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Marking CEO Lewison Chen’s selection to the “36Under36” list, PhotonPay showcased its global industry influence and executive leadership at the 2026 WAVES Summit.
HONG KONG, June 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — PhotonPay, a next-generation financial operating system powered by stablecoins, achieved significant recognition at the 2026 WAVES Summit hosted by 36Kr, a pioneering platform dedicated to serving New Economy participants. PhotonPay’s Founder and CEO Lewison Chen was selected for 36Kr’s “2026 36Under36” Entrepreneurs List, while Sales VP Joey Xu joined a featured panel discussion to unpack the strategic resilience and high-conviction execution required to scale a business.
Visionary Leadership: Driving the Next-Generation Financial OS
The annual “36Under36” list recognizes 108 young leaders driving innovation across AI, deep technology, globalization, and emerging industries. This year’s cohort highlights entrepreneurs who are not simply pursuing market opportunities, but building the foundational systems that enable long-term economic transformation. For Lewison, this recognition underscores his strategic foresight in anticipating the deep structural shifts of global commerce. It validates his leadership in transitioning payments from a fragmented network of disconnected tools into an intelligent, unified operating system.
Under Lewison’s guidance, PhotonPay has established a robust global footprint, expanding to 14 strategic operational hubs across major financial jurisdictions, with a team of over 500 professional employees. Through deep technical and commercial partnerships with world-leading financial institutions, global card networks and banks, the platform now supports more than 60 major currencies, with its full product suite covering over 200 countries and regions. Today, this institutional-grade infrastructure is trusted by more than 200,000 businesses worldwide to secure, manage and optimize their cross-market financial operations.
Abstracting the friction of legacy global banking, PhotonPay operates as a unified financial operating system, which encapsulates multi-currency banking networks and stablecoin rails into a single, programmable infrastructure layer. Clients can run their capital workflows via an intuitive portal, or seamlessly extend these capabilities to their business applications via robust APIs. This modular OS coordinates the entire lifecycle of corporate capital, enabling multi-currency collections, real-time global payouts, card issuance, on/off-ramping, FX conversions and automated reconciliation within a secure and efficient ecosystem.
“Long-term infrastructure is never built on static formulas — it’s built on the conviction to turn macroeconomic uncertainty into operational certainty,” said Lewison Chen, Founder and CEO of PhotonPay.” Being recognized on the 36Under36 list reflects not just what PhotonPay has built, but what we believe the next generation of global financial infrastructure must become: programmable, adaptive, and borderless. We are investing heavily in our global network and technical architecture so that payments stop being a cost center and start being a strategic engine for growth.”
On the WAVES Stage: Redefining Capital Velocity for Global Businesses
Addressing the summit’s flagship panel, “Riding the Waves Before Anyone Believes,” PhotonPay’s Sales VP Joey Xu aligned these capabilities with real-world market execution.
“Global financial giants and legacy banks established the foundational networks of digital trade,” Joey noted during the discussion. “PhotonPay’s mission is not to disrupt this baseline, but to provide precise ecosystem adaptation. We translate complex, fragmented global banking structures into a tailor-made financial operating system optimized for the exact workflows of international businesses.”
Joey highlighted that multi-market organizations routinely drain liquidity and lose days of transaction velocity when transferring funds across disconnected collection, FX, and disbursement applications. PhotonPay resolves this by enabling businesses to retain global earnings in a multi-currency wallet, allowing balances to be instantly deployed for real-time operational expenses — such as global digital ad spends or logistics payouts. Unified approach like this has allowed PhotonPay to reduce global capital costs for its clients by more than 75% while boosting treasury operational efficiency by 60%.
When discussing long-term execution in a volatile market, Joey identified three core pillars of PhotonPay’s operational ethos:
- Long Cycle: Building institutional-grade payment networks, technological foundations, and international regulatory licenses requires years of deliberate cultivation rather than reliance on short-term market trends.
- Granularity: Global infrastructure success depends on a meticulous focus on hyper-local compliance matrices, regional clearing frameworks, and real-time FX fluctuations.
- Continuous Listening: Sustainable growth relies on maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the market to capture the shifting realities of global commerce.
Moving forward, PhotonPay will continue to anchor its strategy in long-term infrastructure evolution, expanding the boundaries where payment technology intersects with core corporate operations. By pioneering the convergence of traditional finance with programmable architecture, stablecoin and agentic commerce, the company aims to deliver sustained value to the global trade ecosystem.
About PhotonPay
PhotonPay is a stablecoin-powered financial operating system built for the stablecoin era. Designed for modern enterprises, PhotonPay enables businesses to send, receive, convert, and settle funds across both fiat and stablecoin rails through a single, compliance-first integration, spanning 200+ countries and territories.
For more information, visit [www.photonpay.com].