Many Filipinos switched to digital channels during lockdown. Bankers think customers are unlikely to return to branches now that they have had a taste of what it is like to go cashless. That would be good for banks – and for financial inclusion.

There’s a team made up of staff from Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and the department of finance who call themselves ‘the Road to A’. They are tasked with completing a long journey for the sovereign credit rating: from BB- as recently as 2009, through BBB+ today, to achieving an A rating.

The country’s economy has not been this hard hit since the Asian financial crisis. Political instability, global tensions and weak productivity mean the recovery is going to be slow – and painful.

Erick Thohir once owned the Italian football team InterMilan. Now Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo has handed him one of the country’s toughest jobs: reforming creaking state-owned enterprises. If he succeeds, he could even get a shot at the presidency.

The country’s banks have made impressive efforts to raise their digital game. But with the economy in trouble, bankers and regulators face some tough choices.

It has been a pattern in Indonesia for the best part of 15 years: whenever southeast Asia’s largest economy is engulfed in crisis, it turns to Indonesia's minister of finance – but she has never faced a challenge like this.

Cash is still king in Myanmar; banks are still trying to figure out what to do with the power of technology.

President Joko Widodo is planning southeast Asia’s biggest infrastructure project in building his new capital city in remote Kalimantan; it promises to be a party for bankers – but first they will have to negotiate some quirky local characters.

Sean Turnell, adviser to Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi, discusses the liberalization, international opening and digitalization of the country’s banking sector.