Asia Pacific

India has decided to extend the deadline on capping the share of digital payment transactions by about two years to Dec. 31, 2024, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) said on Friday, Reuters reported. The NPCI had said in late 2020 that payment firms will not be allowed to process more than 30% of the total volume of transactions on UPI from Jan 1. The move comes as a breather to companies like Walmart Inc's PhonePe and Alphabet Inc's Google, which are among the leading digital money transfer apps in the country.

India’s central bank will launch its first pilot of a digital rupee for individual users Thursday, putting it ahead of many major economies in the journey toward a sovereign virtual currency, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Reserve Bank of India has said a digital rupee could provide Indians a safe alternative to risky private digital currencies. Central banks globally have been exploring the possibility of issuing a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, as cryptocurrencies have gained favor with the public.

The Japanese subsidiary of Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto empire FTX has put together a draft plan for clients to withdraw funds, in what would be one of the rare cases of investors getting money back from the collapsed exchange, Bloomberg News reported. The proposal, which has yet to be finalized, centers on using a platform called Liquid to facilitate the return of assets starting in January. Bankman-Fried’s sprawling tangle of FTX group companies slid into a chaotic bankruptcy on Nov.

Out-of-court settlements in cases of loan default are gaining traction among both creditors and debtors as parties are looking for ways to avoid initiation of Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), the Economic Times of India reported. According to the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (IBBI), 23,417 applications for initiation of the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process (CIRP), having underlying default of ₹7.31 lakh crore, were resolved even before their admission, as on September 31.

Rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve are significantly increasing the cost of capital for South Korea’s startups, elevating the chance many may face bankruptcy in coming months, according to the nation’s Minister for SMEs and Startups, Bloomberg News reported. “US rate increases are too fast and too violent and we are puzzled,” Lee Young said in an interview in Seoul.

India’s gross domestic product grew 6.3% from July to September as global pressures on prices and supply chains, along with economic downturns in the U.S. and European Union, slowed its economic recovery, the Wall Street Journal reported. In April to June, the economy grew 13.5% from a year earlier, benefiting from the easing of covid restrictions, and from a comparison to a quarter in which India’s economy was hit hard by a fierce wave of the illness.

The bankruptcy court has allowed the State Bank of India's petition seeking to initiate insolvency proceedings against Kolkata-based steelmaker Reform Ferro Cast and appointed Arun Kumar Gupta as its interim resolution professional, the Economic Times of India reported. State-owned lender SBI had approached the Kolkata bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) against the steelmaker after it defaulted on its dues of about ₹267 crore.

The swelling protests against severe pandemic restrictions in China — the world’s second-largest economy — are injecting a new element of uncertainty and instability into the global economy when nations are already struggling to manage the fallout from a war in Ukraine, an energy crisis and painful inflation, the New York Times reported. For years, China has served as the world’s factory and a vital engine of global growth, and turmoil there cannot help but ripple elsewhere.

Singapore’s government faces increased scrutiny over the fallout from the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto empire, Bloomberg News reported. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Deputy Prime Minster Lawrence Wong face a raft of parliamentary questions this week over the losses incurred by retail investors and the due diligence undertaken by state-owned investor Temasek Holdings Pte, which wrote down its entire $275 million investment in FTX. The FTX exchange collapsed into bankruptcy on Nov.