Cross-border connectivity becomes real only when it solves a specific economic problem. Workers need cheaper remittances. Travellers need payments that work across borders. Small businesses need trade settlement that does not depend on multiple intermediaries. Connecting Southeast Asia and African markets therefore starts not with technology, but with choosing the first flow worth connecting. Cambodia's expanding cross-border payment relationships offer one starting point for that discussion. The panel examines which use case should come first, which existing systems can be connected rather than rebuilt, and who should absorb the cost and risk of creating the first viable corridor before transaction volumes are large enough to sustain it.

A sandbox can show that a financial product works under controlled conditions. It does not prove that the product can survive licensing, integrate with existing institutions, win customer trust or expand into another jurisdiction. The harder question is what happens after testing ends. The panel examines the conditions that should allow an innovation to move from experiment to licensed market participant, including infrastructure access, capital, governance and regulatory readiness. It also explores a more difficult possibility: whether successful testing in one credible jurisdiction can reduce the cost of entering another, and what regulators would need to recognise in each other's processes before regulatory portability becomes possible.

Bilateral payment links can prove that cross-border interoperability works, but each new connection also adds another set of agreements, standards and supervisory relationships to maintain. At some point, adding country pairs one by one becomes less efficient than building a common network. Regional and multilateral initiatives are testing that alternative through shared platforms and settlement layers. The roundtable examines when bilateral connectivity should give way to multilateral architecture, how such systems should be governed and what individual countries must retain control over when infrastructure becomes shared. It closes by identifying the smallest credible cross-regional network that could demonstrate the model in practice.