20 Years of Lessons from DeeMoney's CEO Technology Moves Information, but Trust Is What Moves Money

Informal money transfer networks such as Hundi and Hawala still move roughly $300 billion a year, even though the system is more than 500 years old, has no app, no blockchain, and no technology holding it up at all. The question of how something that old still stands in a world equipped with AI, cryptocurrency, and digital payment rails is exactly the line Aswin Phlaphongphanich, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of DeeMoney, used to open his own session, with a footnote attached from the very start: as a fintech founder, he does not endorse anyone using this network, because it is illegal in most countries.

In his session, titled 'Unspoken Facts of Global Payments: How Fintechs Changed the Banking Game' at Techsauce Global Summit 2026, Aswin  spoke about the things people inside the payments industry know but rarely say out loud. They all point back to a single conclusion that took roughly 20 years to crystallise, which is that technology does an excellent job of moving information, but what actually moves money is trust. Each fact that follows comes from a different corner of the business, from liquidity and regulation to customer behaviour, and each one arrives at that conclusion from a new direction.

The 500-Year-Old Network No Technology Has Managed to Bring Down

What Hawala and Hundi have done better than banks, fintechs, and crypto founders over the past hundred years is understand from the outset that the real currency of moving money is not technology, but the trust between the people at either end.

Aswin admits this was not something he could see at the beginning. When DeeMoney started around 10 years ago, the thinking was to build the best app with the smoothest Know Your Customer (KYC) journey, on the assumption that customers would choose the service because of the technology. The truth he found later was the opposite.

There Is No Global Money Transfer Network, Only Local Networks Woven Together

The first misconception is about the role of technology. The next one is about the network itself, because most people believe there is one beautiful global money transfer system out there moving funds on their behalf. That system does not exist.

What does exist is a set of local payment networks, one country at a time, woven together until they can carry money across borders. Every local regulation and every local payment channel has been stitched in line by line. Even the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), which many take to be a global transfer network, is in reality only a messaging platform between financial institutions. Funds still have to be converted into local currency and travel through the destination country's own rails before the recipient on the other side of the world actually receives anything.

A Payments Company Is Really a Treasury and Liquidity Company

When the network in use is a weave of local systems, what gets money to its destination within minutes is not the speed of the code. Aswin says that when DeeMoney was founded, the team thought it was building a really cool payments company. What it turned out to be building was a treasury and liquidity company, because without treasury and liquidity management running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, technology means almost nothing in this industry.

The example he gave was sending money from Bangkok to the United Kingdom at three in the morning on a Saturday and expecting it to arrive at five minutes past three. What makes that possible is not technology, but someone in the treasury team pre-funding the money on Wednesday and converting it into pounds sterling on Friday, ready for a customer who turns up in the small hours of Saturday. All of it is a great deal of orchestration that has to land in perfect harmony every single time.

Moving Money Is Easy, Moving It Legally Across Borders Is the Real Work

Liquidity is only one side of the job. The heavier side is the legal framework. Aswin sums it up briefly: moving money is easy, but moving money legally across borders is extremely hard.

Cryptocurrency is the clearest example of the point. The technology can update a ledger from one side to the other in milliseconds, but the genuinely hard part is making that process compliant across multiple corridors and multiple regulators at the same time, which is why most people are still not using cryptocurrency to send money abroad in daily life.

The Winning Formula Is Multiplication, Not Addition

The question that follows is who wins this game, fintechs, banks, or both working together. The answer Aswin offers has nothing to do with the type of player, and everything to do with four components that all have to be in place: technology, compliance, liquidity, and trust.

The reason he describes it as multiplication rather than addition is that if any one of the four is zero, the entire result becomes zero immediately. All four have to work in harmony before a network can earn a customer's trust and genuinely move money.

Why Money Cannot Travel the Way a Chat Message Does

The question Aswin says he is asked most often is this: if sending a message from Bangkok to New York through a chat app takes a few seconds, why can money not travel the same way?

What most people see is the tip of the iceberg, which holds only the fee and the foreign exchange rate, after which the money is supposed to arrive. What sits below the waterline is the complexity that has to be orchestrated every day, from speed, liquidity, and pre-funding to compliance, reconciliation, handling failed payments, managing refunds, and running a customer support team seven days a week. All of it works behind the scenes so that the journey of money from one point to another looks as simple as possible to the user.

The Four Fabrics of Trust DeeMoney Has Woven Together

None of that complexity below the waterline means anything unless it ends in trust. Aswin explains that DeeMoney has woven four fabrics of trust together. The first and most important is the trust of customers. The second is the trust of the regulator, which granted the licence to perform this job on behalf of consumers. The remaining two are the banks and the fintech partners, more than 70 of them across the network, because no fintech moves money legally across borders on its own.

Seeing the business this way also changed how the business is defined. At the start, the team thought it was running a remittance company, but it learned quickly that remittance is only one product running on the highway the company had built, or what Aswin calls a trusted financial bridge between Thailand and the world. Today DeeMoney processes more than 7 million transactions worth over $5 billion a year, and Aswin states that it is the largest cross-border payments fintech in Thailand. Cross-border payments already run on this highway, while collections and stablecoins are the products lined up next.

Banks Are Built for Stability, Customers Want Freedom

When trust has to come from all four fabrics at once, the difficulty lies in the fact that each side wants something different. Aswin is emphatic that banks do their own job very well as custodians of customer funds, holding them with care, keeping them away from risk, and protecting them from fraud. From the customer's side, however, what people want is freedom and authority over their own money, and that balance is hard to strike.

The main reason is that the banking system was built over roughly a hundred years to deliver trust, stability, control, and compliance, while customer behaviour has changed drastically over the past 15 years. People who book a ride through an app and get a car within seconds, or buy something online and receive it almost immediately, expect the same of their money. Yet most bank treasuries still do not operate on US holidays and stop accepting transactions after half past three on a Friday afternoon, while customers expect money to move around the clock. The task for fintechs is to deliver both sides at once, every time.

Customers Do Not Pay to Move Money, They Pay to Remove Uncertainty

Once customer expectations shift that far, what customers are actually buying shifts with them. Aswin recalls that the team used to believe customers chose the service for a good exchange rate, for the flat 125 baht fee to send money anywhere in the world, or for speed measured in seconds. What they found instead is that customers do not pay to move money, they pay to make uncertainty go away.

Uncertainty here goes by another name, which is friction along the entire path from hitting send to the money being received. What customers want is the certainty that funds arrive every single time, without having to call a service centre to ask where the money currently is. The hard part of the job, then, is attaching that certainty to every transaction.

A Future Where Payments Disappear from View, and Customers May Not Be Human

Another question Aswin says he is asked just as often is what the future of cross-border transfers looks like now that AI, blockchain, and a long list of other technologies are all in hand. For about five years his answer was that the cost would fall to zero and everyone would move money for free. He no longer sees it that way.

What he expects instead is that the payment experience itself will gradually disappear from view, embedded into the customer journey of whatever app or platform the user already has open. Payments stop being a separate website or app and become part of the experience the user is already in, and eventually AI or a machine may carry out the transaction without the person having to think about it at all.

The picture that follows is that customers in the future may no longer be human, but a billion AI agents acting on behalf of users on the platform. Aswin admits nobody knows exactly what that will look like, but what keeps him up at night is that for the past hundred years the industry has learned only how to win human trust, while the next 10 years may be about trusting machines instead.

Stablecoins and Deposit Tokens, the Big Cost Every Fintech Is Waiting to Shed

The question and answer session after the talk circled back to the cost that sits at the heart of the business. Aswin says the single largest cost in this business is liquidity and pre-funding, and that it is truer for fintechs than for other players, because a fintech has no bank deposits and has to run entirely on its own working capital and balance sheet.

For that reason, deposit tokens and stablecoins are a game-changing moment for every fintech, if they can genuinely take pre-funding out of money movement. Aswin assesses that it is still very early in Thailand, and if he had to guess, it could be roughly 12 to 18 months before this class of technology becomes part of money transfers, while several parts of the world are already live with it, which gives Thailand something to learn from.

As for the question of machines using financial services in place of humans, Aswin answered plainly that he does not have a precise answer. The only thing he can say is that until now the industry has built technology for humans to use. The moment AI starts taking responsibility for and authorising payments on behalf of the account holder, the element of trust that anchors this entire talk changes completely, because where a person used to decide how to send money from Thailand to the United Kingdom, an AI agent may soon be the one authorising and authenticating that transfer instead.

The question left hanging since the start of the session, of why no technology has brought down a 500-year-old network, therefore has its answer in the same line Aswin closed with, that technology does a great job of moving information, but trust is what moves money. And if the future in which financial customers are not human does arrive, the industry's next task will not be shaving a few more seconds off the journey, but working out how trust gets handed from humans to machines.

Source: 'Unspoken Facts of Global Payments: How Fintechs Changed the Banking Game' session at Techsauce Global Summit 2026