Bernard Leong
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bernardleong.com
Bernard Leong
@bernardleong.com
54 followers 11 following 320 posts
CEO and co-founder Dorje AI; Host of Analyse Asia & Augment AI Podcast, Adjunct Associate Professor, NUS Business School & NUS-ISS. Member @NetworkXA Past: AWS & Airbus; Alumni: NUS, Cambridge University & Singularity University, Opinions my own.
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🎧 Listen to the full episode: “Mastercard and the Future of Money: Crypto, AI Agents & Digital Payments with Ling Hai”

YouTube: youtu.be/WHuHl9vIBVY
Mastercard and The Future of Money: Crypto, AI Agents & Digital Payments with Ling Hai
YouTube video by Analyse Asia
youtu.be
Indeed, having Ling Hai for episode 499, the penultimate episode before the 500th episode is the best way for me to make the next big step for Analyse Asia moving towards the future.
This conversation left me reflecting:
👉 The next era of payments won’t be about cards or crypto — it will be about trusted networks that can scale trust itself.
3️⃣ Agentic AI is rewriting the rules of commerce. When AI agents begin transacting autonomously, we’ll need new guardrails: authentication, tokenization, and chargeback protocols for machine-to-machine trust.
2️⃣ Stablecoins are the bridge, not the revolution. Ling Hai’s perspective reframes stablecoins as another settlement currency — enabling cross-border commerce without displacing traditional finance.
Three key takeaways from our conversation:
1️⃣ Trust is the new currency. In the age of data and AI, Mastercard’s biggest asset isn’t its network — it’s the trust that underpins every transaction. Lose that, and you lose everything.
In a world where payments evolve from physical to digital and soon to agentic, Mastercard’s core doesn’t change — security, integrity, and reliability remain the foundation.
When I sat down with Ling Hai, President of Asia-Pacific, Europe, Middle East & Africa at @Mastercard, one truth stood out clearly: Mastercard is not a card company — it’s a technology company built on trust.
Christmas is coming and just one night in #Shinjuku #Tokyo #japan
RIP CN Yang for your work on Yang Mills theory which sparked our understanding of the fundamental physics www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/s... #Physics
Chen Ning Yang, Nobel-Winning Physicist, Is Dead at 103
www.nytimes.com
The first Japanese female influencer: Murasaki Shikibu statue who wrote the Tale of the Genji in #uji, #kyoto #japantrip2025🇯🇵🌸⛩️. Uji is the land of matcha.
The Phoenix Hall in the Byodoin in #uji #kyoto #japantravel #japan - the building is on the 10 yen coin too!
Back at Walden Woods cafe in #Kyoto, one of the most zen cafe that I have been to. #Japan
Suntory beer has released their non-alcoholic beer to the market. The Japanese brewery is disrupting themselves instead of letting someone else do it. Trying it in #kyoto #japan
Walking in the Nishiki market in #kyoto #japan and trying out fresh oysters
Reposted by Bernard Leong
🌏 Can you build a global company without a physical HQ? The short answer: yes — if you rethink what leadership, culture, and operations really mean. youtu.be/Al0Ii_Or-1w
How to Scale Global Teams Without an Office through Esevel with Deng Yuying
YouTube video by Analyse Asia
youtu.be
If your team still spends more time editing AI drafts than ideating new value — you haven’t optimized AI, you’ve institutionalized workslop.
We tend to frame AI issues as “my draft was bad” or “it hallucinated,” but the deeper danger is systemic diffusion of low-signal content that drags everyone’s baseline upward to compensate.
When poorly generated AI content travels across teams or “downstream,” the cost shifts: recipients absorb the cleanup, reinterpretation, and rework. In effect, workslop is a tax on your colleagues’ focus and cognitive bandwidth.
Interesting Data Points (Refs: Workplace Insight, Axios, Slashdot and etc):
1/ ~40% of employees report having received workslop in the past month.
2/ Recipients spend on average ~1 hour 56 minutes to fix each instance.
3/ It damages trust: many rate senders as less creative, capable or reliable.