Digital expense-management adoption among mid-sized and large corporates in Southeast Asia remains surprisingly low, even as the region's digital payments infrastructure has matured rapidly. A leading global payments network engaged KoreFusion to understand why, and to identify exactly where and how to position its commercial expense-management platform to close that gap.

The Challenge

Across Southeast Asia, mid-market and large corporates have been slow to adopt digital expense management solutions (EMS), continuing to rely on manual, paper-based, and reconciliation-heavy processes for employee expenses and procurement, despite the clear efficiency and control benefits that digital platforms offer. For the payments network, the question was not whether EMS adoption made sense in the abstract, but which specific corporate segments and markets represented the clearest opportunity, and what value proposition would actually move a finance team from manual processes (or a competing platform) to its own solution. Answering that required more than intuition: it required a data-driven view of where payment volumes and card usage were concentrated, paired with a ground-truth understanding of how corporates that had already adopted an EMS were experiencing its benefits.

The Approach

KoreFusion combined the network's own transaction data with an extensive primary research program across five Southeast Asian markets. In each market, KoreFusion analyzed payment volume, card usage, and transaction data to identify the two to three corporate industry archetypes with the greatest opportunity for EMS adoption, then conducted in-depth interviews and quantitative surveys with mid-market and large corporates in those archetypes, including current platform users, alongside conversations with competing regional and global expense-management providers. For each archetype, KoreFusion quantified the specific efficiency, fraud-reduction, and cost benefits that EMS adoption delivers, and benchmarked the competitive landscape shaping each market.

The Outcome

The research quantified a compelling return on investment for EMS adoption, ranging from roughly 14x to 27x the annual subscription cost across archetypes and markets, driven primarily by employee efficiency gains and finance-team time savings, alongside measurable reductions in fraudulent transactions. The findings gave the payments network's commercial teams an archetype-specific, data-backed value proposition and a go-to-market roadmap to accelerate platform adoption among the corporate segments with the greatest opportunity in each market.