Finternet 2025 Drives Asia, Gulf Digital Finance Growth

Finternet 2025 and Hong Kong’s 10th FinTech Week are highlighting growing digital-finance momentum across Asia and the Gulf, with organizers and attendees pushing global regulatory coordination for digital assets, Web3, AI and tokenization. Hong Kong’s FinTech Week drew more than 20,000 attendees and about 600 exhibitors, underscoring the scale of industry engagement. In the Gulf, Ooredoo Kuwait announced a strategic partnership with NVIDIA to build Kuwait’s first sovereign AI data center offering local GPU services, AI-driven operational improvements, and university curricula to grow talent. Malaysia’s payments market is projected to reach MYR 422.4 billion (~$92.6bn) in 2025, increasing pressure on banks to modernize or lose ground to fintech challengers amid uneven cash-to-digital adoption. New DeFi initiatives such as MetaLend’s fintech abstraction layer — which would auto-allocate and rebalance deposits across multi-chain lending protocols and add an auto-collect reinvest feature — aim to simplify yield access, even as capital markets show volatility (South Africa’s JSE remains thin on growth stocks, with WeBuyCars recently down about 16.7% while Optasia’s IPO drew strong interest).