Around 64 percent of consumers in Southeast Asia are confident of going cashless for a full day, highlighting the region’s strong drive towards digital payments.And while almost half of ASEAN’s citizens in a recent survey by Visa are confident they can go cashless for up to three days, awareness of cashless payment systems in Myanmar is still relatively low.Although more than 40 percent of the survey’s respondents expect to utilise cashless payment in the coming year, awareness of contactless

Local media recently quoted PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Malaysia managing partner Sridharan Nair as saying that millennials (those born in the 1980s and 1990s) will make up about 75 percent of the global workforce by 2025. The Department of Statistics stated that around 9.4 million young Malaysians make up about half of the country’s workforce. Unfortunately, this poses a problem.The problem stems from a lack of financial literacy among today’s young Malaysians.

With Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam alone hosting over 10 percent of the world’s unbanked population, providing the right infrastructure to bridge this gap is key to ASEAN’s sustained growth.The unbanked and underserved form a significant part of ASEAN’s population, with research firm CB Insights recently stating that just 47 percent of adults in ASEAN had a bank account while only a third of the region’s SMEs had access to loans or lines of credit last year. The region’s financi