Cross-border digital services in ASEAN still tend to stop at national borders. A QR payment link may work in one corridor but not another. A mobile user may be able to access rewards, identity services, or payment features at home, yet encounter different rules and limited functionality when travelling or sending value to family elsewhere in the region.
The proposed ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement, or DEFA, has brought greater attention to these gaps. Its potential value lies less in policy language than in whether people can eventually use familiar digital services with fewer barriers across markets. For a prepaid mobile user, that could mean easier access to payments, practical rewards, or basic financial services through an app they already use, rather than another platform to download and learn.
Telco apps are well-placed to become part of that shift. They already serve as the starting point for top-ups, data purchases, and customer support for millions of users. Adding commerce, entertainment, rewards, payments, and cross-border functionality could make those apps more useful on a daily basis. It will also require operators to balance engagement and new revenue opportunities with data protection, security, and rewards that are genuinely relevant in each local market.
In this TNGlobal Q&A, Manit Parikh, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Binary Holdings, discusses what needs to change before regional digital-economy goals translate into practical experiences for mobile users. Drawing on his work building digital engagement infrastructure with telecommunications and platform partners across emerging markets, Parikh examines the role of interoperable systems, localized incentives, and trusted telco environments in helping ASEAN’s digital economy become more accessible in everyday life.
ASEAN has concluded negotiations on DEFA. What changes could ordinary consumers actually notice in the apps and services they already use?
The honest answer is that DEFA won’t change anyone’s home screen overnight. Framework agreements never do. But what will change, gradually, and then suddenly, is the plumbing underneath.
At TBH we operate embedded infrastructure inside telco apps across Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and beyond. Every one of those integrations today means navigating a different data regime, a different payments rulebook, and a different set of assumptions about what a digital identity even means. That friction doesn’t show up in a consumer’s UI, but it absolutely shows up in what we can and cannot build for them.
So here’s what I think ordinary users will actually start to feel:
First, payments that just work across borders. ASEAN already has bilateral QR payment links — Thailand-Singapore, Malaysia-Indonesia — but they’re stitched together one pair at a time. DEFA creates the mandate for a region-wide interoperable framework. For a user, that eventually means scanning one QR code in Jakarta or Phnom Penh the same way you would in Bangkok, without thinking about which corridor has been switched on.
Second, fewer “this service isn’t available in your country” moments. Right now, a dApp or digital service we distribute through a telco in Indonesia often can’t offer the same experience to the same telco’s roaming user in Vietnam, because the regulatory assumptions don’t align. Harmonized e-commerce and consumer protection rules start to change that. You won’t notice the regulation — you’ll just notice the app works.
Third, and this one is personal for us, digital identity that travels. DEFA’s provisions on mutually recognized digital identity and authentication could be transformative for financial inclusion. We’re on course to serve over 300 million users, many of whom are unbanked or underbanked. If a verified identity in one ASEAN market is recognized in another, that’s not an abstract policy win. That’s a migrant worker in Malaysia being able to access financial services tied to their home-country identity, directly inside the telco app they already use every day.
The caveat I’d add: DEFA sets the ceiling, not the floor. The agreement is expected to be signed at the ASEAN Summit later this year, and then every member state still has to ratify and implement domestically. ASEAN’s track record there is mixed; the e-ASEAN Framework took some countries eight years to ratify. So I’d tell consumers: don’t expect magic in 2027. But do expect that the invisible walls between your digital life in one ASEAN country and another will start coming down.
For builders like us, that’s the signal to invest now in embedded infrastructure that’s ready for a borderless region, because the regulatory architecture is finally catching up to what users already want.
What still needs to happen before policy goals translate into practical digital experiences for prepaid mobile users?
Three things.
First, the experience has to live inside the apps people already open. A prepaid user in our markets is not going to download a government app or a new wallet to claim a policy benefit. If it’s not inside the Telkomsel or Globe app they already have, it doesn’t reach them.
Second, the reward has to be worth their time. For a user where a family day out can cost the equivalent of two months of discretionary income, an airtime top-up, a data bundle, or an Alfamart grocery voucher is real value. A discount on something aspirational is not.
Third, operators have to be able to move value to each other across borders. Interoperability is the part DEFA can genuinely unlock, and it’s the part the market cannot build on its own.
The infrastructure for all three already sits inside partner apps. What DEFA adds is the regulatory cover to scale the cross-border piece.
What has to change for telco apps to become broader gateways for commerce, rewards, gaming, and financial activity?
The biggest change is conceptual, not technical. Telco apps were built to reward spending: top up, buy data, pay a bill. The shift is to also reward time. People in our markets spend four to five hours a day on their phones. An operator that captures even a fraction of that attention inside its own app turns a monthly utility into a daily destination.
Technically, operators don’t have to rebuild anything. They embed our intelligent infrastructure layer — in our case Binary OS — that adds entertainment content, gaming, challenges, and hyperlocalised offers, and presents it as their existing app. It typically goes live in days rather than months, and the operator keeps full ownership of the customer relationship.
The model operators already understand is what WeChat and GoJek did: one app, many daily reasons to open it. The difference is that the telco doesn’t have to become a technology company to get there.
What are the biggest barriers to building digital services that can work across ASEAN markets?
Fragmentation, and it shows up in very specific places: payment behavior, what people will actually redeem, language, and a different regulator in every market.
Most cross-border products fail for one of two reasons. They launch a separate app per country, which splits the user base, or they ask users to change their habits, which they won’t do. The approach that works is to standardize the engine once and localize everything the user touches: the content, the games, the reward catalogue, and the offers. A driver in Jakarta wants an Alfamart voucher; the same reward slot in Manila or Colombo needs something else entirely.
The barrier people underestimate is trust. Several of our partners are national operators, some state-linked, working under heavy regulation. You don’t get embedded into that environment quickly, and that position is hard for a new entrant to replicate. DEFA helps by reducing the regulatory variance between markets, which today is the most expensive part of scaling.
What would a useful cross-border experience look like for a regular mobile user, especially someone who may not rely heavily on banking or e-commerce apps?
For most users, useful means simple and immediate. They earn value doing what they already do in their home operator’s app, and they can move or spend it in another ASEAN market with no bank account, no currency conversion, and no fee.
For us, that’s not a future scenario. A user can send points to family across a border by phone number or QR code today, and the recipient can redeem them for airtime, data, or vouchers in their own market.
The next layer is travel. We’re building toward a tourist wallet where a visitor completes light identity verification with a passport, links a foreign card, and pays through local QR rails across ASEAN without carrying cash or opening a local bank account. For the traveler, it removes friction. For the host country, it captures spending that currently leaks away.
That’s the kind of everyday cross-border utility DEFA is meant to create, and it doesn’t require the user to be a sophisticated banking or e-commerce customer.
Based on live deployments with telcos in markets such as Indonesia and the Philippines, what actually encourages prepaid users to engage more frequently inside telco apps beyond basic top-ups?
Across our live deployments — now 10 partners in 8 markets reaching around 380 million monthly active users — the pattern is consistent. What moves a prepaid user is a fast, low-effort loop with a reward they actually want.
Gamification is the most popular system. It’s proven across billions of plays and takes seconds to use. Short-form content and hyper-casual games extend the session from there.
The operator-level lesson is that relevance beats volume. A user who watches food content and is served relevant food offers engages far more than one being handed a random, generic reward — and getting that match right every time is where our AI-powered optimization engine does the work. We’re rolling that deeper across partners now. As a result, we see a sustained increase in visits and session duration within the app.
As telco apps add rewards, gaming, commerce, payments, and potentially AI-driven features, how should operators balance engagement, monetization, data protection, and consumer trust?
Safety and security have to come first. Full stop. If users don’t trust the environment, nothing else you build on top of it matters — not the rewards, not the commerce, not the engagement numbers.
In practice, that means the infrastructure has to be secure by design, not bolted on after launch. Get safety right, deliver clear value to the user, and monetization follows naturally — higher ARPU, lower churn, new revenue lines — without the operator having to compromise on data protection to get there.
The practical reality for operators is that they can’t keep building and securing all of this in-house at the pace it now demands. The ones that partner with a specialist who treats security as a precondition rather than a feature are the ones that stay ahead.
Looking ahead, what would show that DEFA is creating real impact for digital inclusion and consumer participation?
The honest test is participation, not access. Coverage and even account ownership are already high across much of ASEAN. The real gap is that people hold access they don’t use.
So the signals that matter are behavioral. Are prepaid and underbanked users transacting more often inside these ecosystems? Are they earning and redeeming value rather than sitting on a dormant account? Are operators generating real revenue from that activity rather than from raising prices?
And the specific DEFA marker: are people moving value across borders — sending earnings to family in another market, spending while they travel — without friction or fees?
ASEAN is betting that DEFA helps double the regional digital economy to two trillion dollars by 2030, but that number only becomes real when someone on a prepaid plan and a tight budget can feel the difference. That’s the line between financial inclusion as a statistic and financial participation as a daily reality.