OceanBase CEO: Asia’s Fintech Growth Demands a Smarter, Unified Data Foundation
As digital payments, cloud adoption and AI reshape financial services, OceanBase CEO Evan Yang says fintechs and banks need infrastructure built for scale, resilience and local market needs.
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Database infrastructure has rarely been the most visible part of Asia’s fintech boom, but it is increasingly becoming one of the most consequential.
For much of the past decade, the industry’s attention has sat mostly on the customer-facing layer, as consumers grew more comfortable managing money through digital channels and financial institutions raced to make everyday transactions feel faster and less visible.
That front-end progress is now placing heavier demands on the systems underneath it.
As digital finance becomes more deeply woven into daily life, the infrastructure behind transactions, account balances, reconciliations, fraud checks and customer activity has to do more than process data quickly.
It has to remain stable during traffic spikes, meet rising compliance expectations, control long-term costs and adapt across markets where regulation, cloud preferences and customer behaviour can vary widely.
OceanBase CEO Evan Yang sees that pressure building across Asia, particularly in Southeast Asia, where digital payments have moved from early adoption into mass usage.
Evan Yang
“Digitalisation has become fully widespread, and digital payments have become a basic necessity,” he said.
That shift is pushing banks and fintech companies to revisit infrastructure choices that once seemed sufficient.
Systems built for a slower financial environment are now being tested by higher transaction volumes, hybrid cloud strategies, stricter regulatory expectations and the growing need to make data available for real-time decision-making and AI tasks.
Evan sees the shift as a change in how financial institutions should think about their core systems.
He believes that database infrastructure is becoming part of the strategic foundation, because the same system that stores and processes data is now expected to keep pace with heavier transaction loads, recover from disruption, satisfy local regulatory demands, support expansion across markets, and seamlessly integrate with the AI era.
OceanBase’s Global Push Has Moved Closer to the Ground
As fintech companies and banks place more weight on the systems behind daily financial activity, OceanBase is exploring how it brings its database technology into international markets.
Their CEO described the company’s development as a shift from an earlier phase tied closely to Ant Group’s fintech ecosystem into a more comprehensive global strategy built around localisation.
That earlier phase gave OceanBase a route into international markets, helped it test its technology with early customers and showed how differently financial institutions operate across Southeast Asia.
Localisation has since become a more deliberate part of its international strategy.
Evan also said that global growth requires more than taking one product into every country, because each market brings different regulations, customer habits, cloud environments and partner ecosystems.
“Globalisation isn’t about offering a single set of products and services worldwide, but rather creating region-specific solutions tailored to different markets,” he pointed out.
OceanBase has anchored that approach through its international headquarters in Singapore and an international support centre in Kuala Lumpur, with local teams covering all sorts of areas.
And the set-up brings the company closer to the customers that it wants to serve, which matters in financial services because banks and payment companies assess infrastructure providers on more than just product capability.
Evan reduces those requirements to one word: trust.
That view gives OceanBase’s expansion wider relevance because financial institutions may want more advanced database infrastructure technology.
However, they might also need confidence that the systems can operate safely inside regulated and market-specific environments.
Fintechs and Banks Are Reworking the Core
The need for trust grows as Asia’s digital finance market scales, with fintech companies and banks across the region facing new infrastructure demands as digital payments become mainstream and older core systems struggle with today’s transaction volumes.
Cloud-native and hybrid deployment models are gaining ground, while cost pressure is making expensive legacy architectures harder to justify.
The strain is especially visible among e-wallets and payment companies, where rapid user growth can turn any outage or failed transaction into a customer, merchant and platform issue.
OceanBase says it now serves more than 4,000 customers worldwide across fintech, banking, manufacturing and retail.
In fintech, the company works with more than 100 clients, including over 20 e-wallets such as Malaysia’s TNG Digital, the Philippines’ GCash, Indonesia’s DANA, and Pakistan’s easypaisa and Africa’s PalmPay and OPay.
For platforms operating at that size, database performance becomes part of the financial service itself.
An e-wallet with tens of millions of users depends on infrastructure that can keep balances accurate and payments moving even during heavy demand.
OceanBase cites TNG Digital, Malaysia’s largest e-wallet, as one example.
According to the company, TNG Digital has used its database infrastructure to support zero-downtime system updates, peak transaction volumes of 40,000 transactions per second and 26 million users, covering around 85% of Malaysia’s adult population.
The company also points to PalmPay, where it said core accounting database costs fell by 86% after the African fintech integrated OceanBase, while its user base grew into the tens of millions.
Digital financial platforms need to grow without letting infrastructure costs and reliability risks rise at the same pace.
A database that works at one stage of scale can quickly become a constraint once transaction volume, customer numbers and regulatory demands increase together. It is for this reason that OceanBase is increasingly emerging as a preferred database solution.
Cloud Flexibility Is Becoming a Practical Requirement
Cloud strategy is now part of the same infrastructure question, especially as financial institutions operate across cloud platforms, private infrastructure and hybrid systems.
Compliance rules and internal risk policies often mean sensitive workloads cannot simply be moved into one environment, which makes flexibility more important.
Evan said cloud fragmentation remains one of the major challenges in international markets.
Customers across regions may use AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud or other platforms, making compatibility harder for traditional databases.
OceanBase’s response has been a multi-cloud-native architecture that supports seven major global cloud platforms across 16 countries and regions, more than 60 cloud regions and over 240 availability zones.
“This ‘develop once, deploy across multiple clouds’ capability enables customers to avoid repeatedly adapting their applications to different cloud environments,” Evan said.
Fintechs and banks can use that flexibility when entering new markets, modernising older systems or managing cross-border continuity without weakening data consistency.
The company also points to international certifications and compliance standards, including PCI DSS, AICPA SOC, ISO 27001 and ISO 27701, as well as compliance with GDPR-related requirements, which matter as financial service providers face higher expectations in regulated environments.
Evan Yang said that his company’s cloud product, OB Cloud, supports real-time synchronisation across cloud regions, with disaster recovery standards reaching an RPO of 0 and an RTO of less than 8 seconds.
Financial institutions are looking for systems that can preserve continuity when something goes wrong, rather than recover only after disruption has already caused damage.
Database Infrastructure Is Becoming a Business Decision
The same pressure is pushing database infrastructure closer to business strategy.
Evan said fintechs and banks need stronger foundations that can keep services available as usage grows, while avoiding the cost and complexity that often come with older technology stacks.
Companies are also looking for “a single technology stack” that can handle transaction processing, analytical processing and AI.
That matters because data now carries a heavier role inside financial institutions.
Core systems still have to process transactions reliably, while analytics teams need fresher information to understand how customers and risks are changing.
AI raises the stakes further because production use cases depend on governed data environments that can operate safely inside real financial workflows.
Many banks and fintech firms have tested AI for years, although fragmented data architecture still makes production deployment difficult.
Information often sits across separate systems, creating delay and duplication.
Those weaknesses become harder to ignore when institutions start using AI for fraud detection or real-time decisioning, where poor data quality can limit how far the technology can go.
Partners and Open Source Help Build Local Trust
The same logic behind localisation also shapes OceanBase’s partner strategy.
Evan said the company combines local partners with global technology, with trained service partners supporting database migration, operations and maintenance alongside a global 24/7 after-sales team.
OceanBase says it has attracted dozens of partners across Southeast Asia, Japan, and China’s Hong Kong SAR and Macao SAR, covering sales, services and solution architecture.
That local layer matters when customers are running mission-critical systems, where remote support alone may not be enough.
Open source adds another layer to that trust.
Evan said the developer community is central to OceanBase’s global strategy, with the company committed to long-term open-sourcing of its core code and providing documentation and tools that developers can use, deploy and customise.
“Companies nowadays highly value open, vendor-neutral technology architectures,” Evan said.
Financial institutions are often cautious about vendor lock-in, especially when technology sits close to core operations.
Open source gives customers more visibility and allows developers and partners to adapt tools to local needs, which supports OceanBase’s wider push to build a more grounded ecosystem across its international markets.
Asia’s Infrastructure Race Is Entering a New Phase
The first wave of digital finance growth was judged mainly by adoption, as user numbers and transaction volumes became the easiest signs of progress.
Sustaining that growth now requires stronger infrastructure, especially as financial institutions face more pressure to keep systems reliable at a greater scale.
OceanBase is positioning itself around that shift through localisation, multi-cloud flexibility, partner-led implementation and open source, while actively pioneering AI database technologies to drive the next wave of industry evolution.
Its longer-term challenge will be proving that those pieces can translate into trust across different markets.
What comes after adoption may depend less on the apps customers see, and more on the data infrastructure that keeps those services running as the market becomes larger, more regulated and more technically demanding.
Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore based on an image by Louis H. via Magnific.
