Unrealistic as it was technically, the idea of a pan-Asian currency always had some political support: Since 2005, the Japanese have published the exchange value of something called the Asian Monetary Unit, a precursor to what would one day become the region’s equivalent of the euro. The debt…

Alipay and WeChat Pay’s dominance of China’s retail payments was scripted over the past decade on the back of the humble quick recognition code. The same dotted squares could now start to undermine their moat. Fan Yifei, a deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, said at a recent forum on…

There’s a lot about Beijing’s decades-long infrastructure push and investment-led growth that India wants to emulate. But when it comes to the consumer economy, aping China’s out-of-control digital lending boom is strictly off the policy agenda. The Reserve Bank of India’s recently released…

If success has many fathers, then a crypto exchange in the eye of a money-laundering storm has become an orphan. After Indian law enforcement froze $8 million in WazirX assets, Binance Chief Executive Officer Changpeng Zhao denied owning the country’s largest crypto exchange. Binance’s November…

After five years of negotiations involving the government, tech companies and civil society activists, the world’s largest democracy is sending its debate on privacy back to the drawing board. The Indian government has junked the personal data protection bill, and decided to replace it with “a…

It was too quiet to last. A sustained and brutal destruction of capital in India’s telecom industry was only just starting to give way to a period of peace and calm. The three operators who survived out of the dozen on the scene in 2016 must have been grateful for the end to a debilitating price…

Five years ago, India’s federal and state governments struck a historic deal. From July 1, 2017, a uniform tax on goods and services — marketed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as “One Nation, One Tax, One Market” — replaced a bewildering array of local sales and entry levies. But the many…

It seems that India’s central bank is no fan of “buy now, pay later.” But then, the regulator’s irritation with this newish fad in consumer finance is wholly understandable. “Get Credit in 90 seconds. Shop at Millions of Merchants. Pay Later,” says the website of LazyPay, which claims to have 60…

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s model of welfarism isn’t new to India: Previous leaders have also subsidized food and fuel, and given the rural poor houses, toilets, and paid work. Modi’s edge comes from technology. A year before the 2014 election that brought him to power, the government, then led…

Back in February, when India was still in denial about its brewing inflation challenge, economists at Nomura Holdings Inc. summarized the choices before the monetary authority into three neat boxes. First, they said, there was a 15% probability that the central bank was right to ignore supply-side…