via Trade Finance Global by Vanessa Manning and Mahika Ravi Shankar
- Long-term innovation involves identifying emerging growth trends early, particularly in regions like South-East Asia.
- Banks must adopt customer-led, incremental innovation to meet increasing demands for speed, efficiency, and real-time capabilities.
- The principle of kaizen, or continuous improvement, underpins modern banking strategy, emphasising gradual refinement, transparency, and close alignment with client needs in Japanese banking.
What does it mean for innovation to be long-term? It requires seeing growth corridors and rises in wealth before they have fully been realised. But this far-sightedness is not prophesying – it’s merely knowing where to look.
Just 10 to 15 years ago, the prominence of an affluent middle class – a modern bourgeoisie – was not a feature often attributed to emerging markets in South-East Asia. But the telltale signs were there. Intra-regional trade in Asia stood at 54% of the value of Asia’s total trade in 2000, a figure which increased to 57% in 2022. For most other regions, intra-regional trade decreased.
Intra-Asian trade needs to be financed. Multinational banks must be positioned within regional financial architecture, building local partnerships to capture future flows rather than react to them. Over a decade ago, Japanese bank MUFG formed partnerships with Bank Danamon in Indonesia, Bank of Ayudhya (or Krungsri) in Thailand, Delta in Vietnam, and Security Bank in the Philippines.
Now, the region is “young, mobile, and cross-border oriented,” according to Vanessa Manning, EMEA Head of Transaction Banking at MUFG. Speaking to Trade Finance Global (TFG) at the 2026 BAFT Europe Forum, Manning elaborated on the relationship which Japanese banks tend to form with clients and banking partners alike to make money flow, and how they navigate trends facing the industry. The key takeaway is that this navigation must happen in sync with clients.