Neeraj Agarwal

No wonder Asian businesses strive to be more innovative.

Asia, of course, is incredibly diverse.

I would argue the same diversity makes this change even more profound and prolific.

I started by talking about pop culture.

But Asia's cultural and intellectual influence extends to ideas and business innovation.

For long, we've created Asian workers with outsourcing and factories.

Today, however, many Asians are intellectual leaders.

They're bypassing jobs with Western multinationals to start new ventures.

That's a big shift.

Many kids who come to the West to study are keen to go back because they spot opportunities in their own countries.

And this is disrupting industries.

Take fintech.

Twenty years ago, fintech was almost entirely a North American play, hardly visible in Asia.

And living in India, it used to seem like a travesty to me.

Why?

Because back then, only a third of the Indians had bank accounts.

And many others used to pay outrageous sums of money to moneylenders to live a basic life.

It changed with the mass adoption of cell phones.

Today, India's payment system, UPI, does about a trillion dollar-plus of transactions.

When I go to a local street-side vegetable vendor, he says, Saab, UPI kardo.