Payoneer’s latest report highlights how ASEAN’s shifting trade landscape is creating new financial challenges for businesses expanding across the region, including US$2.5 billion a year in payment leakage.
Tariff-driven trade diversification has redrawn the map of South-east Asian trade — and exposed a less visible cost. Payoneer estimates that USD 2.5 billion in transaction value is being lost each year across five ASEAN markets — Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines — as businesses scale into new trade corridors faster than their payment infrastructure can keep pace.
As tariffs on China-origin goods redirected trade, Vietnam absorbed a surge in manufacturing and also emerged as a hub for gaming studios and app developers routing payments through Singapore.
Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia deepened their roles in automotive, semiconductor, and consumer goods exports. The Philippines took a different path, emerging as a services export hub for business process outsourcing (BPO) and IT firms invoicing clients abroad.
A business that once ran a single Singapore-US payment corridor may now be managing five currencies across as many markets — and its payment infrastructure was rarely built for that.
Two pressure points quietly draining value
In particular, the report identifies two key pressure points contributing to value leakage. The first is FX conversion and payment costs, which account for an estimated US$1.6 billion of the total exposure.
The second is settlement delays and working capital drag, where funds can be tied up for days or even weeks, resulting in a further US$930 million in annual exposure.
A Singapore-incorporated trading company that added Vietnamese and Thai suppliers, EU buyers, and a Philippines-based operations team within a single year could move from managing one FX pair to five. Leakage that was manageable at USD 2 million in annual revenue can become a material drag at USD 10 million.
Rather than managing collections, FX, and reconciliation as separate functions, businesses are increasingly consolidating into a single payment stack — enabling multi-currency collection, deliberate currency conversion, faster disbursements, and direct accounting connectivity.
“Trade diversification has opened a real growth opportunity for ASEAN SMBs, but many are still running it through payment infrastructure built for a single corridor. The businesses that manage currency, collections, and reconciliation as one integrated function across their legal entities and markets, rather than entity by entity, are best placed to capture the full value of this shift,” said Nagesh Devata, SVP, APAC, Payoneer.
