An EITN chat with Ben Wong, Adyen’s GM in Southeast Asia and HK

Responses attributed to Ben Wong, General Manager, Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, Adyen

EITN: Do you have trends to share about payment technologies and payment behaviour/expectations in F&B as well as the retail sector?

Ben: There’s a rule of thumb at fast food and quick-service restaurants that reducing wait times by seven seconds can boost market share by 1%. This truly demonstrates that customers are increasingly valuing speed and convenience as part of their experience – and payments technology needs to keep up with this pace.

At the same time, malicious actors are capitalising on AI in their tactics – meaning that merchants must be more careful than ever when handling payment details of any kind.

Businesses are now challenged to balance customer experience with risk management, meeting expectations for frictionless and hassle-free payments without compromising on security controls.

EITN: How do you approach complying to regulations in different markets?

Ben: Ensuring that we are continually optimising our risk control efforts is of utmost priority to Adyen. We do this by assessing that our policies and procedures are compliant with evolving regulatory frameworks in the markets we operate in. 

To manage the variety of supervisory conversations and agendas, Adyen also actively invests in local compliance and regulatory teams, to maintain strong, transparent, and active relationships with regulators and payment schemes.

By doing so, we deliver the highest level of assurance to our customers so that they can focus on their core business with peace of mind. 

Our work across the globe has familiarised us with various local regulations, and our proficiency in these has enabled us to guide merchants across markets to streamline their operations in compliance with these. For example, through our extensive learnings from working across markets in the EU and navigating the PSD2 requirement, we’re able to provide counsel to customers in Japan to navigate the local EMV 3-D Secure mandates, working to ensure that our customers’ and our own operations remain in compliance with these.

EITN: What is the business model/form of partnership that Adyen has to adopt in order to deliver its payment solutions to Hong Kong and Singapore?

Payment processing is a tightly regulated industry, and an acquiring license granted by local authorities is required to process payments locally.

Adyen has acquiring licenses in both Hong Kong and Singapore, which means that we are able to process payments for our customers both online and in person in these markets.

Ensuring compliance with local regulations is key to our operations, which is why we are committed to keep up with evolving regulatory frameworks. In 2021, Adyen became the first global payments provider to be licensed for the newly regulated activity of merchant acquisition service under the new Payment Services Act (2019) in Singapore.

EITN: How do you leverage resources from Temasek to achieve the business objectives you have set for Adyen?

Ben: We invest our resources into strengthening our single, in-house tech stack, which is the backbone of our entire business. By building our own infrastructure in-house, we have full control over the process and knowledge to better deliver innovation to our customers. 

EITN: What is your technology/product roadmap for the next 3 years? How do you incorporate AI and other emerging technologies into it? 

Ben: We’re focused on bringing greater performance and cost savings at scale, making use of the vast amounts of payments data at our fingertips to provide added value and efficiency to our customers.

To that end, we kicked off 2025 by launching Adyen Uplift. This AI-powered solution is trained on our global dataset through machine learning. The insights then help our customers optimise payments, balancing payment efficiency with risk management.

The solution also optimises fraud detection, automating decision-making in the favour of our customers. We’ve observed that this has helped businesses reduce manual risk rules by 86% on average, while also helping them to reduce expenditure on payments by up to 5%. 

Another growing area of focus for us is developing new, efficient ways to pay. With 56% of consumers in APAC saying that they will abandon a purchase in-store if they can’t pay the way they want, shoppers want payment methods that are both easy and convenient. This is why we continuously expand our support of local and popular payment methods, especially in newer markets like Japan and India.

Simultaneously, merchants want to ensure secure and successful sales without adding unnecessary friction to the payments process. We’re working quickly to bridge these gaps, harnessing our understanding of new technologies to expand on our payment offerings

EITN: How will you partner to increase technology capability and go-to-market channels? Please share examples of all these.

Ben: The success of our customers doesn’t only depend on our innovative solutions but also our partnerships. Adyen currently works with a wide range of partners to help meet the ambitions of our customers across verticals like retail, airlines, travel & hospitality to digital services like subscription.

Our partners include vendors like Oracle, Amadeus, Magento, Cegid, Hybris, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Netsuite and more.

A strong partnership with our partners allow us to ensure robust and scalable joint integrations for our merchants. Adyen and its partners also work to identify joint business opportunities and launch faster with proven go-to-market strategies.

EITN: What are the business goals you have targeted to achieve in 3 to 5 years?

Ben: A philosophy at the core of our long-term approach is our promise to provide a subscription to innovation, as exemplified by:

• Expanding our capabilities and investing in the continued growth and success of our financial services offering
• Our continuously evolving platform intelligence, built on years of innovation and data-led decision making
• Continual enhancement of Adyen’s in-person payments (IPP) technology