Australian businesses have long looked to Southeast Asia, India, and the broader Indo-Pacific as the defining growth story of the coming decades.

The macroeconomic case is well established: proximity, expanding middle classes, and deepening trade ties. But the digital dimension of that story is only now coming into sharp focus — and it is developing faster, and differently, than most strategic frameworks anticipated.

For the 2026 edition of Beyond Borders, our annual study on digital commerce in emerging markets, we partnered with World Data Lab (WDL) to map where digital consumer spending is accelerating, who those consumers are, and what merchants need to do to actually reach them.

For Australian businesses, including those in SaaS, e-commerce, streaming, gaming, and online education, the data is hard to ignore.

The first thing the data overturns is the assumption that digital commerce maturity correlates with economic development.

It does not. In fact, e-commerce captures a larger share of household spending in India (22%), Indonesia (19.8%), and Brazil (11.5%) than in the United States (9.8%), Germany (6.4%), or France (6.9%).

South Korea sits second globally at 23.5% — ahead of every Western market — and China leads the world at 63.4%.

Australia’s nearest neighbors, including Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, are allocating shares of household spending to digital channels that would surprise any strategist working from legacy assumptions about “emerging market readiness.”

The trajectory points firmly upward. In Southeast Asia, the Philippines stands out as one of the region’s fastest-rising digital economies.

According to EBANX and WDL, the share of consumer spending happening online in the country is projected to grow from 5.7% today to 9.6% by 2035, reflecting the rapid normalization of digital payments and e-commerce among its mobile-first population. 

For Australian merchants operating in saturated domestic markets, these numbers describe something genuinely rare: a structural growth differential, right on the doorstep.

WDL projects that over one billion people in emerging markets will join the consumer class by 2036 — a 32% expansion of the global consumer base, against growth of just 3% in developed economies over the same period.

Consumer spending in Southeast Asia and India alone is projected to grow 147% over the decade. These numbers reflect demographic structures already in place: younger populations, rising mobile penetration, and income growth among cohorts who went straight to smartphones before they ever held a credit card.

There is a common mistake in how Australian businesses think about emerging market consumers: assuming that digital commerce is a premium activity concentrated among the wealthy, as it often is in developed markets.

In the US, for instance, 84% of online spending is concentrated among higher-spending consumers.

“The consumer driving digital commerce in Southeast Asia is not who most Western businesses imagine. says,” Sean Yu, VP of Commercial APAC at EBANX

“In Vietnam, 86% of online spending comes from the middle-spending brackets. In India, that segment represents nearly 700 million people,” he said.

In markets where the middle-spending groups set the pace of the economy, a payment strategy centered solely on international credit cards structurally excludes the majority of consumers, not because they lack purchasing power, but because they lack access to the payment methods accepted.

The payment share of credit and debit cards in the Philippines is 24%, while digital wallets have a 40% share. The consumers are there. The standard checkout flow simply does not reach them.

Young consumers are choosing their brands right now

Across Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, digital commerce is being driven by a demographic cohort that does not exist at the same scale in Australia: young consumers in the 15-to-30 age group who are entering their first consumption cycle.

In the Philippines, this group accounts for 37% of online education spending and 30% of streaming and gaming. In Kenya, the same cohort drives 44% of the online education market.

In Nigeria, consumers under 30 collectively account for nearly 70% of online spending in high-growth sectors, including gaming and mobility.

Early exposure to digital platforms tends to shape consumption patterns that persist as users enter adulthood and their peak earning years. Businesses that establish brand familiarity with this cohort now are not making a short-term bet. 

“Southeast Asia and India are the only regions in the world where Generation Z holds the largest share of online spending across every vertical, according to Beyond Borders 2026,”

“Businesses that reach these consumers now are acquiring customers who will drive spending for the next 30 to 40 years,” added Sean Yu.

For subscription-based businesses in particular — SaaS, streaming, online education — capturing these users early is both a retention and a lifetime-value story.

But to take these opportunities, merchants have to build a payment strategy that reflects how these consumers actually transact.

Southeast Asia has largely bypassed the card era. Digital wallets and account-to-account transfers account for 65% of e-commerce in Thailand, 61% in Indonesia, and 50% in the Philippines.

International credit cards — the default Australian merchant integration — are often used by fewer than 10% of consumers in many of these markets.

In Indonesia, even domestically issued debit cards are disabled for e-commerce by default in many cases, due to fraud concerns. Banked consumers are being pushed toward wallets and QR-based transfers for their digital lives.

Local payment rails such as GCash and Maya in the Philippines, OVO and DANA in Indonesia, TrueMoney in Thailand, and UPI in India are not simply payment options.

They are the primary financial infrastructure for most consumers in these markets. Merchants that do not support them are structurally invisible to the bulk of the addressable market.

The same logic extends to subscription-based models. For SaaS, streaming, and digital service providers, the recurring billing question is as important as the initial checkout.

Across 12 emerging markets, including the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, South Africa, and India, more than one billion people use alternative payment methods that can now support cross-border recurring transactions via EBANX. 

Australia’s geographic proximity to Southeast Asia is a genuine strategic asset — but it does not automatically translate into digital market access.

EBANX recently expanded its payments infrastructure into Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Turkey, markets where cross-border e-commerce already accounts for 28–30% of digital transaction volume.

The merchants capturing that demand are those who invested early in local payment infrastructure. That demand is already live. The question for Australian businesses is not whether this market is ready — it is whether they are.