2023 was the year that the structural optimism about APAC digital commerce met the cyclical pessimism of a funding market correction, and the two didn't cancel out in the way some people expected. What happened instead was a compression of the less-differentiated middle — companies with adequate products and adequate growth whose fundraising momentum had been carried by market sentiment rather than genuine investor conviction. The companies that demonstrated category-defining infrastructure or proprietary data positions held their valuation and their investor interest more robustly than the macro environment would have predicted. That divergence is worth examining, because it tells you something about what actually matters in this category when the easy money isn't making the distinction for you.
In payment infrastructure, 2023 confirmed the APAC cross-border thesis in a way that was hard to argue with operationally. The corridors that matter — Australia to Southeast Asia, Singapore as a hub into the broader region, the growing direct linkage between Chinese manufacturing ecosystems and APAC-native consumer platforms — saw sustained transaction volume growth even as discretionary consumer categories softened. The reason is structural: the supply chains and distribution relationships that underpin APAC commerce don't stop operating because consumer sentiment is down. B2B cross-border payment flows are somewhat independent of the consumer cycle, and the companies building infrastructure for those flows were relatively insulated from the consumer commerce slowdown.
In logistics and fulfilment, the year was characterised by a post-COVID normalisation that hit some categories hard. The carrier overcapacity that emerged as pandemic-era e-commerce growth moderated put pressure on carrier economics and created an interesting dynamic for orchestration platforms: more carriers competing for share meant more negotiating leverage for platforms able to route volume intelligently, which improved the economics of orchestration relative to single-carrier commitments. The retailers who had built carrier-agnostic orchestration layers found themselves better positioned in 2023 than those who had locked in single-carrier agreements at rates that looked good during peak demand.
The AI personalisation and product intelligence categories had a more nuanced year. The general enthusiasm for generative AI in 2023 created a lot of noise in this segment — a wave of new entrants claiming AI-native differentiation that, on diligence, turned out to be GPT API calls wrapped in a commerce-adjacent interface. The companies that had been building proprietary training data, custom model architectures, and genuine integration depth with commerce platforms were not well-served by that noise in the short term, because the market had difficulty distinguishing them from the wrapper products. We expect that distinction to reassert itself as enterprise customers move past the enthusiasm phase and start demanding production-grade performance and measurable business outcomes.
Looking into 2024, the themes we're spending the most time on are loyalty infrastructure and the smart receipt / post-transaction data layer. Both represent categories where the underlying problem — customer retention economics, post-purchase engagement, transaction-linked data assets — has been solved conceptually but not well executed at the infrastructure level for mid-market commerce. The companies that can build clean, extensible infrastructure for loyalty and post-transaction engagement — rather than yet another loyalty points scheme or receipt digitisation app — are working on something that will be foundational for a generation of commerce platforms. That's the kind of opportunity that doesn't announce itself loudly, which is why we pay attention to it.