In May 2026, the field of cross-border payment will make waves again.
PingPong has officially reached a strategic cooperation with Kasikornbank (KBank), one of the four major commercial banks in Thailand. The two parties have achieved two-way empowerment through API direct connection.
This action was interpreted by the industry as: PingPong is leveraging the Southeast Asian market with a lightweight cooperation model, integrating its global payment network and KBank’s local infrastructure, and quickly penetrating the local B2B trade scene.
Southeast Asia has always been a battleground for cross-border payment players.
According to a report jointly released by Google, Temasek and Bain, the GMV of Southeast Asia’s digital economy has exceeded US$300 billion in 2025, of which B2B cross-border payments account for a considerable proportion.
As the second largest economy in ASEAN, Thailand is the gateway connecting the six countries of Indochina, and its B2B trade flow is huge.
PingPong chose KBank with clear logic.
KBank is the bank with the largest number of mobile banking users in Thailand and has a strong local merchant base. Under the API direct connection mode, PingPong’s global merchant network can directly reach KBank’s corporate customers; two-way empowerment means: Chinese companies can use PingPong to collect and pay overseas in Thailand, and Thai companies can also get a smoother payment experience when entering the Chinese and global markets.
PingPong’s cooperation reflects a significant trend in the cross-border payment industry: from ‘working alone’ to ‘deep localization cooperation’.
In the past, the expansion path of cross-border payment companies was often: obtaining a license, building a team, and expanding merchants.
But this method is heavy, slow and expensive.
The API direct connection model allows payment companies to quickly call on the merchant resources and compliance infrastructure of local banks to achieve light assets and rapid penetration.
The results of this strategy are already showing.
According to public data, PingPong’s transaction size in Southeast Asia has increased by more than 60% in the past 12 months, with B2B business being the main growth engine.
For cross-border e-commerce and SaaS overseas companies, the cooperation between PingPong and KBank brings direct value.
Local collection accounts in Thailand are easier to obtain: through PingPong, companies can quickly generate local collection accounts in the KBank system, reducing capital withdrawal costs; exchange rates and rates are better: API direct connection reduces intermediate links, and the cost advantage can be passed on to merchants; settlement timeliness is improved: the combination of local clearing network + cross-border payment network makes T+0 payment possible.
However, ‘more access’ does not mean ‘good management’.
When enterprises connect to multiple payment service providers (PSPs) such as PingPong, Lianlian, and Airwallex at the same time, new pain points emerge.
In terms of technical burden, each PSP has its own API interface, data format, and reconciliation logic. The more connections there are, the higher the development cost. In terms of risk control fragmentation, transactions are scattered among different PSPs, and risk data cannot be uniformly monitored, which easily creates blind spots. In terms of routing decisions, which PSP has a high authorization rate, which one has low costs, and which one has more advantages in a specific market – there is a lack of a unified decision-making center.
This is an overlooked link in the current cross-border payment ecosystem.
While PingPong, Lianlian, and Airwallex help merchants ‘connect’, NexusOrch helps merchants ‘manage’ them.
As a new generation payment orchestration and risk control system, NexusOrch allows enterprises to easily connect multiple PSPs around the world and 1,000+ payment methods in more than 100 countries through a single API access, shortening the development cycle by 90% and reducing operating costs by 50%.
Its core capabilities include an intelligent dynamic routing engine, which analyzes the authorization rate, cost, and success rate of each PSP in real time, and automatically selects the optimal channel for each transaction.
Data shows that NexusOrch can help merchants increase authorization rates by more than 8%; it has a full-link risk control engine that synchronizes risk and payment transactions in real time within seconds, and the response time is less than 50 milliseconds.
No matter which channel the transaction takes, risk control rules are uniformly implemented without leaving any dead ends; dispute management is unified and directly connected to the card issuing bank and dispute resolution networks such as Ethoca and Verifi. Regardless of which PSP the transaction comes from, dispute cases are handled uniformly, significantly reducing the chargeback rate.
It has a wide range of applicable scenarios. In the field of cross-border e-commerce, multiple PSPs run in parallel, automatically selecting the optimal exchange rate and channel, and reducing exchange losses; in the field of digital services/SaaS, intelligent retry and downgrade in global subscription scenarios improve the renewal rate; in the field of overseas gaming, the payment method covers a wide range to maximize user payment conversion.
