When I got married about seventeen years ago, an American friend proposed a thoughtful toast. He observed that Billy Joel’s sentimental song “Just the Way You Are” had it all wrong. He said that the most interesting and fun part of having married friends is watching them change as they create a family, face life’s challenges and grow older together.

He was right. My wife and I have spent the time since bringing up two daughters while employers moved us from Singapore to Sydney, then to Hanoi and, eventually, back to Singapore again; constantly adapting to new environments, new people and new situations. Work and life experiences in these places have indeed changed us, our views of global society, our values and the nature of our relationship. We’re different people now – better, I believe – and still very much together.

Southeast Asia is not exactly a new region but the changes that this community is about to undergo – due to technological, economic and demographic evolution – will be tantamount to the creation of an entirely new family dynamic amongst our nations.

A recent report published by Google and Singapore’s Temasek * predicts that Southeast Asia internet usage will nearly double – from 280M to 480M users – within the next four years. And these folks won’t be signing up just to play Pokémon Go, read email and look at cute cat pictures. They are expected to use their new smartphones to engage in online media, travel and eCommerce transactions; stimulating growth in that area from a current rate of $31B per annum to almost $200B by 2025. The CAGR’s are astounding. If they are even half right, growth will be huge.

There are fundamental reasons to believe that these numbers are reasonable. The middle class is on the rise in Southeast Asia, a vast majority of the population is young (70% under the age of 40) and most countries here do not have well established “big-box” retail stores to compete with budding eCommerce vendors.

Besides the infrastructural investments that are required to make this growth happen, a big challenge to the potential success of the internet economy highlighted in the report – the biggest in my mind– is overcoming the lack of consumer trust that exists in places like the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia when it comes to the prospect of fraudulent transactions and sharing financial data. And this is where I get back to my analogy…

Despite all the faults of western financial and economic systems, the security of mobile payments and other online financial transactions has transformed consumer behaviors drastically. People are trading much more directly, via sites like eBay, Amazon, and even Alibaba in China. Through technology, they are improving the quality of the consumer experience, increasing choice, reducing costs and inefficiencies by cutting out middlemen and paperwork. Most importantly, they are helping to improve the communication and trust between traders and consumers that are required for businesses and economies to thrive – particularly smaller ones.

For years people have feared that technology is driving a wedge into the human condition. But, just as marriage itself is evolving into a broader and more inclusive institution in many places, technology is giving more people a chance to participate more effectively in the intricacies and institutions of commerce. Google and Temasek, caring friends of both technology and commerce, seem to be offering a hopeful and enthusiastic toast to the changes coming to the Southeast Asia union.

David Knapp has lived and worked in the APAC region since 1985. He is currently Director of ACUMULA PTE LTD (http://acumula.asia/), which provides business development services to Technology, Media and Telecommunications companies intending to establish and grow their business in Asia.

* https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Bp4KT-W8RF4ZorPUthts8X-B7QHBhsEnY1T5G7XifU0