Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Welcome to the Daybreak Asia podcast. I'm Doug Chrisner. In the States, risk assets were sold down, with big cap tech and cryptocurrencies bearing the brunt of the selling.
Now.
That drop came after a number of Wall Street executives warned of a pullback in the equity market. At the same time, the hedge fund manager Michael Burry placed a one point one billion dollar bet against leading artificial intelligence related stocks. For more on the market action, we caught up with Anna Wou. She is cross asset investment specialist at Vanek who spoke with Bloomberg TV host April Hong and shry On and I.
Great to have you with us as we get the Asian session started. We have already seen significant pressure over in South Korea, for example, because of the Career Exchange warning about s k Heinix, because of that incredible AI rolly. Where are we in Asia when it comes to these valuations of these high flying tech stocks.
Hello from Sydney and good to see you. I think very much to your point. We had a five month rally in AI thematic in the US and cross the board, so the bar is simply just getting higher. So now a modest earning speed does not translate into price reaction anymore. To that point, the similar sentiment, I guess it's flowing into the Asia market as well. After such a rally that we have seen in South Korea, China, arguably in Japan,
I think that bar right now is getting higher as well. However, I want to bring your attention to the valuation landscape. Right even after the broader rally in Asia tech that we have seen so far, it's still valued much lower than the US tech and which makes it really a value and a growth play in the long term. And if we look at the EPs growth, it's not great, but it's improving sectors sector for the sector quarters after quarter.
So I think the long term story for this sector in Asia is still constructive.
One of all, not necessarily the direct the AI please, but the indirect ones because we know that in order to power artificial intelligence will need the energy for example. That that's a great question.
I really love that because exactly the global AI industry is maturing over the last couple of years, so it's gone from you know, this idea generation phase who has the best model really to an operational intelligence phase where we need to see actual monetization an operational AI ecosystem. And in that sense, the supplementary roles into the AI rally right now are benefiting and also positioned to benefit in the coming quarters as the margin expansion goes in.
To your point, energy play is one of the one of the pockets of opportunities that's getting a lot more attention compared to the previous quarters because AI after the record amount of AI capex energy and electricity demand in specific, it's rallying two decade high and it's positioned to go ten x in by twenty thirty. So that demand gap
needs all sorts of energy play. So you know, one of the more prominent play right now is the nuclear It gives twenty four to seven clean non emission play from that part and benefiting the uranium minus as well, and to a certain extent, the renewable other renewable energy sources companies have been growing very fast in the second
half of the year. Also look at the valuation side as well, and pointing to that growth and value play, they are very attractively valued comparing to the other pockets of AI.
With that in mind, which market do you think will lead the way for the rest of US year and into the first quarter of next year. Is it still going to be perhaps South Korea for the region, especially given how we're seeing a resurgent dollar.
Yeah, okay. I think that question really goes into two parts. I think in terms of markets that is positioned well towards the end of the year to next year, Korea is one of the more high conviction market because it's got the cleanest growth play right now and also translating into the latest earning season while it's still quite early days, but we can still see that over half of the companies are reporting surprising to the upside. Also, it's got two cleanest play in terms of growth. One is AI.
It's strategic position in the high member chip specialist role in in the global AI supply chain is giving it a long term tailwind and long term contracts as well with margin expansion possibilities. But also it has a very unique role in the global defense sector and also that has an AI play to it as well. So these two catalysts, I guess is driving the career market to
a broader growth play. Outside of that, I think China, even though right now the the rally has stoled a little bit, and I think investors are waiting for a more pronounced and substantial policy stimulus to to you know, pick on that rally again. And but also AI sector in that country can still defy gravity as the broader I guess hardware makers rally and race to to to fight for the role for China's the domestic Navidia.
That was ANAWU Cross Asset investment specialist at Vanek speaking to Bloomberg TV host April Hong and shrry On here on the Daybreak Asia podcast. Welcome back to the Daybreak Asia Podcast. I'm Doug Chrisner. Economies across Asia are being reshaped by a new reality or realities plural. We've got higher US tariffs, softer Chinese demand, and the growing impact of artificial intelligence. And in the midst of it all, money moving faster and more securely across borders. Joining me
now for a closer look is Sandeep Mahultra. He is Executive VP of Core Payments for the Asia Pacific at MasterCard. Sandeep, thank you so much for making time to chat with me lately. I think we can agree on this much. There has been a tremendous amount of focus on the use of artificial intelligence. Give me a sense right now best you can on how MasterCard is using AI, especially in the APEC region.
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me on. And you know AI is the is the tok of the town.
So if you look at MasterCard, you know our big focus used to be converting cash to digital and then over the last you know, one year or so, we are actually taking this to the next level, so taking digital to intelligent and this is where AI plays a big role, where we are looking at intelligent transactions just not digital, and we are actually changing our network to be ready for this connected commerce, which is our vision for twenty.
Thirty driven by AI. So what is AI going to do?
We want to make sure that consumers, when they do discovery of the products or search the products on an AI agent, are able to even do a purchase or that without leaving that agent. Sounds very simple, but behind the scenes, it's very complex.
Right.
What happens if you ordered green pair of socks and red rive, who takes care of that? What happens if a fraudulent transaction happens? How do you take care of that. So what we are trying to ensure is that we're trying to create a very safe, secure, and a transparent kind of an environment for these agents to perform the transaction.
I'm wondering now on the degree to which you are collaborating with other software developers over or whether this is primarily something that is proprietary to the extent that you need to employ a number of software engineers to help facilitate this goal. What's the balance between collaboration and kind of going alone in house.
It's all collaborative, it's all partnership.
It's all based on standards because you cannot anything propriety because it won't scale. And if it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter. So what we're trying to do is we're working with the fidos of the world, which is the standard community. We're working with cloud Flare and I'll tell you what that does. We're working with PayPal, We're working with many other partners to make sure that the transaction happens in a safe, secure fashion.
You know.
One example is you want to make sure that when the merchant accept a transaction, that agent is a good agent.
How do you do that?
And that's where cloud Flare club comes into picture, which basically will block unit agent which is not a good agent, and that provides, you know, comfort to the merchant who's accepting those transactions.
So in the last two week here in the States, we heard from a number of those big hyper scalers on their AI caps spend. And I'm curious about the degree to which you feel, maybe not you personally, but MasterCard as a company feels compelled to lay out vast sums of money in the capex realm in order to be ready for this kind of change that you're describing.
Look, I think the hyperskillers are doing what they are best in in terms of creating models, in terms of providing the computing data to make sure that that is done.
What we are doing is we are basically saying, if you search using that data to find an item you like, we will make sure that that transaction which is done within that AI interface, whether it's an agent, whether it's some other protocol which the consumer is using, or if the merchant has made a change, we will make that commerce become safe, secure and intelligent and give comfort to the consumer without leaving that agent, you know, domain.
San Deepe I'm curious as to whether there are certain areas of the digital payment space that you're particularly concerned about, perhaps something that you have to almost counter program again anst whether there is a level of risk for your business or the businesses of your customers. What are the areas most concerning to you?
It is it is a big concern that if you look at just Asia loan Asia lost about close to six and seventy billion dollars of money due to fraud in thus last year. So sixty percent of the banks are brightticing AI driven fraud prevention and identity verification. So that's a big focus for us. How we're going to do that is we want to make sure that the
card numbers which you have don't exist anymore. So, whether you save a card on file at Macy's dot Com, we're going to replace it with a token, whether you basically have a Apple Pay transaction that replaced by a token even today.
And then even the.
Cards which are on the physical card, the card numbers, we're going to make them numberless as well. So the big focus is make that tokenized. No more card numbers anywhere on the planet, and that's our goal for twenty thirty and we must verify the user. We will make sure that you are who you are for every transaction.
So fraud is the risk. But this tokenization and authentication, which is verifying every user for every transaction, that's the next step which we are moving towards and made a big progress around that.
So when you're in conversation with your colleagues at MasterCard, talk to me a little bit about aspirationally what the world in the future looks like when we introduce quantum computing to the payment system.
Yeah, so first, what quantum brings to the table is it brings huge amount of computing in a different fashion, it actually gets into the realm of even you know, challenging today's cryptography and encryption, which is where the trust is based on. So what we are working on is we even created a crypto resistant cryptogram, you know, which means a quantum resistant cryptrogram, which means that even a quantum computer cannot actually decrypt that cryptogram or when the
transaction happens, it actually is very safe in nature. So as the technology advances, you have to also advance in this fraud prevention area because trust is the essence. The day you break the trust of the consumer, they will never transact and then you know, we would have a tough time, you know, convincing the consumer and to do these transactions.
So quantum does make a difference.
But we're looking into ways on how do you make sure that these technologies are safe and secure?
To what extent are you using AI to actually help build these platforms, which is to say, maybe you're relying on it somewhat as a partner or a copilot or a collaborator when your programmers are setting about developing software programs.
So AI is not new for us, right, We've used AI for more than a decade. One of our three of our services, one in three of our services today leverages AI for insights and protection. And then we have secured about one hundred and sixty billion transactions annually. And then we have prevented over twenty billions of fraud every year using AI. Now what's next is the next is around this agent pay agent commerce. How do you make
sure that agent is a good agent? How do you make sure that the user is present or not present when they do the AI transaction? Because you can have an autonomous transaction where the AI agent wakes up and buys a ticket for you when the ticket price is less than three hundred dollars. And the third thing is the merchant may not be technologically sophisticated or not. How do you make sure that this technologically unsophisticated merchant is also part of this AI era. So that's what we
are working on. Prevent fraud, verify the consumer, make sure the agent is good and it actually goes down to a consumer who may not be AI sophisticated or a merchant who may not be technologically sophisticated. That's what we're working on by making one network do a lot of heavy lifting and making more intelligent and more interoperable.
Sandy, before I let you go, describe for me the current market dynamics in the APEC and your understanding about the growth outlook for consumers and businesses in the region. Is there a degree of optimism here or given some of the volatility that we have seen not only in markets but economies as well, are you a little maybe cautious?
I believe that Asia is leading in payments. It's not the adopter of payment technology, it's the originator of that. I personally see that the payment innovation is traveling from east to west, where the other innovation might be traveling from west to east. So I'm very optimistic. Seventy percent of the real time payment transactions happening in Asia, and there are wallets in China, there Alipay, v chat pay, you have g cash and Philippine means they are just
buzzing driving electronic and digital transactions. What we're doing is we are trying to create interoperability with these other ecosystems, so which means you could be a consumer from the US traveling to China. You can download an Alipay app, you can put your card in there, and you can transact wherever Alipay is accepted with no changes to the merchant. That's just brilliant. This is where you brought in a card ecosystem and a quality ecosystem talk to each other. That's,
in simple words, in properability. And wouldn't be cool that somebody from Philippines using a g cash app goes to the US, taps on a terminal and New York City in New York City transit and that works with no changes. I think that's introberability which we are seeing, and that's where I'm very happy about you know, Asia is leading the edge in this digital payments which is safe and secure.
So does it make sense to continue to cooperate with these competing platforms or maybe at some point to become acquisitive.
Absolutely, I mean the whole idea is to partner because we will never win the game alone. We have to go together. So the wallets bring in the consumers. They bring in an amazing consumer experience. We bring in acceptance, which is one hundred and fifty plus million locations around the world. We'll bring in trust, we bring in you know, dispute resolution and things go wrong. So the whole idea is to partner and basically leverage the strengths of what
each of these entities bring together. And that's how we have grown over the last sixty years plus.
So you wouldn't buy a platform outright, I.
Mean built by partners. Our strategy so where it makes sense we would build, whether we buy or whether we partner. Partnership seems to be one of the best strategies so far, so that's what we focus on. But when it makes sense, we have bought companies, We've bought Recorded Future, you know, which tracks fraud around the globe. We've done a corporative exercise with Corpe which.
Actually drives forth business to business payments.
So we look at well where it makes sense to build by a partner and be adop that strategy.
Sandai believe it there. Thank you so much for making time to chat with me. Sandeep Maholtra. He is Executive VP of Core Payments for the Apac Region at MasterCard. Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Bloomberg Daybreak Asia Edition podcast. Each weekday, we look at the story shaping markets, finance, and geopolitics in the Asia Pacific. You can find us on Apple, Spotify, the Bloomberg Podcast YouTube channel,
or anywhere else you listen. Join us again tomorrow for insight on the market moves from Hong Kong to Singapore and Australia. I'm Doug Chrisner, and this is Bloomberg