Building control into APAC payments

Brian Clark, Minor Hotels' AMEA payments and fraud lead, shares how orchestration and local acquiring are reshaping APAC.

APAC brings together some of the most diverse payment methods, currencies, acquiring setups, and regulations anywhere in the world. Where do you see merchants still getting APAC wrong, even experienced ones?

I would start with the assumption that a regional payments strategy can be implemented uniformly. A useful way to approach APAC is to ask what needs to work in each market, then decide which elements can be managed consistently across the business. Starting with a global provider list and working backwards risks leaving the local questions until too late.

For a merchant, those questions should be practical. Can customers use the payment methods they expect? What acquiring arrangements are needed? Who can explain a failed payment, and who owns the next step? How will the finance team reconcile the transaction and understand the cost? A payment solution needs to make sense to the people operating it as well as the people integrating it.

Our own localised acquiring footprint is still a work in progress. That is an important part of the story: expanding the provider network and putting the right local arrangements in place are distinct pieces of work. I would encourage merchants to give both proper attention, with clear responsibilities and realistic implementation plans. The aim should be a structure that supports local needs while remaining understandable and manageable across the business.

How has Minor International's payments strategy evolved in recent years, and what was the biggest force behind that change?

We have moved from two payment service providers (PSPs) to five globally, with a sixth planned, and we have set up our orchestration layer. Alongside that, we are continuing to build our localised acquiring footprint, implementing omni-channel tokenization, and assessing a fraud decisioning tool to span across the PSPs. Those are the clearest milestones in how our payments setup has evolved.

The provider count is only one part of the discussion. For any merchant expanding its network, the more useful question is what each relationship contributes. Does it address a specific market requirement, provide a capability the business needs, or create an additional option for processing? Each addition should have a clear purpose and an owner who can assess whether it is delivering that purpose.

A broader network also raises questions about how the pieces fit together. The architecture, the commercial relationships and the day-to-day operating model need to be considered together. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to distinguish between having more options and being able to use those options effectively.

What capabilities (e.g., data visibility, orchestration, partnerships) have been most important in driving performance and helping your team gain control over payments operations?

Setting up our orchestration layer has been a key development. The way I would frame the wider challenge is that a merchant needs to understand how decisions are made across its payment providers and how those decisions can be reviewed at both the property and corporate level. The value of an additional capability should be judged against a clear operational question.

For orchestration, I would ask which decisions the merchant wants to control, what information is available to support them, and how changes will be tested. The team also needs to understand what happens when something goes wrong. Who investigates, which provider is involved, and how does the issue get resolved across teams? Those responsibilities deserve as much attention as the initial integration.

Data visibility should support that process. A useful starting point is to agree on what success means and how it will be measured consistently. For example, a merchant might want to examine payment completion alongside processing costs and the work required to reconcile payments. The priority is to choose measures that help the team decide what to do next.  This applies to each actor using the tool.  Front of house, back of house, central finance, and payment teams all have different need states that need to be accounted for.

Partnerships matter in the same practical way. I would look for people who can work through a problem with the merchant and explain the trade-offs clearly. As of today, we now have dynamic routing in place, one token vault across PSPs, and a refined recon and payout flow.

A good example here is our UAE hotels.  Before, we lacked local acquiring. As we added Checkout.com into our orchestration platform, they were able to bring this to the table. We can now say that for domestic UAE cards, we route to CKO; for APMs, we leverage Airwallex, as they are marginally cheaper.  This has resulted in our payment success rate for the region growing from 65% to 85% and costs decreasing from 2.9% to 2.4%. 

What fraud patterns are you seeing in APAC now that you weren't two years ago?

We are seeing an increase in guests submitting chargebacks and providing AI-generated confirmation details to support their claims. Now, we need to provide even more detailed supporting evidence to show that the guests are dishonest in their claims. This simply did not happen two years ago and shows a real gap in the ecosystem.

The dispute process is largely siloed, making it hard for a merchant to understand what the guest is disputing, let alone the logic behind determining if it was a valid chargeback or not. There needs to be more transparency between parties, allowing for a better investigation and dialogue. 

We just lost a dispute where, as a merchant, we could only see that the guest provided no details. We submitted a passport, a signed checkout form, video screenshot footage, and booking confirmation. However, we lost, and there was zero explanation as to why.  Add in that guests are now able to fabricate artificially generated content, and it is clear we need more work in this space to evaluate the veracity of the claims here.

In October 2026, you will be attending the MAG Payments Summit in Singapore. What are you most looking forward to discussing there?

For me, the value is in real conversations with people who work through these challenges themselves. The presentations are valuable, but the smaller, more intimate atmosphere is what makes the experience particularly useful. The regional payments community is small, and bringing people together in a collaborative setting creates room for a more open exchange.

I would like to compare notes on the practical issues behind the themes we have discussed: managing a broader PSP network, making orchestration useful in everyday operations, progressing local acquiring, and responding to unusual fraud activity. It would be helpful to hear what others have found difficult, what they would approach differently, and which questions they wish they had asked earlier.

The most useful conversations often begin with a specific challenge. Hearing how another team worked through it gives you something concrete to examine in your own business. That is what I would hope to take away from Singapore: a better understanding of other merchants' experiences and relationships that allow those conversations to continue after the event.

About Brian Clark

Brian Clark leads payments and fraud across Minor Hotels’ AMEA portfolio and the company’s AI commercial transformation. He brings over 14 years of product and commercial leadership experience spanning hospitality, fintech, telecommunications, banking, and consumer internet. His career includes roles at True Digital, Meta, Ascend Bit, and Target. At Minor Hotels, he is modernising payments architecture across orchestration, fraud, foreign exchange and settlement, while developing AI applications that deliver value.