In the Asia-Pacific region improvements in infrastructure, bank and payment services just keep on coming. Three latest examples are:

• the Indian government implementation of an e-payment gateway and the Ministry of Finance passing a regulation mandating that all governmental ministries to make payments above INR25,000 (USD485) electronically, replacing cash and cheques with transfers direct to recipients' bank accounts (April 2012)
• HSBC became the first foreign bank in India to offer P2M (Person2Merchant) services on the National Payments Corporation of India Interbank Mobile Payment Service, which was launched in 2010, providing finance firms with the option to let customers use phones to access accounts and carry out fund transfers (May 2012)
• Deutsche Bank has launched its cross-currency payments solution FX4Cash in Malaysia and Thailand, making it available for the first time to corporate clients in these two markets (May 2012).

Cash and treasury management in Asia-Pacific is becoming much more automated, how long will it be before it is as easy as in Europe? Answer: a long time.