew survey data backs that up.

McKinsey’s latest report on agentic AI adoption names what most corporate leaders won’t: four specific fears that are paralyzing their workforce.

This isn’t about legacy systems, inadequate data, or LLM intelligence. It’s about humans and how we respond to AI and all innovation when we’re afraid. We block it.

Fintech Stays Silent as Stablecoins Fuel Trafficking and Scams in SE Asia

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 09:19:17 GMT

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Thanks for reading the “Cashless” newsletter, an insider’s view on Asia’s fintech, CBDC, and AI for anyone serious about “the Asia Century.” I’m Rich Turrin, and these are my hard-hitting insights designed to help you — whether you’re in finance, tech, or consulting — stay ahead of the pack. Free is great. Premium is your unfair advantage.

Topics:

Fintech Stays Silent as Stablecoins Fuel Trafficking and Scams in SE Asia
Instant Payments Work When Banks Don’t Control Them
Can Local Currency Stablecoins End Dollar Dominance?
The Week Stablecoins and Bitcoin Lost Their Religion
Dive into the Knowledge Vaults — Start with two free reads
Chart and Art of the Day — Asia’s Neobanks Have 817 Million Users: The West Will Never Catch Up

Happy Sunday,

I’ll be honest, this week’s stories made me angry, and you can read it in the tone of three of them.

Stablecoins are funding human trafficking across Southeast Asia. The UN documented it, specifically naming USDT and Tron, and the fintech industry said nothing.

Let this sink in: 300,000 people are trapped in scam compounds, which exist because of stablecoins’ ability to launder money, and your favorite fintech publications and influencers couldn’t find the time to mention it between their posts about the future of payments. Yes, it makes me mad.

The rest of the week didn’t improve my mood. McKinsey buried its own conclusion that instant payments work when governments mandate them through digital public infrastructure, not when banks control them.

Then, back to stablecoins, Italy’s central bank found that they cost more than Wise on most remittance routes. That story got buried.

Washington passed the GENIUS Act to spread dollar dominance, but not every country jumped on board. Nigeria, Brazil, and Asia are already building their own stablecoins and passing laws to slow the dollar’s march. Is it enough?

The one thing that made me smile? Today’s chart of the day. Asia’s neobanks have 817 million users. WeBank alone has more than every US, UK, and European neobank combined, twice over. The neobank story isn’t being told from the right continent, and this chart proves it.

When the Western press loses the plot or the stories get buried, as they did this week, I turn my frustration into articles. That’s why this newsletter exists.

Thanks for reading. I’m grateful you’re here.

Rich

P.S. You read it, I write it. If there’s a topic I’m missing or a report I ought to know about, tell me. The best ideas come from readers.

Fintech Stays Silent as Stablecoins Fuel Trafficking and Scams in SE Asia

The UN names USDT and Tron as facilitators, yet fintech celebrates them

The UN just released a damning report naming USDT on Tron as the payment backbone for trafficking and scam operations across Southeast Asia. Illicit crypto transactions tripled from $51 billion to $154 billion in a single year, with stablecoins driving 84% of that volume. Some 300,000 people sit trapped in scam compounds. And yet, scroll through your fintech feeds, and you’ll find nothing. Not a word. The industry that never stops talking about stablecoins as the future of payments goes completely silent when the UN documents what those payments actually fund.

This article would normally be behind a paywall. Consider this one a public service announcement. Some stories are too important to lock away. If you want the reporting that the rest of fintech won’t touch, that’s what premium is for.

Instant Payments Work When Banks Don’t Control Them

McKinsey unwittingly proves digital public infrastructure works for payments

McKinsey just published a deep dive on instant payments and somehow missed its own punchline. India’s UPI and Brazil’s Pix didn’t succeed because of better technology. They succeeded because governments mandated bank participation and killed the fees. Where banks get to decide whether to join, like FedNow in the US, adoption stalls while they quietly steer customers toward their own profitable rails. McKinsey acknowledged the conflict of interest in a single line, then moved on. I didn’t.

Can Local Currency Stablecoins End Dollar Dominance?

Washington wants stablecoins to spread the dollar, other countries are pushing back

Washington passed the GENIUS Act expecting dollar stablecoins to extend American financial dominance worldwide. The rest of the world had other plans. Nigeria launched a naira stablecoin, Brazil is moving to block stablecoins from settling cross-border payments, and Asia’s major financial centers are issuing their own licenses to keep the dollar off their rails. Non-USD stablecoin holders grew 2,900% in three years. The dollar still commands 97% of the stablecoin market, but the counter-moves are accelerating faster than most people realize.

The Week Stablecoins and Bitcoin Lost Their Religion

Faith shaken in “cheap stablecoin remittances” and “safe BTC wallets”

Two articles of faith crumbled in the same week. First, hackers stole $100 million from Coldcard, the cold wallet Bitcoin maximalists swore was untouchable, exploiting a flaw that sat in the code for five years. Then Italy’s central bank ran 200 actual stablecoin transfers across ten corridors and found they were cheaper than Wise in only three of eight routes. One transfer hit nearly 9% in fees. That’s a problem for the true believers who preach that stablecoins will revolutionize remittances, because the data says the savings they promise largely don’t exist.

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Dive into the Knowledge Vaults. Start with a Free Read

Knowledge Vaults are your curated edge across six high-impact themes: AI, banking, CBDC/tokenization/payments, stablecoins, macrotrends, and Asia.

Every resource is hand-picked for quality, no filler, no padding. These are living documents, updated weekly and growing fast.

Premium members get exclusive access to all six vaults and a first look at all future additions.

This Week in the Vault: New Reads Worth Your Time

New to the Vault this week: ten additions, and if you’re not premium, here’s what you’re missing. Cambridge University Press published a full ebook on AI governance, now in your Vault, one click, no paywall. It maps every governance toolkit on the table and explains why ethical AI boards, technical fixes, and self-regulation keep failing.

Free this week are two reads on the coming AI crash. Moody’s puts a 25% probability on the bubble bursting and wiping out $15 trillion in shareholder wealth. Vanderbilt picks up where Moody’s leaves off with eight policy proposals Congress should have ready before the correction hits.

The other seven go deep on what separates the 15% of companies capturing AI value from the 88% faking it, why every LLM tested hallucinated below 90% accuracy on financial data, and how frontier AI collapsed the cost of a cyber attack to $50.

🔓 Every week I unlock the first two articles for free.

This Week’s Free Reads from the Vault: Step inside

Worried about an AI crash? You’re in good company.

Moody’s puts a 25% probability on the AI bubble bursting and wiping out $15 trillion in shareholder wealth, and their baseline says nearly all of AI’s GDP contribution so far came from investment spending, not actual productivity gains
So what happens after the crash? Vanderbilt lays out the math: the bubble is already 17 times larger than the dot-com bust, with $120 billion in data center debt hidden off balance sheets, and delivers eight policy proposals Congress should have ready before the correction hits

Read both for free. Then ask yourself what else you’re missing.

Click on the Vault link below👇

Chart and Art of the Day!

Chart of the Day ✦ Asia’s Neobanks Have 817 Million Users: The West Will Never Catch Up

Think Revolut is big? Its 50 million users wouldn't even rank in Asia's top four. The neobank story isn't being told from the right continent. Of the roughly 1.5 billion reported neobank users worldwide, 817 million, more than half, are in Asia. That number comes from just 22 companies willing to disclose figures out of 365 tracked, which means the real total is almost certainly larger. The charts below from NeobankBeat tell the story the Western fintech press mostly misses.

WeBank in China alone claims 400 million users, more than the combined total of all US, UK, European, and global neobanks, twice over.
Asia’s top four (WeBank, PhonePe, GCash, bKash) account for 764 million users. Revolut, the largest European neobank, has 50 million.
Neobanks thrive where traditional banks failed. In much of Asia, the product isn’t a sleeker alternative to an existing bank account. It’s a first bank account, period.
Europe and the UK together hold just 31 million neobank users, roughly 2% of the global total, despite attracting the majority of English-language fintech coverage.
Revolut would need to grow 8x just to match WeBank. Monzo would need to grow 33x.

Source: NeobankBeat: Here NeobankBeat is an amazing source for everything going on in the neobank world.

Art of the Day: High Summer, Edvard Munch, 1915

"Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye — it also includes the inner pictures of the soul." ― Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch — the Norwegian expressionist behind the world-famous The Scream — painted High Summer II in 1915, well after the anxiety-drenched masterworks that made his name. This oil on canvas, now in Oslo’s Munch Museum, belongs to a quieter chapter: Munch had returned to Norway after years of restless travel and a nervous breakdown, and his eye had turned toward sunlight, open air, and the human figure set loose in nature.

By 1915, his palette had brightened, his compositions opened up, and subjects like bathers, gardens, and workers replaced the specters of jealousy and death. The painting is still unmistakably Munch: the figures aren’t idealized, the brushstrokes carry an almost aggressive energy, and the colors vibrate rather than soothe, but the mood has turned from existential anguish to something rawer and more physical.

The Week Stablecoins and Bitcoin Lost Their Religion

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 09:10:45 GMT

I post daily, but deliver to your inbox every Sunday. Browse past newsletters HERE. Book Rich. Bring the speed of Asia to your next event HERE

Read me first

What happens when near-religious faith in stablecoins and Bitcoin gets shaken?

This week I watched the fallout from the Banca d’Italia’s revelation that stablecoin remittances aren’t cheaper, just as the Coldcard BTC wallet hack sent believers running.

What connects them is belief. Many believe stablecoins are cheaper for transfers, just as BTC holders believed “not your keys, not your coins” was sacred. Both tenets are unshakable until they’re challenged.

The Coldcard hack hit first. $100 million was stolen from the ecosystem’s most secure cold wallet due to a bug that sat in the code for five years and was likely uncovered by AI.

The BTC faithful reacted. The day after, 10,000 Bitcoin flowed into exchanges. The same centralized platforms that crypto preached it was built to destroy. Crypto thought this time was different, they didn’t need custodial accounts. It wasn’t.

Then the Banca d’Italia released its mystery-shopping study on stablecoin remittances. The central bank sent 200 USDC across ten corridors linking Italy with Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, the UAE, and Japan.

The results shatter the “stablecoins are cheap” mantra:

↳ Against Wise, stablecoins were cheaper in only 3 of 8 corridors. UAE to Italy: stablecoins cost 8.95% vs. Wise at around 1%

↳ Total costs ranged from 0.30% to nearly 9% of the transfer amount

↳ The on-chain transfer averaged just 0.4% of total cost. The real expense sits in the on and off-ramps, the fiat conversion points

↳ Speed varied wildly: under 20 minutes where instant payment systems exist, but 1 to 2 business days in South Africa and the UAE, where standard bank transfers are required

So with results like this, it's hard to keep the faith that stablecoins are already quietly replacing bank payment rails. The blockchain part works. The problem is everything around it. The "stablecoin sandwich" just swaps correspondent banks for crypto exchanges, and exchanges charge fees too.

The greatest irony? Stablecoins still rely on the banks they aim to bypass.

BTC holders surrendered at least one tenet of their faith by moving coins into custodial accounts. Stablecoin believers didn’t react and remained uncharacteristically mute.

The few who responded called the experiment flawed: the size of transfers was too small, the failure to use informal exchanges (yes, that the central bank didn’t use illegal exchanges was a real complaint), and dismissively “on- and off-ramps are your problem, not stablecoins’.

Beyond that, the report has been buried as sacrilege and an offense to progress.

Look at the difference between the two reactions to determine who has greater religious fervor.

Religious-like belief in technology is dangerous. Repeating the mantra that stablecoins are cheap and cold wallets are safe is fine, but be prepared for challenges to your faith.

If you know someone who would like this newsletter, please share it with them and help grow our Asia, CBDC, and AI aficionados community!

Can Local Currency Stablecoins End Dollar Dominance?

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 09:09:13 GMT

I post daily, but deliver to your inbox every Sunday. Browse past newsletters HERE. Book Rich. Bring the speed of Asia to your next event HERE

Read me first

Washington thinks dollar stablecoins will spread American financial dominance. The rest of the world is simply building its own, and Washington didn’t see it coming.

Kudos to Arthur D. Little for a balanced and rational view of a stablecoin market 97% dominated by dollar instruments worth roughly $312 billion.

The GENIUS Act was passed with the expressed intent that USD stablecoins will further global dollarization. This didn’t sit well with many nations.

The Governor of South Africa’s central bank put it bluntly: “The creation of stablecoins, especially dollar stablecoins, is being used to undermine African currencies... I worry that some countries might actually lose monetary sovereignty.”

It isn’t just Africa that is worried. Non-USD stablecoin holder growth, while still small, has increased by 2,900% over the past three years.

The response is simple and logical: nations worldwide are choosing not to directly resist dollar-stablecoins but to replicate them and bring them into regulated flows to maintain monetary policy.

What this is not is countries disliking the US or a coordinated effort to de-dollarize, but make no mistake, the movement is global.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the world’s highest stablecoin adoption relative to GDP, with on-chain transfers exceeding $56 billion in 2025, driven by the high cost of remittances.

In response, Nigeria launched cNGN, a naira stablecoin regulated by the SEC, in February 2025, to channel that activity onto sovereign rails and off the black market.

Similarly, Asia is taking the lead in heading off dollar coins. Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea have all issued or will shortly issue stablecoin licenses to protect their markets.

The strategy across Asia is less about displacing dollar-stablecoins, a key cross-border trade currency, than about ensuring that sovereign rails capture cross-border flows. Except in China and India, where private stablecoins are banned outright.

Then there is Brazil, whose Resolution 561 seeks to actively contain stablecoins and shut them down at the border. Starting in October, stablecoins and crypto will be prohibited from being used to settle regulated cross-border payments.

While Washington continues to heap praise on dollar-stablecoins for expanding dollar usage, no one there seems to have predicted, or even acknowledged, that other nations would simply build their own.

The dollar isn’t going away, but Washington’s monoculture that proclaims it the only game in town is over.

USD stablecoins may dominate for years, but local coins will tame their growth and eventually settle cross-border trade without the dollar. That day is on the minds of every central bank governor out there, even the one in Washington.

The Knowledge Vault: Artificial Intelligence 2026

Rich Turrin — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 03:45:54 GMT

Knowledge Vaults are your curated edge across six high-impact themes: AI, banking, CBDC/tokenization/payments, stablecoins, and Asia.

Every resource inside is hand-picked with only the highest-quality, most valuable material I uncover, no filler.

With just five articles per week in the newsletter, I can’t cover everything, so the rest of the best stuff lands here.

These vaults are living documents, updated weekly and growing fast (already over 1000 pages and counting).

Why a vault? One single, always-accessible place to find exactly what you need — no more endless searching or lost links.

Whether you’re a fintech founder, investor, policymaker, or simply stablecoin-curious, these vaults fast-track your understanding, cut through the hype, and deliver a serious competitive advantage.

What’s inside this AI Vault:

The definitive AI vault — curated, data-rich resources, institutional reports, and no-hype analyses all in one place.
Resources that cut through the noise — highlighting tech, geopolitics, and the massive societal changes AI will bring.
Over 1000 pages of high-quality material as of early 2026 — and growing by leaps and bounds each week because it’s such a hot and diverse topic.
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I do the digging — you get the gold. Need a specific report, chart, graph, or passage? It’s probably already here.
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If you care about AI, this is required reading with a collection of resources you can’t find by yourself.

Dear premium subscriber,

This is a live document that is continuously updated to provide value to you.

My primary goal is to keep you up to date with the latest papers that explain how to use and successfully implement AI to give you an edge.

While AI is great tech, it is proving far harder to implement than advertised, and the ROI promised by consultants is still far off for many.

AI is more than just code, chips, and LLMs. The AI vault will provide you with thought-provoking reads that cover a broader remit than just tech.

One area that will be huge in 2026 is AI’s geopolitical impact. We can’t ignore the AI divide between the US and China and how AI sovereignty is now a major concern in the EU.

The big question for AI in 2026 isn’t just the technology — it’s the jobs.

Society must face how a powerful tool that clearly leaves many people and countries behind will reshape work, and those challenges will only intensify over every passing year of the AI revolution.

This isn’t just another AI roundup — it’s your shortcut to the insights that actually matter, from real-world AI wins on the job to the geopolitical power plays shaping 2026.

Note: For AI specific to banking and fintech, please go to the Banking Vault.

New this week:

The latest AI insights you can’t afford to miss

The coming AI crash and human extinction by 2040?

If you’re worried about an AI crash, you’re in good company. Even mainstream Wall Street players like Moody's are having second thoughts about the sustainability of the AI boom. But what comes after the crash? Read on for that answer.

Moody's The Macroeconomic Consequences Of Ai (redux)

1.17MB ∙ PDF file

Moody's Analytics just put a 25% probability on the AI stock bubble bursting, wiping out $15 trillion in shareholder wealth and triggering a recession. Their baseline (40% odds) says AI added half a percentage point to GDP in 2025, but nearly all of it came from investment spending and stock wealth effects, not actual productivity gains. The supply-side story hasn't started yet. If you're pricing AI into anything right now, you need to understand which of their five scenarios you're betting on.

After The Ai Crash

1.45MB ∙ PDF file

Afraid of an AI crash? You're not alone, and this report is more relevant today than when it was written a few months ago. Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator lays out the math: the AI bubble is already 17 times larger than the dot-com bust, $120 billion in data center debt is hidden off balance sheets through SPVs, and hyperscaler capex is on pace to exceed every major capital project in U.S. history except the Louisiana Purchase. The paper delivers eight bold policy proposals Congress should have ready before the correction hits, from banning circular equity financing to building a public cloud from stranded data center assets. Washington has no plan. We're all on our own if it happens.

Fintech Stays Silent as Stablecoins Fuel Trafficking and Scams in SE Asia

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 01:44:56 GMT

I post daily, but deliver to your inbox every Sunday. Browse past newsletters HERE. Book Rich. Bring the speed of Asia to your next event HERE

Read me first

Stablecoins’ dark side is out in the open, and no one in fintech wants to talk about it.

Readers ask me why I am anti-stablecoin. The answer is I’m not. I like them for legal transfers, but their use in Southeast Asia in support of human and drug trafficking, pig-butchering scams, and illegal gambling is impossible to remain silent about.

But what upsets me the most is that when the UN points out the damage stablecoins do, as in the July 2026 UNODC threat assessment on Southeast Asia, no one in the fintech world seems to listen.

Who dared to cover this report in the news or on fintech social media channels?

In polite fintech circles, the debate is limited to stablecoins’ payment efficiency and the pending Clarity Act on interest payments, as though the damage stablecoins create doesn’t exist.

This is normally where I’d put a paywall. I’m not going to.

This article is too important to lock away. Stablecoins are widely celebrated for their role in cross-border transfers in Asia, yet their dark side and the real human pain they enable are almost never discussed in the pro-stablecoin press.

Stablecoins didn’t just support these criminal networks. They allowed them to scale.

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Chainalysis tells us that all is well and that illicit use of crypto, including stablecoins, accounts for a manageable 1% of the total. A mere rounding error that proves the industry is clean.

Tell that to the 300,000 humans trafficked in the scam compounds and the people defrauded by pig butchering scams, which are propped up by P2P stablecoin transactions that hide billions in illicit profits.

Consider this: if it weren’t for stablecoins, how would these scammers move billions of dollars out of a small nation like Cambodia? Such huge dollar flows could never escape attention.

The problem is that stablecoins don’t just aid the scam business; they are the business because they allow it to scale.

Illicit crypto is severely undercounted

Illicit cryptocurrency transactions globally hit a record US$51 billion in 2024, according to the UN, with Southeast Asian fraud schemes and “pig butchering” operations the fastest-growing category.

And 2025 was worse. Chainalysis now puts illicit crypto at $154 billion, a 162% jump, with stablecoins accounting for 84% of that volume.

But here’s what the crypto press doesn’t mention. The Chainalysis figures severely underreport illicit use, making their 1% figure for illicit crypto meaningless.

Chainalysis admits that it excludes from its count all non-crypto-native crimes, such as drug and human trafficking, as well as cases where crypto is used mainly as a payment or laundering method.

So the figures for Southeast Asian organized crime aren’t even in the Chainalysis report!

Tron and Tether Support Organized Crime

The UN report is blunt about what powers Southeast Asia’s crime: “Cryptocurrency functions not merely as a speculative asset but as the primary medium of exchange within a parallel financial system that underpins fraud, money laundering, trafficking in persons, and the operational logistics of scam centers.”

And one rail dominates. “USDT-on-TRON offers near-zero transaction fees, settlement finality within seconds, and, critically, operates outside the regulatory perimeter of traditional financial institutions.”

Let that sink in. Tron and USDT are operating outside of the regulatory perimeter and facilitating organized crime with not just impunity but cheerleading by their supporters in the West and no pressure to change.

When enforcement caught up and Tether froze wallets, the criminals adapted. Huione Group launched its own stablecoin, USDH, marketed as “censorship-resistant” because it “avoids the common freezing and transfer restrictions of traditional digital currencies.” (See my article below)

The UNODC calls the result “a fully sovereign criminal stack.” Own stablecoin. Own blockchain. Own messaging app. No external point of failure.

Although it is now shut down, how-to guides on money laundering for organized crime that were once hosted by Huione are still widely circulating online.

Huione Guarantee’s Closure Doesn’t Stop It.

Some may say this isn’t an issue because the largest player in Cambodia, Huione Guarantee, was closed by FinCEN in October of 2025.

Not true. The scams continue, and Huione’s cloud platform was active until it was seized by the DOJ in late June 2026.

Blockchain analytics showed that Huione-linked wallets continued to move large volumes of USDT after the shutdown, without immediate freezes. Thank you, Tether and Tron!

It is never over. In June, South Korean police referred 23 suspects for laundering about $11 million in USDT through money mule accounts for a Cambodia-based phishing and investment scam network.

So while Huione may have been officially shut down and Tether claims it is more carefully monitoring the region, the reality is that stablecoins continue to be the foundation for crime and trafficking throughout Southeast Asia.

So my question is: with all the articles you read about stablecoins, how come none of them mention a UN investigation that clearly names USDT and the Tron network as facilitators of illicit transfers?

Where is the indignation? Fintech, which prides itself on doing good, won’t even address that stablecoins in the wrong hands enable drugs, human trafficking, and pig butchering.

Instead, we are told that stablecoins are infrastructure and everything is just fine.

See the problem?

Instant Payments Work When Banks Don't Control Them

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 08:16:02 GMT

I post daily, but deliver to your inbox every Sunday. Browse past newsletters HERE. Book Rich. Bring the speed of Asia to your next event HERE

Read me first

Years after the instant payment revolution transformed the world, McKinsey finally noticed. It got the data right and every conclusion wrong.

McKinsey examines instant payments in India, Brazil, the US, and Mexico, and while impressed with the 15-18% annual growth, it somehow can’t figure out why India and Brazil succeeded while the US and Mexico stalled.

Let me help.

UPI and Pix were built as digital public infrastructure with universal access by design. India mandated bank participation and zero fees. Brazil’s central bank required its largest banks to join Pix.

The result? UPI processes 19 billion transactions a month. Pix handles 80% of Brazil’s P2P payments.

The US and Mexico, in contrast, left participation in instant payments to the banks’ discretion.

The result? Only 1,800 of 9,000 US banks have joined FedNow, while in Mexico instant payments are only 5% of payment volume.

Both nations relied on banks for distributing instant payments, yet McKinsey can’t see the problem.

McKinsey fails to frame this as the success of digital public infrastructure for fear of tarnishing its free-market credentials.

Why would banks voluntarily make payments free when card interchange is a profit machine?

McKinsey itself acknowledges this: “The profitability of credit cards can create a stronger economic incentive to maintain card usage.”

Yet McKinsey won’t state the obvious: banks are the problem.

For the US, McKinsey casually observes that Zelle, owned by banks, processed 4.2 billion transactions in 2025, nine times the combined volume of FedNow and RTP.

Somehow, the smartest guys in the room didn’t figure out that banks are routing demand to the system they control and profit from.

The report also frames instant payments as just 1% of $2 quadrillion in global flows, in a blatant attempt to downplay their impact.

That $2 quadrillion includes wholesale and interbank transfers that instant rails were never built to handle. Comparing retail volumes with wholesale flows is an apples-to-oranges comparison that deliberately diminishes the impact of instant payments.

The biggest sin for me and my readers: no China, no WeChat Pay, no Alipay. No Kenya’s M-Pesa, no Indonesia’s QRIS. If McKinsey wants to understand instant payments, it should get out of the office and look beyond the markets where it has its biggest paying clients.

I welcome reports that broaden the industry’s knowledge of instant payments, but this one does its readers a disservice.

The report data is clear, but McKinsey fails to acknowledge it: digital public infrastructure is what makes instant payments successful, while bank control kills them.

If you know someone who would like this newsletter, please share it with them and help grow our Asia, CBDC, and AI aficionados community!

Stablecoin Hype Meets Bank Compliance. Compliance Wins.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 09:03:23 GMT

Book Rich. Bring the speed of Asia to your next event HERE

Thanks for reading the “Cashless” newsletter, an insider’s view on Asia’s fintech, CBDC, and AI for anyone serious about “the Asia Century.” I’m Rich Turrin, and these are my hard-hitting insights designed to help you — whether you’re in finance, tech, or consulting — stay ahead of the pack. Free is great. Premium is your unfair advantage.

Topics:

Stablecoin Hype Meets Bank Compliance. Compliance Wins.
TradFi Already Owns Tokenization, Not Crypto
Google Needs 80 Pages to Explain How to Build an Autonomous Agent
AI Sovereignty: Silicon Valley’s Loss Is Your Company’s Gain
Dive into the Knowledge Vaults — Start with a Free Read
Chart and Art of the Day — Why You’re Invested in AI and Don’t Know It

Happy Sunday,

The thread connecting every story this week is the same: someone selling a vision while the fine print tells a completely different story.

Stablecoins that lose their speed advantage the moment compliance walks in. Tokenization pitched as crypto’s moment, except consumers trust their bank instead. And Silicon Valley as the loser when sovereign AI goes global. Nobody dared tell investors to read that part of the fine print.

It’s like an insurance policy: the coverage pitch sounds great, with the expectation that you won’t read the fine print that tells you what’s not covered. Today’s chart of the day makes that personal: if you have a 401(k) or pension fund, you’re riding the AI wave whether you chose to or not, and nobody handed you the fine print.

That disconnect between the policy and what’s buried in the details is exactly where this newsletter lives.

This week’s issue breaks out the magnifying glass to read the fine print, just as my subscribers expect.

Thanks for reading. I’m grateful you’re here.

Rich

P.S. You read it, I write it. If there’s a topic I’m missing or a report I ought to know about, tell me. The best ideas come from readers.

Stablecoin Hype Meets Bank Compliance. Compliance Wins.

Washington and crypto proponents’ plans for fast adoption hit a wall

Stablecoins may be Washington’s darling, but bank compliance teams aren’t buying the hype. A new report from TradingTech Insight, written specifically for treasury and risk professionals, found that legacy systems remain the top obstacle to institutional adoption. The real killer? KYC requirements create a catch-22: verifying both sides of a transaction destroys the instant settlement that makes stablecoins attractive, but skipping verification invites regulatory trouble. The result may be a two-tier dollar system split by compliance rigor.

TradFi Already Owns Tokenization, Not Crypto

Crypto has had years to build trust and failed

Less than a third of Americans even know what tokenization is, but a new HarrisX/CTM survey of 2,008 voters reveals that once you explain it, half want in. The catch: not if it’s tied to crypto. Only 28% would trust tokenized assets from crypto firms, compared to 45% from traditional banks. What people want is simple: lower fees, 24/7 trading, and faster settlement. “Uses blockchain technology” tested dead last as a selling point. Crypto had years to build trust and failed. TradFi will own this market.

The stablecoin piece is premium because it goes where headlines won’t: the KYC paradox, compliance catch-22s, and why the dollar may split into two tiers. Go premium for the insights that give you the edge.

Google Needs 80 Pages to Explain How to Build an Autonomous Agent

A “how to” guide that shows just how hard they are to build

Google just released the most detailed public blueprint any major cloud provider has put out for building enterprise AI agents. It runs 80 pages. That alone tells you how far most companies are from the “autonomous enterprise” vision. The guide lists 8 separate strategies just to manage token costs, and even recommends open-source models, a quiet nod to Chinese AI. Google wrote the instruction manual, but this isn’t IKEA flatpack furniture.

AI Sovereignty: Silicon Valley’s Loss Is Your Company’s Gain

46% still treat AI sovereignty as a compliance exercise, not a profit opportunity

Silicon Valley’s AI dominance is cracking. An Accenture survey of nearly 2,000 leaders across 28 countries found that reliance on global providers collapsed from 56% for cloud implementations to 19% for AI between 2022 and 2025. The sovereign AI infrastructure opportunity is estimated at $1.5 trillion, much of which won’t go to Big Tech. Meanwhile, 46% of companies still treat AI sovereignty as a compliance box to check. Apple figured it out in China, partnering with Alibaba’s Qwen and turning regulation into a competitive advantage. Most haven’t.

Go Premium and step inside the Vault

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Dive into the Knowledge Vaults. Start with a Free Read

Knowledge Vaults are your curated edge across six high-impact themes: AI, banking, CBDC/tokenization/payments, stablecoins, macrotrends, and Asia.

Every resource is hand-picked for quality, no filler, no padding. These are living documents, updated weekly and growing fast.

Premium members get exclusive access to all six vaults and a first look at all future additions.

New This Week in the Vault: New Reads Worth Your Time

Start with the freebies. Bullhound Capital tears apart Revolut’s revenue engine and flywheel mechanics. Deloitte exposes why 87% of banks are botching AI governance. And ICAEW just dropped a full 200-page e-book cracking open how private equity actually works. All three, yours for nothing.

The other seven are why people go premium. The OECD, Visa, Mastercard, J.P. Morgan, the IMF, and Paylume all publishing work this week that touches agentic payments, quantum cyber risk, BigTech systemic risk, and digital asset strategy. If you’re making decisions in any of those spaces, these are the reads that will keep you a step ahead of the competition.

🔓 Every week I give members a free read of the first two articles. This week it’s three because of the free e-book! Enjoy!

Free to Read in the Vault

Revolut at $6bn revenue, 75M users, and only $86 per customer. The monetization story hasn’t even started. Bullhound lays out the bull case with enough data to make your own call.
87% of banks are failing at AI governance, and AI incidents in financial services have surged 8x since 2022. Deloitte’s new index links better governance directly to doubled revenue growth.
FREE E-BOOK! Private Equity Demystified is 200 pages of how the money actually moves, who bears the risk, and why your pension has more PE exposure than you think. Grab it before you forget.

Read ~~both~~ all three for free. Then ask yourself what else you’re missing.

Click on the Vault link below👇

Chart and Art of the Day!

Chart of the Day ✦ Why You’re Invested in AI and Don’t Know It

Moody’s Analytics warns that if the AI stock bubble bursts, consumer spending takes a massive hit, potentially triggering a recession like the Y2K bust. And here’s the part most people miss: you don’t have to own a single AI stock to be exposed.

If you have a 401(k), a target-date fund, or any passively managed retirement account, you’re riding the Magnificent Seven wave whether you chose to or not. Index funds don’t analyze companies; they just buy what’s going up, creating a self-reinforcing cycle that pushes AI valuations ever higher.

The Magnificent Seven make up 58% of NASDAQ-100 and 53% of large-cap growth funds
Even broad S&P 500 index funds carry 35% exposure to these seven stocks
Target-date retirement funds, the default choice for millions of workers, hold roughly 18% in Mag Seven names
Index funds don’t evaluate fundamentals; rising prices automatically attract more investment, inflating valuations further
The 10 largest tech companies issued $120 billion in bonds last year, up from $45 billion annually in the prior decade
If the bubble bursts, the fallout won’t stay on Wall Street; the wealthy own the bulk of stocks, and their reduced spending would ripple through the entire economy

Art of the Day: Malcolm Morley, Beach Scene, 1968

“I make a handmade painting from a readymade.”

― Malcolm Morley

Morley took something deliberately ordinary, a holiday snapshot from Daytona Beach, and reproduced it as a color screenprint using the commercial dot process in photorealistic style. The result is uncanny. His exaggerated, intensified color transforms a banal family beach photo into something hallucinatory, hovering between a travel postcard and a fever dream. The work sits at the origin point of Superrealism, the movement Morley pioneered as a counterpoint to Pop Art in the 1960s. Where Warhol flattened consumer imagery, Morley interrogated what happens when mechanical reproduction meets painterly obsession. He won the inaugural Turner Prize in 1984.

The Knowledge Vault: Banking 2026 – The Year Disruption Gets Real

Rich Turrin — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:43:00 GMT

Knowledge Vaults are your curated edge across five high-impact themes: AI, banking, CBDC/tokenization/payments, stablecoins, and Asia.

Every resource inside is hand-picked with only the highest-quality, most valuable material I uncover, no filler.

With just five articles per week in the newsletter, I can’t cover everything, so the rest of the best stuff lands here.

These vaults are living documents, updated weekly and growing fast (already over 650 pages and counting).

Why a vault? One single, always-accessible place to find exactly what you need — no more endless searching or lost links.

Whether you’re a banker, fintech, service provider, or a simple bank customer who wants to know what’s going on, this vault will fast-track your understanding, cut through the hype, and deliver a serious competitive advantage.

What’s inside the Banking 2026 Vault:

This vault is designed to prove that “this is the year banking disruption gets real.” A curated collection of the most cutting-edge, bank-specific trends shaping finance in 2026.
Institutional reports, data-rich analyses, and no-hype insights covering AI, stablecoins, quantum, blockchain, fraud, and non-technical trends that are hitting banking hard.
No limits — banking is under pressure from every angle in 2026, so expect the broadest range of topics across all my vaults, including geopolitics.
Every resource here is tailored to banks and finserv, or has immediate, practical relevance to your world.
Over 650 pages of high-quality material — and growing throughout 2026 with fresh additions.
Why a vault? Saves you hours of scattered searching — centralizes the best insights so you stay ahead.
I do the digging — you get the gold. Need a specific report, chart, graph, or passage? It’s probably already here.
One-click access to the exact resource, stat, or insight you need — no more endless tabs or handing over your corporate email.

If you want to start out 2026 on the path to success, these are all required reading with a collection of resources you can’t find by yourself.

Dear premium subscriber,

This is a live document that will be updated throughout Q1 2026 to provide value to you.

Note that I will concentrate reports for AI and Banking in this vault, with general AI placed in the AI vault.

New this week:

Revolut under the microscope, why 90% of banks are failing at AI governance, and a free e-book you need to read!

Revolut The Dawn Of Modern Banking

12.6MB ∙ PDF file

Read this if you want to understand what a $115bn fintech looks like from the inside. Bullhound Capital's July 2026 investor report lays out the case for Revolut at $6bn in revenue, 75 million users, a 29% net margin, and only $86 of revenue per customer, meaning the monetisation story has barely started. They project $29bn in revenue and $13.6bn in net profit by 2030, with a trillion-dollar valuation by 2035. Fair warning: Bullhound is unabashedly pro-Revolut, so read this as advocacy, not analysis. But even discounting the cheerleading, the flywheel mechanics and competitive positioning data belong on every banker's desk.

Banking On Trust

3.03MB ∙ PDF file

Deloitte Access Economics surveyed 135 senior bank leaders and found that 87% of global banks have AI governance that needs serious work, yet a 10-point improvement on their new Trustworthy AI Governance Index is associated with doubling revenue growth. Meanwhile, AI incidents in financial services have increased 8x since 2022, and 95% of enterprise GenAI investments have produced zero measurable profit impact. The banks getting governance right are deploying 8x more AI solutions than those winging it. If your bank isn't treating AI governance as a revenue strategy, you're already behind.

E Book Private Equity Demystified

1.54MB ∙ PDF file

FREE E-BOOK! Read this if you see private equity in the news every day but don't know how it works. Don't care? You should. You own more PE positions through your pension than you probably know. ICAEW's Private Equity Demystified breaks open the mechanics of leveraged buyouts, carried interest, and the "equity illusion" where debt masquerades as upside. 200 pages of how the money actually moves, who bears the risk, and why nobody's asking the right questions.