SINGAPORE — Asian banking is on the cusp of a WhatsApp moment.Remember paying an arm and a leg for text messages? Now all the telcos in the world combined can’t match WhatsApp’s 30 billion pings a day. Financial transactions will go the same way, and Asia may lead the trend, rather than following it a decade later.People without bank accounts, worldwide: 2-billionFor the WhatsApp analogy, a hat tip to Nandan Nilekani, a successful Indian technology entrepreneur who later helped New Delhi set up online biometric IDs for 1 billion people. Nilekani is perhaps best known for giving the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman the idea that the world was flat.On banking, Nilekani is really on to something.Banks in the Asia-Pacific region, responsible for 46% of the global industry’s $1-trillion in profit last year, should brace themselves for a storm, says McKinsey.About $400bn of their revenue will be at risk by 2025, the consulting firm estimates. A small part of that may be from the d...
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