There is a version of Money20/20 Bangkok that is easy to write. Panels, announcements, networking. Thousands of people in a convention center are talking about the future of payments. That version is accurate, but it misses what the event actually felt like this year.

What felt different in Bangkok was the register of the conversations. Not the topics — the tone. The Asia–LATAM payment corridor has been a "watch this space" story for years. In Bangkok, it stopped being that. The people in the room were not debating whether it mattered. They were talking about how to build on top of it, how to price it, how to move faster than the next company already moving.

The Stand

That shift in tone showed up first on the floor.

The VelaFi stand was not a hard pitch. It was more of a gathering point for people who already understood the problem and wanted to talk through the specifics.

Decision-makers stopped by throughout the week — operators running supply chains between Southeast Asia and Latin America, fintech founders trying to figure out settlement, treasury teams tired of maintaining bank relationships in every country they do business in. The conversations were specific. How do you handle FX across five LatAm jurisdictions without setting up five local entities? What does real-time settlement look like when one side of the transaction is in Shenzhen and the other is in São Paulo?

To set the tone, the team brewed a specialty coffee blend — beans from Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. Three of VelaFi's core markets in one cup. It was a small gesture, but it started more than a few real conversations, which is usually how those things go.

That specificity had an echo on stage.

Maggie Wu on the Panel

Maggie Wu, VelaFi's CEO and Co-Founder, joined the panel "Global Stablecoin Adoption, Investment Trends and Regulatory-Innovation Balance" alongside investors, infrastructure builders, and policy communications professionals from across the industry.

The panel was wide-ranging. Maggie's contributions were grounded in something the other speakers did not quite have: years of operational experience building a stablecoin infrastructure for enterprise clients in markets where the system does not make things easy.

She opened with a point that reframed the conversation. The stablecoin ecosystem, she said, has solved the problems people spent years worrying about — the issuer layer is mature, the blockchain layer is mature. The hard problems now are not technical. They are relational and operational. Bank partnerships. Regulatory licensing. The compliance and reconciliation infrastructure that enterprise clients need before they will move real volume through any new payment rail.

On corridors, she was direct about where VelaFi focuses and why. Asia–Latin America and Latin America–U.S. are not interesting because of their potential. They are interesting because the trade is already happening, and the financial infrastructure underneath it is failing to keep up. Latin America's 600 million people, its open banking APIs, its $150 billion in annual remittances from the U.S. — these create real, immediate demand for cross-border settlement that works. The corridor with Asia adds another layer: manufacturers, logistics providers, and commodity exporters operating across multiple currencies and jurisdictions, all trying to move money faster than correspondent banking allows.

The pain point Maggie kept coming back to was the one VelaFi hears most often from enterprise clients. A company selling in Brazil, sourcing from Vietnam, holding USD, and paying contractors in Mexico does not have a payments problem in the abstract. It has a specific, expensive, time-consuming problem: it needs to act like a local bank in every market it operates in. Open accounts, maintain relationships, navigate regulatory requirements — and do all of that in parallel, in multiple jurisdictions, every time it expands. Stablecoin infrastructure collapses that complexity. Not by replacing the banks, but by removing the requirement to replicate them everywhere.

On regulation, she was careful. Clear frameworks are good — the shift in how institutions like JP Morgan engage with digital assets since regulatory clarity improved is real and observable. But excessive reporting requirements create drag that slows business without meaningfully protecting anyone. Latin American regulators, she said, tend to handle this better than most. They invite industry input before finalizing rules. That produces better outcomes for everyone.

By the end of the panel, the question was not whether stablecoins work. It was whether the companies in the room would move fast enough to matter.

What Money 20/20 Confirmed

The team left with a specific impression that the panels and the stand conversations kept reinforcing.

The companies that arrived in Bangkok already treating the Asia–LATAM corridor as infrastructure — not opportunity, not thesis, but operational reality — were a different kind of company than the ones still asking whether the corridor mattered. The former were talking about execution. The latter were still talking about the market.

Trade between Latin America and Asia is growing. Exports accelerated sharply in 2025. FDI is following. Digital commerce is compressing what used to be regional relationships into something closer to continuous economic interaction. The gap between all of that and the financial system built to support it is not closing on its own.

That gap is the business. Bangkok was a good week to be reminded of how real it is — and how many people are finally ready to do something about it.

The conversation doesn't stop in Bangkok.

Talk to our team.