As 2025 approaches, where will new opportunities arise for financial institutions, financial services providers, and fintechs looking to expand into new markets?

In this week’s Finovate Global interview, I talk with Lewis Ide, Vice President for 10x Banking, about the opportunities in high-growth markets in APAC and Africa.

Part of the company’s senior leadership team, Ide is responsible for the strategy, growth, and execution of the business objectives at 10x Banking. He has a 13-year career in financial services technology with leadership roles in payments, financial infrastructure, and AML platforms.

10x Banking first introduced itself to Finovate audiences with its debut at FinovateEurope 2023 in London. The company won Best of Show for a demonstration of its 10x SuperCore Cards which enable banks to build a card proposition in minutes with 10x’s Bank Manager interface. Founded in 2016, 10x Banking is headquartered in London, U.K.

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There is a lot of interest in high growth markets around the world, especially in the APAC region and in Africa. What is driving growth opportunities in these markets – starting with APAC? 

Lewis Ide: I think it comes down to demographics first of all: APAC in particular has a young, growing, digitally-native population. Economies in this region are growing rapidly and with that come opportunities for growth in the financial services industry. And typically the countries across APAC are very innovation-friendly.  

Regulation also really supports innovation. One example is in Thailand, where the regulator is releasing new digital banking licenses to support the growth of the industry from a digital-first point of view.  

This all feeds into banks being able to benefit from core transformation, moving away from batch transactions to real-time transactions. They are also able to scale in user numbers and transaction volumes as the population grows and becomes even more digital-first. And the thing that makes that growth even more sustainable is the hyper-personalization that modern cores allow for, so banks in APAC can create unique offerings that consumers need.  

What do small businesses in APAC need that they have not been getting from traditional financial services? 

Ide: I think the first thing to say here is that traditionally, SME offerings have been bucketed into either the retail or the corporate bank offerings. Neither of these is really built around what small businesses need, so there is a demand in the market for tailored solutions.  

The next thing is cost: these services are typically costly for SMEs because they aren’t tailored. I think what we’re now starting to see is a shift away from that bucketing towards banks being able to launch services that are specific and personalized to the needs of small businesses. That includes broadening access to credit, making it cheaper, and designing the products that the business needs at the time that they need them.  

And again it’s innovation that is enabling this. The availability of agile, cloud-native infrastructures allows for a much more effective cost-to-income ratio control. And that in turn means that they can pass the cost benefits on to their customers in the form of new products at compelling price points. So the shift here is from high-cost services to tailored, personalized ones. And that’s been made achievable by agile, cloud-native core platforms. 

What has prevented or limited the ability of financial institutions to respond to these pain points? 

Ide: I would say the biggest thing is the legacy technology in place. In the last decade or so, neo cores emerged as a way to address the problems of legacy infrastructures, but they now come with almost a “neo legacy” of their own with limited ability to scale or personalize. Those that are able to be personalized can be very challenging to maintain or upgrade once the code has been written.  

But in the last five to six years we’ve started to see a huge positive shift within the neobanks that has highlighted where the legacy and neo core platforms are now coming under pressure with those changing customer expectations. 

That pressure comes from the way those legacy architectures were constructed. They were monolithic in nature and didn’t necessarily allow for hyper-personalization. They were also batch-based systems, very expensive to run on the mainframe. All of this requires specific and costly resources and makes it difficult for banks to respond to all of these pain points. 

What changes have taken place or are taking place that are giving innovative companies the opportunity to step in with new solutions? 

Ide: The adoption of cloud-native platforms that are microservice and API-based has been transformational in terms of the industry opportunity. This is why we launched the world’s first meta core at 10x Banking — to give customers access to a cloud-native core banking platform that overcomes the compromises of both legacy and neo cores.  

This then allows customers to launch products at speed, gives them the hyper-personalization that they need, as well as doing so at a very low cost and with the ability to scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, overcoming a number of the challenges that the industry has faced with great success. 

What specific roles do you see for AI in helping institutions improve their operations and expand their services? 

Ide: I think from our perspective, before we get to AI, it’s about data. The data structures that we use in this industry are the foundations of AI capability. You need to have access to high-quality, unsiloed data so there is a single source of truth across the business from which AI models can be launched.  

From a core banking perspective, there are many things AI can enable, but three that spring to mind. First, at the customer layer, AI can personalize recommendations, power chatbots and make credit lending more efficient. Next is integration and transformation, enabling banks to connect all their systems together in a more efficient, composable architecture. Banks have a real opportunity to leverage AI to build better migration capability here. Finally – and this is something we are looking to support at 10x – is the ability to use AI to help code and create hyper-personalized products and services.  

What the meta core allows our customers to do, for example, is get their data ready for AI, so they can unlock its full potential. So I always go back to that: making sure the data is clean and the structures are unsiloed so it’s all ready to go when you do start using AI.  

Looking at Africa, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, what is driving growth there? 

Ide: Africa is similar in some ways to APAC, so what I mentioned before in terms of the young demographic holds true here too. It’s a massive region, of course, so it’s hard to generalize. But there are some notable nuances in the way innovation is deployed in Africa. The mobile telecommunications networks like Safaricom and M-Pesa have been at the center of that, offering money transfer services alongside the telecommunications services.  

Much of the growth here is driven by the desire to bring more people into the banked economy. Financial inclusion is big on the agenda. If you can reduce the percentage of unbanked people from, for example, 20% to 10%, that’s a big growth in customer numbers for banking and financial services. That’s a lot more people to provide services to, which again links back to the importance of scalability and personalization.

Some have suggested that Africa is the ideal example of a region unencumbered by complex legacy financial systems. Can you elaborate on how this impacts the environment for innovation and new ideas? 

Ide: I would say that’s not the full story. The mobile telephone networks and operators have driven a lot of innovation as I touched on before, and there is a broad appetite for innovation across Africa in general. But there are challenges around the continued use of mainframe infrastructure, which is slowing banks down. As that has become more obvious, banks have been looking to core modernization, as well as partnerships with the mobile networks. This will enable them to extend their capability and services, which is a benefit for both the banks and the mobile networks.  

Are there any trends in banking and financial services in the APAC or Africa that you think are underappreciated or even unrecognized? Are there opportunities there that 10x Banking is pursuing? 

Ide: The major trend that goes underappreciated at the moment is in corporate banking. We have been working and investing heavily in this area, so I can speak from first-hand experience, with active projects in Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, South Africa, and Kenya to name a few. At the moment, there is a massive shift underway in corporate banking, moving from batch to real-time transactions, modernizing their cores. This will enable them to radically increase transaction processing volumes to better serve the demands of new and existing customers in the market. 

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Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Israeli fintech startup and chargeback management specialist Justt raised $30 million in Series C funding.
• Merchants in Paymob’s network in Egypt can now accept Apple Pay.
• Middle East-based payment solutions provider Magnati partnered with Arabian Automobiles Company (AAC).

Central and Southern Asia

• India’s Karnataka Bank partnered with hybrid multicloud computing company Nutanix.
• TBC Uzbekistan launched Osmon Card, its first credit card product.
• India-based high-yield savings account Curie Money raised $1.2 million in seed funding.

Latin America and the Caribbean

• El Salvador announced its intention to continue accumulating Bitcoin, but will discontinue its Bitcoin wallet Chivo as part of a financing deal with the IMF.
• Uruguay-based cross-border payments company Bamboo teamed up with monetization platform Coda to enhance the gaming payment experience in Colombia.
• Latin American payment platform AstroPay launched its multi-currency wallet.

Asia-Pacific

• Singapore-based SME digital finance platform Funding Societies announced a $25 million investment from Cool Japan Fund.
• Indonesia’s Bank Jago teamed up with Google Cloud to enhance the bank’s innovation strategy.
• Malaysian fintech startup Swipey, which provides financial tools for small businesses, secured an investment from 1337 Ventures.

Sub-Saharan Africa

• Ethiopia’s parliament passed legislation to enable foreign banks to operate in the country.
• TechCrunch profiled African stablecoin startup Juicyway.
• Nigeria’s Bamboo became the first Nigerian fintech to acquire a U.S. broker-dealer license.

Central and Eastern Europe

• Bulgaria joined the European Central Bank’s TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) service.
• Episode Six partnered with Secupay to provide asylum seekers in Germany with payment cards to access financial assistance from the government.
• Bank of Georgia turned to Cloudera to better leverage data analytics to enhance the customer experience.

Interested in demoing at FinovateEurope 2025 in London? Applications are still being accepted from innovative companies with new solutions that are ready to show. Visit our FinovateEurope hub today to learn more.

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Photo by Rebecca Zaal