A hair salon in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia books out its 6pm slot. For the first time this week, the customer pays through DuitNow Pay instead of hunting for a card machine or asking which wallet the shop takes. That's not a hypothetical — the integration went live today, and it's the small merchants juggling five different wallet apps who'll feel it first. Three vendors made a real move worth tracking this cycle: Curlec on payments plumbing, PayMongo on a new card product, Airwallex on a fundraise plus a product update. Every date and figure below is checked against a primary source, confirmed between June 8 and August 26, 2026 — nothing here runs on the strength of a press release alone.
Curlec (Razorpay)
- 2026-08-26: Curlec by Razorpay went live with DuitNow Pay, a single API that lets Malaysian merchants present participating banks and e-wallets through one checkout entry point. Curlec is among the first PayNet participants to offer DuitNow Pay to businesses. Worth noting: this is table stakes now, not a differentiator — expect every Malaysian gateway to ship the same button within a year. Sources: TechNode Global, RinggitPlus.
- At checkout, the customer picks a participating bank or e-wallet, authenticates inside that institution's own app, and lands back on the merchant page once payment clears.
- Saved payments and recurring billing — subscriptions, instalments, scheduled billing — aren't live at launch. Curlec says those arrive as PayNet enables them, which in practice could mean months.
- No pricing change here. Curlec's Basic, Premium, and Enterprise (MYR 1 million+/month volume) tiers are unchanged. For a merchant who's been eating card-network interchange on every sale, a bank-and-e-wallet checkout button isn't thrilling news, but it is money staying in the till.
PayMongo
- 2026-06-08: PayMongo, Paymentology, and Mastercard launched a Virtual Prepaid Business Payment Card for small businesses in the Philippines. It's PayMongo's first virtual card product, and the first in the Philippine market to pair prepaid functionality with business-grade spend controls. Sources: BusinessWorld, The Fintech Times, Paymentology Newsroom.
- No bank account required. An SME onboards through PayMongo, funds the card from its existing PayMongo wallet, and can have a card issued in under five minutes — no branch visit needed. That five-minute figure matters more than it sounds: a Manila retailer who needs to pay a supplier on a Sunday has never had that option from a bank branch.
- Paymentology and Mastercard supply the card-processing rails, so PayMongo can issue pre-funded cards without holding a banking licence of its own. That's the quiet, unglamorous part that actually makes this work.
- Fraud controls and transaction monitoring run on Paymentology's licensed infrastructure, plus Mastercard and APATA compliance standards.
- Unrelated to the card launch: PayMongo's Protect fraud-screening add-on is unchanged this cycle — PHP 120,000 a month platform fee, plus PHP 2.90 down to PHP 2.45 per screened transaction, tiered by volume. Source: PayMongo Protect.
Airwallex
- 2026-06-25: Airwallex closed a $320 million Series H, led by returning investor Addition, with Baillie Gifford, Hummingbird, QED Investors, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia, Haun Ventures, and Amex Ventures also in. Valuation: $11 billion, up from $8 billion in December 2025 — a jump worth sitting with, given how flat most fintech valuations have been this year. Sources: BusinessWire, CNBC, TechNode Global.
- 2026-08-20: In a Fortune interview, president Lucy Liu described T:0, Airwallex's automated bookkeeping product, as running a company's finance department with a human still watching. It's in private beta; no general-availability date yet. Every fintech is racing to automate the finance function right now, and Airwallex is one of the few with the payments data to actually pull it off. Source: Fortune.
- Scale from that same interview: 675,000+ businesses served, $1 billion+ in annualised run-rate revenue, EBITDA positive. Airwallex is aiming for IPO readiness by year-end 2026, though Liu called it "not the best time" to actually go public — a fair read of the market, frankly.
- No pricing change confirmed for the existing multi-currency account, FX, or payment-processing products this cycle.
Notes on scope
We also checked Duitku, Midtrans, KiotViet, Loyverse, Ninja Van, Wallex, Volopay, Finmo, and iPay88 this cycle, most of them serving Indonesia and Vietnam. A tracker that only reports the vendors with news isn't actually tracking anything. None had a dated pricing, feature, or partnership change confirmed inside the last 30-60 days as of 2026-08-26. Midtrans comes closest — Payment Link QR-sharing and Promo Management voucher-code releases — but both are attributed only to "July 2026" or "August 2026" in available coverage, with no verifiable exact date. We excluded it rather than guess, and we'd rather publish nine "no change" lines than one wrong date.
Two more fell outside the window on timing alone, not relevance: Finmo's Gotrade partnership (2026-06-02), Airwallex's own Malaysia e-money/Class A BNM approval (2026-04-01), and its Indonesian PJP acquisition (2025-12-12). All three pre-date the 30-60 day cutoff. They're logged here only for cross-reference against later editions.
Nine vendors checked, three made the cut — that ratio is normal for this beat, not a sign we're scraping the barrel. If Curlec's DuitNow Pay integration adds saved-payment or recurring-billing support, or T:0 exits private beta, those are the follow-ups worth tracking next edition.