Singapore’s central bank is drawing a firmer line between digital assets built for speculation and those that could make financial markets work better, as global crypto exchange Coinbase expands its footprint in the city-state.

Speaking at the opening of Coinbase’s new Singapore office, Kenneth Gay, Chief Fintech Officer at the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), said the digital asset industry has moved beyond the early public debate around cryptocurrencies and trading. The more important question now, he suggested, is whether tokenisation and digital money can solve practical problems in finance without weakening trust, resilience, market integrity, or consumer protection.

Also Read: Singapore crypto adoption hits new high as 61 per cent now hold digital assets

That distinction matters in Southeast Asia, where cross-border payments remain costly and slow, capital markets are fragmented, and businesses often operate across multiple currencies and regulatory regimes. For years, the region’s crypto boom was associated mainly with retail trading, volatile tokens, and collapses that hurt ordinary users. MAS’s latest framing points to a different phase: one focused less on hype and more on settlement, compliance, liquidity, and institutional infrastructure.

Gay said the ecosystem is becoming “more diverse and more differentiated”, with use cases emerging across tokenised financial assets, payments, custody, compliance, settlement, and market infrastructure. Some tokens, he noted, are designed largely for speculation. Others are tied to real financial assets, commercial bank money, or central bank payment instruments.

The implication is clear: MAS is not treating all digital assets the same way. It wants to support the parts of the market that may improve how finance operates, while maintaining close oversight of activities that create risk without obvious economic value.

From crypto trading to financial plumbing

The most promising developments, according to Gay, are those that address long-standing frictions in the financial system. Tokenisation — the process of representing assets such as bonds, funds, deposits, or collateral on digital ledgers — is often marketed as a breakthrough in itself. MAS’s view is more restrained: the value is not in turning an asset into a token, but in whether doing so improves how that asset is issued, transferred, pledged, settled, or managed.

In practical terms, tokenised assets could reduce the time institutions spend reconciling records, improve post-trade processes, and make settlement more predictable. This is especially relevant in Asia, where capital and trade flows frequently move across time zones, jurisdictions, and currencies. A company operating between Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines may face different banking rails, settlement cycles, and compliance requirements in each market.

But MAS is also warning that tokenised assets cannot scale in isolation. Faster-moving assets require settlement money that can move just as safely and reliably. Without credible settlement assets, trusted infrastructure, legal certainty, and operational controls, tokenisation risks becoming another layer of complexity rather than a solution.

That is why digital money has become central to Singapore’s digital asset strategy. Gay pointed to three forms now under active development: well-regulated stablecoins, tokenised deposits, and central bank digital currencies, particularly wholesale CBDCs used between financial institutions.

Each serves a different purpose. Properly backed stablecoins, if governed by strong safeguards, could become settlement assets or mediums of exchange. Tokenised deposits could allow banks to bring commercial bank money into digital environments. Wholesale CBDCs could provide a credit risk-free settlement asset for financial institutions.

The future, in MAS’s view, will not be built around a single ledger or one form of digital money. Instead, multiple digital assets, payment instruments, and ledgers are likely to coexist. The policy challenge is to make sure they are interoperable, safe, and aligned with financial regulation.

What BLOOM is trying to solve

To push that agenda, MAS has established BLOOM, short for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency. The initiative is designed to support multi-currency settlement capabilities and bring together banks, payment service providers, architects, and other industry participants to work on practical use cases for digital money and settlement assets.

Also Read: Asia’s US$4T tokenisation boom: Why the region will lead the global financial revolution by 2030

Gay described BLOOM as being about “making digital money useful for real settlement needs across borders and currencies”. That phrasing captures the bigger shift in Singapore’s approach. The goal is not to encourage experiments for their own sake, but to help projects move from pilots to commercially meaningful deployment.

For Southeast Asia, this focus is important. The region has no shortage of fintech pilots, blockchain proofs of concept, and bank-led experiments. What it lacks, in many cases, is the connective tissue that allows regulated institutions to deploy such systems at scale across markets.

Interoperability, liquidity management, and programmable compliance — the ability to embed compliance rules into transactions — are not glamorous topics, but they determine whether digital asset infrastructure can move into production.

MAS said BLOOM is intended to give participants regulatory clarity, partnerships, and ecosystem connectivity to scale and launch in Singapore. The regulator also expects to learn from these projects, using real-world experience to shape future policy and rules.

Coinbase’s involvement in BLOOM places it within this institutional push. Gay thanked the company for its active participation and said firms such as Coinbase are building capabilities, launching product offerings, and creating jobs in Singapore.

Coinbase in a crowded regional race

Coinbase’s Singapore expansion comes as major global exchanges compete for regulatory legitimacy in Asia. The company holds a Major Payment Institution licence from MAS, allowing it to provide digital payment token services in Singapore. Its regional rivals include Crypto.com, Independent Reserve, and Blockchain.com, which have also received MAS licences, while global names such as OKX, Kraken, Gemini, and Binance compete for institutional and retail users across different markets, subject to local rules.

The competitive landscape has changed since the peak of the crypto bull market. Exchanges can no longer rely solely on retail trading volumes or brand recognition. In Singapore, the more valuable prize may be integration into regulated financial infrastructure — custody, settlement, tokenised assets, and stablecoin-based services that appeal to institutions rather than speculative traders.

This is also where MAS’s regulatory posture gives Singapore an edge. The city-state has tightened rules around retail access and consumer protection, while continuing to support institutional experimentation through projects involving tokenisation, wholesale settlement, and digital money. That balance has made Singapore one of the more important hubs for digital asset companies seeking credibility in Asia, even as other centres such as Hong Kong, Dubai, and Tokyo compete aggressively for the same sector.

The next test: moving beyond pilots

The speech underscored a familiar but unresolved challenge for digital assets: turning technical possibility into everyday financial utility. Faster settlement, better liquidity, and programmable compliance are valuable only if institutions trust the systems, regulators understand the risks, and customers are protected when things go wrong.

For founders and fintech operators in Southeast Asia, MAS’s message is both an opportunity and a constraint. The regulator is open to digital asset innovation, but only where it is tied to clear economic value and strong safeguards. Projects built mainly around speculation will face a colder reception than those improving settlement, treasury operations, compliance, or cross-border liquidity.

Also Read: Tokenised assets have moved on-chain. The liquidity has not followed

That may define the next phase of Singapore’s digital asset market. The city is not trying to be the loosest jurisdiction for crypto activity. It is trying to become the place where regulated digital asset infrastructure can be tested, supervised, and eventually deployed.

Coinbase’s new office gives the company a larger base in that ecosystem. BLOOM gives MAS another channel to shape how digital money develops. Whether either can help digital assets move from controlled pilots to real financial plumbing will be the test that matters.

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For years, cybersecurity teams have told employees to look for the usual clues: awkward grammar, strange email addresses, urgent requests, and links that do not quite look right. Generative AI is making that advice less reliable.

A new Mimecast study suggests that many organisations in Asia Pacific now expect attackers to use AI against them, yet a large number still have not adjusted their defences to match the threat.

According to the company’s “State of Human Risk 2026” study, 65 per cent of surveyed IT and security decision-makers believe an AI-enabled attack against their organisation is inevitable within the next 12 months.

Also Read: GoSerpent exposes the quiet cyber war against Southeast Asian governments

The APAC findings are based on responses from 500 IT security and IT decision-makers in Singapore and Australia, drawn from a broader global survey of 2,500 respondents across nine markets. All organisations surveyed had more than 250 employees and more than 250 email users, spanning sectors including financial services, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, retail, energy, public services, construction and media.

The headline number is striking, but the more important finding may be this: 60 per cent of APAC respondents said their organisation was not fully prepared to deal with AI-driven threats that exploit human vulnerabilities. In other words, many companies can see the risk coming, but their playbooks are still catching up.

The new face of social engineering

Social engineering attacks are not new. Fraudsters have long pretended to be bosses, suppliers, banks, government agencies or colleagues to trick employees into revealing credentials, approving payments or sharing sensitive data.

What AI changes is the quality and scale of deception.

Attackers can now use generative AI tools to write polished emails, imitate a company’s tone, translate messages into local languages, personalise scams using scraped public information, and produce convincing voice or video impersonations. For businesses in Southeast Asia, where cross-border teams often work across English, Mandarin, Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese, Thai and other languages, this matters. Poor language used to be one of the easiest warning signs of a scam. That signal is becoming weaker.

“AI is changing the way cybercriminals manipulate trust,” said Nicky Choo, Vice President and General Manager, APAC, Mimecast. “Attackers can now use it to create convincing, tailored messages that appear to come from a colleague, a partner or a senior leader.”

Also Read: Southeast Asian SMEs remain soft targets as ransomware groups refine extortion tactics

That is particularly relevant in regional markets where startups, SMEs and large enterprises alike rely heavily on fast-moving digital communication. A procurement request may arrive by email, be clarified on a messaging app, approved through a cloud workflow, and paid through a banking portal. Each handoff creates a moment where an employee has to decide whether the person on the other side is genuine.

Mimecast’s study found that 79 per cent of respondents were concerned about AI being used as an attack vector against their organisation. Two-thirds, or 66 per cent, agreed that an employee in their organisation was very likely to be fooled by a cybercriminal using AI as part of a social engineering attack.

That finding points to a difficult reality for security leaders: the weak point is not simply technology. It is judgement under pressure.

Training has not caught up

The study found that AI-specific employee preparation remains limited. Only 40 per cent of surveyed APAC organisations provide training on how to use AI while avoiding exploitation, while 42 per cent conduct simulated AI-driven phishing attacks.

This does not mean employees are receiving no cybersecurity training at all. Many companies already run phishing awareness programmes, password hygiene sessions or compliance modules. The gap is that traditional training may not prepare workers for scams that sound natural, reference real business context, and arrive through channels they use every day.

“Employees should not be expected to identify increasingly sophisticated deception on instinct alone,” Choo said. “Fewer than half are training staff on how to avoid AI-driven exploitation or running simulated AI phishing exercises.”

For Southeast Asian companies, this gap could widen as AI adoption accelerates inside the workplace. Employees are experimenting with AI assistants for writing, coding, customer support, research and translation. At the same time, attackers are using similar tools to improve fraud. That creates a messy middle ground where legitimate AI use and malicious AI use can look increasingly similar.

Also Read: Thailand is suddenly on the frontline of a new ransomware wave

A finance employee may receive a payment request written in the exact style of a senior executive. A customer support agent may be sent a forged document that looks credible. A founder may hear what sounds like an investor or board member on a voice call. The problem is not that workers are careless. It is that the cost of verifying trust has gone up.

Why APAC firms face a sharper test

APAC’s exposure is not uniform, but several regional factors make the issue more pressing. Singapore and Australia, the two markets covered in the APAC sample, are both highly digitised economies with mature financial and enterprise technology sectors. They are also hubs for regional business activity, meaning employees frequently deal with overseas vendors, remote teams and cross-border customers.

In Southeast Asia, the challenge is compounded by uneven cyber maturity. Large banks, telcos and technology firms may have advanced controls, while smaller companies in their supply chains often operate with lean security teams. Startups can be especially vulnerable because they prize speed, informality and rapid decision-making, the same conditions that social engineers exploit.

A young company may not have layered approval systems for payments or data access. A fast-scaling regional business may onboard new staff and vendors faster than it updates security processes. In such environments, a convincing AI-generated message does not need to defeat sophisticated infrastructure; it only needs to land at the right moment.

The growing use of collaboration tools also expands the attack surface. Email remains central, but work now happens across Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, Telegram, shared documents and customer platforms. If security awareness is still built mainly around spotting suspicious emails, organisations may miss deception that begins elsewhere.

From blocking threats to building judgement

Mimecast argues that organisations need to treat human judgement as a core part of cyber defence, not merely as the last line of protection when technical filters fail. That means pairing security tools with practical training, realistic simulations and clearer verification processes.

For example, companies can require out-of-band confirmation for payment changes, create simple escalation paths for suspicious requests, and train staff on AI-specific red flags such as synthetic voice calls, overly personalised messages or unusual urgency framed in familiar language. Security teams can also run simulations that reflect how employees actually work, rather than relying only on generic phishing tests.

The broader lesson is that AI-enabled cyber risk is not just a technical problem to be solved by buying another tool. It is an organisational problem involving culture, process and incentives. Employees need permission to slow down, question authority and verify unusual requests without fearing that they are blocking business.

Also Read: From fraud fighters to zero-trust builders: SEA’s cyber stars

The Mimecast study is a warning, but not an unexpected one. As AI lowers the cost of producing convincing deception, the old assumption that scams are easy to spot will become increasingly dangerous. For APAC organisations, the next phase of cybersecurity may depend less on whether employees can catch every fake, and more on whether companies design systems that do not leave them to make those calls alone.

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When Applied Materials brought ASTRA, its Applied Startup Technology & Research Accelerator, to Singapore for the first time this year, it marked more than a regional expansion. It signalled that Southeast Asia’s deeptech ecosystem has matured enough to bridge the gap between breakthrough technology and industrial deployment, a challenge now defining the AI era.

Behind that bet is Applied Ventures, the semiconductor equipment giant’s corporate venture arm, which manages a portfolio exceeding US$400 million across more than 90 companies worldwide.

Also Read: Applied’s US$500M Singapore expansion tightens ties with Southeast Asia’s chip push

In this interview, Abhishek Sud, Senior Investment Director at Applied Ventures, unpacks why Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and India are generating the region’s most compelling deal flow, how AI is reshaping capital allocation towards photonics, robotics and energy-efficient computing, and why deeptech investing demands a patience most pure-play VCs simply cannot afford.

ASTRA came to Singapore for the first time this year. Why now, and what about Southeast Asia’s deeptech ecosystem made the timing right?

ASTRA goes where we see the greatest opportunity to accelerate deeptech innovation, and Singapore’s ecosystem has reached the level of maturity that made this the right time. As AI reshapes industries, the challenge is no longer building breakthrough technology; it’s bringing that technology into real-world manufacturing. ASTRA exists to bridge that gap by connecting startups, industry leaders, ecosystem partners and customers.

Southeast Asia has changed considerably in three years: semiconductor investment has grown, engineering capabilities have deepened, and the deeptech startup scene is far more vibrant. Singapore sits at the heart of that momentum, combining world-class research, advanced manufacturing, semiconductor expertise and strong public-private partnerships as a regional hub for Applied Materials’s R&D and commercialisation activities.

Applied Ventures has invested in 18 countries. Where in Asia are you seeing the most compelling deal flow, and which markets have the greatest untapped potential?

We’re seeing strong momentum in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and India, where deep expertise in semiconductor and advanced-manufacturing capabilities keeps generating compelling opportunities.

Singapore has become a nexus for innovation and venture activity in Asia, underpinned by a stable, business-friendly tax and regulatory environment, strong legal and financial institutions, and regional connectivity. This is why so many venture firms have chosen to headquarter here. In robotics, companies like Augmentus exemplify the Singapore-based innovation we find compelling.

India is also emerging as an important source of innovation, driven by exceptional engineering talent, an electronics manufacturing base and a fast-growing deep-tech startup ecosystem; companies like VVDN represent this momentum. More broadly, we’re seeing exciting developments across Southeast Asia in AI, robotics, photonics and advanced manufacturing.

As investors, we focus less on geography and more on whether an ecosystem brings together talent, research, manufacturing capability and customer demand. That combination is what lets startups move from breakthrough ideas to real industry adoption.

How does Asia’s deeptech VC landscape structurally differ from the US — in founder quality, exit pathways and corporate willingness to be early customers?

The US has one of the world’s most mature venture ecosystems, with deep capital markets and established pathways to scale. Asia is different — not one market but a collection of innovation ecosystems, each with its own strengths.

For us, the defining characteristic of a strong ecosystem isn’t geography; it’s the ability to turn breakthrough research into real-world adoption. What distinguishes many Asian markets is how closely research, manufacturing and industry are connected. Much of the world’s advanced manufacturing capacity sits in Asia, so founders here often get direct access to foundries, manufacturing partners and strategic customers earlier than they would elsewhere.

Also Read: Deeptech’s secret: Ignore the market, master the engineering, and let opportunity find you

That proximity accelerates how quickly a deeptech company can validate and commercialise its technology, and it’s part of why we’re seeing an increasingly sophisticated pipeline of founders tackling hard problems in AI, semiconductors, photonics, robotics and advanced manufacturing. It also shapes exits, with strategic partnerships and acquisitions by Asian companies playing a prominent role alongside traditional venture outcomes.

You manage a portfolio of over US$400M across 90+ companies. With AI demanding more capital-intensive bets, how are you investing in this AI economy?

AI is influencing where capital flows, but it hasn’t changed our investment philosophy. We view AI as an infrastructure transformation and continue focusing on foundational technologies enabling the next generation of computing: energy-efficient compute, photonics, advanced packaging, thermal management and AI data centre infrastructure, all areas aligned with Applied Materials’s expertise across the materials-to-systems stack.

Beyond digital AI infrastructure, we’re also seeing the emergence of Physical AI, where foundation models converge with robotics, automation and industrial systems, as well as quantum computing and AI for science and engineering. ASTRA Singapore is one way we engage with innovators at this intersection, giving us early insight into emerging technologies.

Our objective is not simply to invest in the current AI cycle, but to identify the technology inflections that will shape the semiconductor and AI industries over the next decade.

Selectivity means more companies don’t get funded. What does that mean for early-stage hardware or materials founders who need early institutional backing?

Greater selectivity raises the bar, especially in hardware and materials, where scaling innovation takes significant time and capital. We look beyond technical novelty to understand the problem being solved and whether there’s a credible path to industrialisation and mass deployment, which is often where our model differs from traditional financial VCs.

Minds.ai and Sigray illustrate this well. Minds.ai applies reinforcement learning and deep learning to optimise semiconductor fab operations; Sigray pioneers synchrotron-grade x-ray systems for materials characterisation.

Both are deeply specialised, hard-tech businesses that traditional financial investors may find challenging to evaluate given their technical complexity and development timelines. We engaged because we understood the problems they were solving and their relevance to the broader semiconductor ecosystem. Over time, both technologies became sufficiently important to Applied Materials’ long-term roadmap that the companies were ultimately acquired.

You’re moving into photonics, robotics and quantum computing, areas with historically optimistic timelines. What’s changed that makes these bets fundable now?

Less has changed than you might expect. Deeptech innovation has always followed the realities of physics, manufacturing readiness and customer qualification, not consumer adoption cycles or market sentiment.

Also Read: Building smart: A tech founder’s guide to the semiconductor supply chain revolution

Photonics illustrates this well. We recognised its potential early through our investment in Ayar Labs and have continued building that thesis as the technology matured, including through Mixx Technologies. As AI infrastructure scales, faster, more energy-efficient data movement is becoming increasingly important.

Similarly, robotics is attracting attention as manufacturing environments become too complex for traditional automation, creating demand for adaptive, AI-enabled systems that handle variability and real-time decision-making — the thesis behind our investment in Augmentus, a Singapore-based robotics AI software company actively engaged with our Worldwide Operations group.

We don’t invest because timelines have suddenly become shorter. We invest when we see technologies reaching an inflection point where advances in science, engineering and market demand begin to reinforce one another.

What threshold separates genuinely transformative energy-efficiency plays from incremental improvements dressed up in the right language?

The real question isn’t whether a technology touches power consumption, but whether it meaningfully improves performance-per-watt at the system level, not just in one isolated component.

Our industry has historically delivered roughly a threefold improvement in energy-efficient performance every two years, largely through transistor- and interconnect-level advances. But at today’s density, leading-edge chips packing hundreds of billions of transistors into an area smaller than a postage stamp, that gain can no longer come from any single innovation working in isolation. It requires advances across logic, memory and advanced packaging: transistor architecture (such as gate-all-around transistors), the interconnects moving signals through dense 3D stacks, and packaging that brings compute and memory closer together to address the “memory wall.”

So, when we evaluate a company, we’re not asking ‘does this reduce power somewhere?’ We’re asking whether it changes the system-level equation.

With deeptech cycles running 10 to 15 years and LPs demanding shorter returns, how is Applied Ventures managing expectations without compromising patience?

Deeptech innovation operates on timelines set by science, engineering and industrial adoption, so patience remains important regardless of market cycles. Investing directly as Applied Materials’s corporate venture arm lets us take a long-term view.

In deeptech, most of the value sits behind a single, high-stakes gate: qualification. Before a novel breakthrough is designed into a customer’s product or process, it generates very little revenue. But once it clears that bar and gets designed into a semiconductor node, manufacturing line or product platform, it tends to stay there for the life of that platform and often carries forward into subsequent generations. That’s why we think of deep-tech value as compounding rather than linear — the payoff is a technology becoming embedded in a customer’s roadmap for years, not a single exit event.

Why should a founder take Applied Ventures’s money over a pure-play financial VC, given corporate VCs can be slower to participate?

What we bring instead of speed is depth. Applied Materials has spent decades building expertise across the materials-to-systems stack, advanced manufacturing and the global semiconductor ecosystem, giving founders access to technical expertise, customers, supply chain partners and co-investors. In some cases, we also become a customer ourselves. Through programmes like ASTRA, startups work directly with our business units on real industry challenges, bridging the gap between a promising technology and commercial adoption.

Also Read: Chips, corruption, and credibility: Malaysia’s semiconductor gamble faces a trust test

That’s particularly valuable in deeptech, where success depends on more than technical breakthroughs. Companies also need to navigate qualification, industrialisation and customer adoption. We help founders through that journey with the technical and commercial support needed to scale.

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For years, online travel has made flights and hotels relatively easy to compare. The messier part begins after touchdown: finding the right train, coach, ferry or local connection, often across operators that do not share booking systems, languages or payment flows.

That gap is where Berlin-headquartered Omio is placing its next big Asia bet.

Also Read: Granite Asia secures over US$350M in first close of private credit fund

The multimodal travel booking platform has secured a US$10 million strategic investment from Granite-Integral, a Japan-focused growth investment platform backed by Granite Asia and Integral Corporation.

The funding will support Omio’s expansion in Japan and help strengthen its presence across Southeast Asia, two regions where international tourism is recovering fast and travellers are increasingly building trips around transport access rather than only destinations.

Omio allows users to search, compare and book different modes of transport, including trains, buses, ferries and flights, through a single interface. Its broader group also includes Rome2Rio, the route-planning platform acquired by Omio in 2019, which is often used by travellers to understand how to get from one place to another when the answer is not as simple as booking a flight.

The company says the new partnership with Granite-Integral will help it deepen transport operator partnerships in Japan and Southeast Asia, improve its product for local and international users, and grow regional teams, including in Japan and at its AI-focused technology hub in Singapore.

Asia’s fragmented travel map

The timing is not accidental. Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest-growing travel region globally over the next five years, while Omio says nearly half of travellers are now planning journeys that involve more than one mode of transport.

That shift is especially relevant in Southeast Asia, where cross-border and domestic travel often depends on combinations of low-cost flights, coaches, ferries, trains and private transfers. A traveller moving from Singapore to a Thai island, from Ho Chi Minh City to Cambodia, or from Bali to secondary Indonesian destinations may need several operators and separate bookings to complete one trip.

For founders and operators in the region, the opportunity is not just in selling tickets. It is in turning fragmented transport supply into usable digital infrastructure. Southeast Asia has strong demand from backpackers, business travellers, digital nomads and a growing middle class, but its ground and sea transport systems remain unevenly digitised. Many operators still rely on offline sales, agent networks or local booking channels that are difficult for international travellers to access.

That creates room for platforms that can aggregate inventory, simplify payments, and give users confidence that a journey involving multiple legs will actually work.

Japan presents a different but equally complex challenge. Its transport system is among the world’s most advanced, but it is also dense, operator-heavy and sometimes difficult for overseas visitors to navigate beyond the biggest cities. Omio launched in Japan earlier this year and says it is already seeing demand from international travellers booking along the Golden Route, the popular corridor linking cities such as Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, as well as trips to mountain regions, sacred routes and coastal communities.

The company has been expanding its Japanese transport network through partnerships with operators, including Japan Railways and Willer Express.

“Millions of travellers visit every year, but planning journeys across different operators and transport modes can still be complex, particularly beyond the major cities,” said Naren Shaam, founder and CEO of Omio. “With Granite-Integral’s regional expertise, we intend to accelerate a new era of connected travel in Japan, expand our presence across Southeast Asia and continue building a more connected future for travel across Asia.”

Why Granite-Integral matters

Granite-Integral brings more than capital to the table. The platform is a joint venture between Granite Asia and Integral Corporation, managing US$100 million in committed capital. Granite Asia has experience investing across Asia Pacific’s technology sector, while Integral brings operational expertise and networks in Japan.

For Omio, that combination matters because transport aggregation is a local relationship business as much as a technology problem. Signing up transport operators, integrating inventory, handling customer support, and navigating local payment preferences all require market-specific execution.

CK Choun, Co-Head of Granite-Integral, said Japan and Southeast Asia represent “some of the most important long-term opportunities in global travel”, with rising demand for more connected journeys across the region. He added that Omio’s platform is built to simplify increasingly fragmented travel experiences.

Omio says it currently offers bookable transport options across 48 countries and serves more than one billion users annually across its platforms. The group sells more than 100,000 tickets daily, employs over 470 people from more than 50 countries, and maintains offices in Berlin, Singapore, Prague, Melbourne and Bangalore.

The company has also set an ambitious target to expand into more than 70 markets worldwide by 2028, with Japan and Southeast Asia named as key priorities.

Rivals chasing the same traveller

Omio is not alone in seeing the value of multimodal travel in Asia. In Europe, Trainline remains a major player in rail and coach booking, while Trip.com Group has deep reach across flights, hotels and rail in Asia, especially among Chinese and regional travellers.

In Southeast Asia, platforms such as Traveloka and Klook have built strong consumer brands around flights, accommodation, activities and transport-adjacent services, while 12Go has long focused on buses, ferries, trains and transfers across emerging travel markets.

Global giants such as Booking Holdings and Expedia Group also have the distribution power to move further into connected trip planning, though transport beyond flights remains a harder category to standardise.

Omio’s challenge will be to prove that it can localise deeply enough while keeping the simplicity that made its European product useful. Southeast Asia, in particular, is not one market. Indonesia’s island geography, Vietnam’s coach networks, Thailand’s tourism corridors and Singapore’s role as a regional hub all require different supply strategies.

Also Read: Granite Asia, Integral form US$100M JV to drive Japan-global tech expansion

If Omio can stitch those pieces together, its regional push could tap into a larger change in travel behaviour: people are no longer only asking where they can go, but how easily they can move once they get there.

That question is becoming central to tourism growth across Asia. For Japan, it could help spread visitors beyond crowded urban routes. For Southeast Asia, it could make secondary destinations more accessible and commercially viable. For Omio, it is the opening it needs to turn multimodal travel from a niche convenience into a mainstream booking habit.

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Product teams speak a great deal about understanding users, but much of what passes for empathy is still strangely external. A few interviews, some clips from research, a dashboard, a support summary, and perhaps a customer visit if the quarter is going well. The PM learns about the user, but rarely feels anything close to the shape of the user’s day.

There is a meaningful difference between hearing that a workflow is frustrating and living even a diluted version of the conditions that make it frustrating. One gives you information. The other changes your judgment. It changes what you notice, what starts to feel intolerable, and what no longer sounds like a minor edge case once it begins stealing attention from the work that actually matters to the user.

The point is not to imagine the user better

The phrase becoming your user can sound theatrical if handled badly. It can drift into a kind of product tourism, where the PM briefly samples the user’s world and comes back declaring deep insight after a few hours of inconvenience. That is not what I mean.

The goal is not to imagine the user more vividly. The goal is to borrow enough of the user’s constraints that your product judgement changes in useful ways.

That distinction matters because users are not defined only by goals. They are defined by context. What time pressure are they under? What other systems are open? What risks do they carry if something goes wrong? How fragmented is their attention? What language do they think in? Which decisions are reversible and which ones will come back to haunt them in an audit, a manager review, a customer escalation, or a missed operational target?

Good method acting in product is not identity play, it is constraint play

There is an important ethical line here. A PM cannot become the user in any complete human sense. They cannot briefly inhabit a profession, identity, power structure, or lived experience and claim equivalence. That would be shallow and, in many cases, arrogant.

What a PM can do is become answerable to a version of the user’s constraints.

That is the more useful frame. Do not try to imitate the person. Try to inherit enough of the conditions. Work with the same interruptions. Use the same information quality. Accept the same timing pressure. Force yourself into the same system boundaries. Limit yourself to the same training level. Carry the same downstream consequence for delay or error, even if only through a carefully designed simulation.

The most powerful immersion technique is to inherit the user’s compromises

One of the biggest differences between how product teams think and how users behave is that teams think in terms of optimal flows, while users often operate through compromise. They trade accuracy for speed, structure for momentum, local inconsistency for getting the day unstuck, and perfect usage for something that is simply survivable.

A PM begins to understand the product properly when they are forced into the same compromises.

Also Read: Your customers are not buying your product, they are buying a better version of themselves

What do you skip when the system asks too much? What steps do you stop trusting? What notifications do you mentally tune out? Which fields do you fill carelessly because the form has trained you that accuracy is rarely rewarded? Which safeguard do you work around because it arrives at the wrong moment? Which part of the workflow becomes ceremonial rather than meaningful?

This approach improves prioritisation because it changes what feels expensive

One of the quiet failures in product organisations is that teams often price effort correctly and price users badly. They know what engineering work is expensive. They are less precise about what user adaptation is expensive.

Method acting helps correct that.

Once a PM has felt the repeated cognitive drag of a confusing permission model, the hidden embarrassment of a brittle workflow during a customer call, or the compounding irritation of a product that requires too much memory to use safely, they start evaluating product choices differently. What once sounded like a small usability issue starts looking like an ongoing tax on serious work. A feature request that felt secondary becomes strategically important because it removes repeated mental labour rather than adding visible novelty.

Product teams should immerse themselves in pairs, not in isolation

There is also a practical lesson here. A single PM doing an immersion exercise can still turn it into a private epiphany that never quite translates back into the organisation. The better model is paired immersion across functions.

A PM and a designer should take the same support shift together. A PM and an engineer should attempt the same first-time setup under the same constraints. A PM and customer success lead should walk through the same renewal period using only the product and resources a customer would have. Not because cross-functional alignment is fashionable language, but because products fail in layers and different disciplines notice different truths under pressure.

The PM may notice expectation gaps. The designer may notice interpretive failure. The engineer may see state fragility. The customer-facing partner may understand where confidence actually breaks. A shared immersion experience creates a much stronger basis for action than a single insight carried back into a prioritisation meeting.

It also has another advantage. It makes the user’s reality harder for the organisation to sanitise later.

The risk is romanticising pain instead of removing it

There is, however, a failure mode here that product leaders should be honest about. Teams can become fascinated by immersive research and still not change the product in ways that matter. They collect vivid stories, run internal exercises, and leave the user impressed by the company’s curiosity but still burdened by the same avoidable friction.

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That is where this whole idea becomes self-indulgent.

Method acting only deserves the name if it leads to stronger action. The purpose is not to feel more empathetic in meetings. The purpose is to remove false assumptions from the product and to design with greater seriousness about what the user’s day actually costs.

If the immersion does not change priorities, defaults, sequencing, onboarding, trust cues, or the burden placed on the user, then the team has performed understanding rather than built from it.

The deepest insight often comes from repeated immersion

There is a tendency in product culture to search for one transformative field visit or one intense customer session that will unlock truth. Reality is usually less cinematic.

The more valuable form of becoming a user is often repeated, almost boring exposure. The PM takes the same support block each week. They use the same constrained setup path every month. They attend the same operational checkpoint at the same stage of the customer cycle. They revisit the workflow during the moments when pressure actually rises.

This matters because many product truths are not dramatic. They are cumulative. A tiny delay repeated forty times. A confusing label that produces just enough hesitation to disrupt pace. A weak default that creates small but constant recovery work. A permission design that nobody describes as broken, yet everyone silently routes around.

Repeated immersion is what reveals these patterns. It turns empathy from a moral gesture into an operating discipline.

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