Singapore is putting a clearer name and sharper frame around one of its most important industrial bets.

On Friday, the city-state announced SG Semiconductor, a national identity for its semiconductor sector, jointly developed by A*STAR and the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB). The move is not a new agency or a standalone company. Rather, it is an attempt to make Singapore’s chip capabilities easier to understand, navigate and sell to global companies, researchers and talent at a time when semiconductors have become central to economic strategy.

The first focus will be public sector research and development (R&D). That is a telling choice. Singapore is already a major manufacturing base, but the next phase of the global chip race is increasingly about whether countries can connect lab work, pilot production, advanced manufacturing and commercial scale in one ecosystem.

Also Read: Southeast Asia’s chip-hub ambition is colliding with its chip-smuggling problem

SG Semiconductor is meant to package that proposition under a single national banner.

The initiative brings together capabilities across R&D, advanced manufacturing, infrastructure, industry partnerships and talent. It covers seven technology areas: advanced packaging, silicon photonics, power electronics, radio frequency gallium nitride, piezoelectric micro-electro-mechanical systems, flat optics and integrated circuit design.

Put simply, these are not consumer-facing technologies. They sit deep inside the devices, networks, vehicles, data centres and industrial systems that now power the digital economy. They matter because artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, electrification and connected machines are placing heavier demands on chips: they must process more data, consume less energy, communicate faster and fit into more complex systems.

A national brand for a strategic industry

Singapore’s semiconductor story is not new. The country has spent nearly six decades building a base that spans chip design, wafer fabrication, assembly and testing, semiconductor equipment, materials development and R&D.

Today, it accounts for one in ten chips produced globally and one-fifth of global semiconductor manufacturing equipment output, according to EDB. Those figures explain why chips remain one of Singapore’s strongest anchors in advanced manufacturing, even as neighbouring economies across Southeast Asia court electronics and chip-related investment.

Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines are all strengthening parts of the semiconductor value chain, especially in assembly, testing, electronics manufacturing and supply-chain diversification. Singapore’s pitch is different: it wants to sit closer to the frontier of R&D, engineering, process innovation and high-value manufacturing.

That positioning has become more important as the global semiconductor industry reorganises around supply-chain resilience and technological sovereignty. The US, China, Japan, South Korea and Europe are pouring capital into chip capacity and research. For a small country like Singapore, the challenge is not to outspend them, but to remain a trusted, specialised node where companies can develop and scale complex technologies for global markets.

“Singapore’s strength in semiconductor innovation has been built through decades of sustained investment and close partnership across public research, universities and industry,” said Beh Kian Teik, CEO of A*STAR. “SG Semiconductor brings this collective endeavour under a national identity.”

Also Read: Nexstrom lands US$12M to bring 2D semiconductors to 12-inch wafers

That national identity is backed by money. Singapore has committed SGD800 million (about US$626 million) from 2026 to 2030 through the Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) Flagship in Semiconductors. The funding is intended to deepen capabilities and tighten the link between research and industry.

From lab work to manufacturing scale

The launch was accompanied by a series of partnerships announced at Innovate Together 2026, offering a glimpse of how SG Semiconductor is expected to work in practice.

In advanced packaging, Applied Materials and A*STAR will move into Phase 4 of their long-running collaboration, expanding the joint laboratory’s infrastructure, equipment and headcount. Advanced packaging has become critical because chip performance is no longer improved only by making transistors smaller. Increasingly, companies are combining multiple chips, memory components and optical links in sophisticated packages to deliver more computing power and energy efficiency.

A*STAR and KLA will also establish a new process control collaboration framework to explore ways to improve manufacturing reliability and yield. In chipmaking, yield — the share of usable chips produced from a wafer — can determine whether a technology is commercially viable.

A*STAR and STATS ChipPAC will work together on co-packaged optics, a technology that brings optical communication components closer to computing chips. The goal is to create a pathway towards high-volume production. This is especially relevant for AI data centres, where moving data quickly and efficiently between chips and servers is becoming one of the biggest bottlenecks.

In silicon photonics, A*STAR and GlobalFoundries will deepen their R&D collaboration to develop next-generation technologies on 300 mm wafers in Singapore. Silicon photonics uses light, rather than only electrical signals, to transmit data. It is increasingly important for high-performance computing and data communications, where speed and energy efficiency are both under pressure.

There is also a sensing angle. Tacta Systems and ASTAR will develop intelligent sensing technologies for robotics using ASTAR’s Lab-in-Fab platform, which combines research and manufacturing capabilities for prototyping and validation. Tacta has also opened its Singapore operations, adding to the country’s technology development base.

Another collaboration brings together the National Center for Advanced Integrated Photonics, hosted at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and Battery Age Minerals. They will explore germanium-based devices for data communications, linking NTU’s research expertise with Battery Age Minerals’ access to raw germanium. The partnership points to a broader ambition: connecting upstream materials with higher-value semiconductor applications.

Why it matters for Southeast Asia

For Southeast Asia, Singapore’s move comes at an important moment. The region is benefiting from multinational companies diversifying manufacturing beyond China, but much of the opportunity has so far centred on production, assembly and supply-chain redundancy. Singapore is trying to show that Southeast Asia can also play a deeper role in semiconductor innovation.

That matters for startups, too. While chip companies are capital-intensive and harder to build than software firms, demand is rising for enabling technologies around AI infrastructure, robotics, sensors, power electronics, mobility and industrial automation. A stronger research-manufacturing bridge in Singapore could create more openings for deep-tech startups, corporate spinouts and university-led commercialisation.

EDB Managing Director Jermaine Loy said companies are looking for locations where innovation, manufacturing and talent come together as semiconductor technologies become more complex. SG Semiconductor, he said, is intended to provide a “gateway” to Singapore’s ecosystem.

Also Read: Taiwan bets on Gen Z founders to move beyond its chip-supplier image

The word gateway is doing a lot of work. Singapore cannot be all things to the global chip industry. But it can make itself easier to access for companies that need specialised R&D, trusted manufacturing partners, process expertise and regional connectivity.

The test for SG Semiconductor will be whether it becomes more than a branding exercise. Its success will depend on how quickly research projects turn into manufacturable technologies, how effectively talent is developed and retained, and whether Singapore can keep attracting global partners despite intensifying competition.

For now, the message is clear: Singapore wants its semiconductor sector to be seen not just as a manufacturing base, but as a place where the next generation of chip technologies can be built, tested and scaled.

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For years, Southeast Asia’s insurtech promise has rested on a simple idea: insurance should be bought where people already spend, borrow, shop, travel or top up their phones. The harder part has been turning that distribution advantage into a business that can scale without burning ever larger amounts of capital.

Singapore-headquartered Igloo is now trying to show that the model can move closer to profitability.

The company’s audited accounts for the year ended 31 December 2025 show revenue rising 45.9 per cent year on year to SGD80.9 million (~US$63 million). Net loss narrowed 60.4 per cent to US$6.7 million, from US$17 million in FY2024.

Also Read: Igloo expands Thailand footprint with Eazy Digital acquisition amid insurance reform push

The top-line growth is notable, but the more important signal sits underneath it. Igloo said revenue rose by US$19.8 million while total operating expenses remained broadly flat.

In other words, the company claims it added scale without adding cost at the same pace. That is the operating leverage many venture-backed technology companies have been under pressure to prove since the funding market cooled.

Igloo is targeting adjusted EBITDA breakeven by the end of 2026, with revenue growth continuing and no material increase in operating expenditure.

“Revenue grew 46 per cent year on year while OPEX stayed much the same,” said Raunak Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Igloo. “The way we’ve designed our operating system for insurance means that the cost of serving the next partner and the next million policies keeps falling. We are targeting adjusted EBITDA breakeven at the close of 2026.”

From insurance distributor to infrastructure layer

Igloo describes itself as an “operating system for insurance” in Southeast Asia. In practical terms, it provides the technology that allows insurers, digital platforms and financial institutions to build, distribute and manage insurance products online.

That puts the company in the embedded insurance market, where coverage is offered inside another customer journey. A shopper may buy device protection at checkout, a driver may access accident cover through a mobility platform, or a gig worker may receive microinsurance through a fintech or telecoms app. The product is insurance, but the point of sale is often not an insurer.

This model is particularly relevant in Southeast Asia, where insurance penetration remains low across many markets and traditional agency-led distribution can be expensive. The region’s large digital platforms, mobile-first consumers and fragmented regulatory landscape create both the opportunity and the complexity for companies such as Igloo.

Igloo operates across Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia, with technology centres in China and India. It says its platform processes more than 100 million policies a month and has facilitated more than 2.2 billion policies cumulatively. Its partners include Shopee, Lazada, Tokopedia, GCash and Telkomsel, alongside more than 100 commercial and insurer partners.

Also Read: PolicyStreet’s US$21M raise signals a shift from insurtech hype to infrastructure reality

The company also runs Igloo Tech Solutions, which licenses its modular technology stack to insurers and enterprises. The aim is to shorten insurance product launch cycles from months to days by digitising product configuration, underwriting, claims adjudication and financial reconciliation.

Why flat costs matter

Igloo attributes its FY2025 performance to operating leverage in its embedded insurance business. The company said partnership volumes scaled without a proportionate increase in fixed costs, helped by what it calls AI-native infrastructure.

The phrase can sound vague, but the business logic is straightforward. If product setup, partner operations and claims processing can be automated, Igloo can serve more platforms and more policyholders without hiring large teams for every new product or market.

That matters in insurtech because distribution scale alone does not guarantee profitability. Companies still need to manage integration costs, customer support, claims workflows, compliance and reconciliation with insurers and partners. If each new partnership requires a heavy manual build, growth becomes expensive. If those functions are repeatable through software, margins can improve over time.

Igloo’s reported net loss includes US$1.6 million in non-cash share-based compensation, down from US$3 million in FY2024. It also includes US$860,000 in foreign exchange translation losses. These items do not erase the loss, but they suggest the underlying cash profile may be improving faster than the statutory bottom line shows.

Still, the company has not disclosed gross margins, cash balance, adjusted EBITDA figures, claims ratios or quarterly performance. Those numbers would give a clearer view of how close the business is to sustainable profitability, and whether growth is spread evenly across markets or concentrated in a handful of major partners.

A tougher market for insurtech

Igloo’s improved numbers come at a time when Southeast Asian startups are being judged less on expansion narratives and more on capital efficiency. During the peak of the funding cycle, insurtech companies could raise large rounds on the promise of digitising a vast underinsured population. Today, investors are asking whether those models can survive lower liquidity, higher scrutiny and slower follow-on funding.

Igloo has raised more than US$100 million from investors, including Eurazeo, Openspace Ventures, Cathay Innovation and BlueOrchard. That backing gives it room to build across markets, but it also raises expectations. A path to adjusted EBITDA breakeven by end-2026 is therefore not just a financial milestone; it is a credibility test for the embedded insurance category in the region.

The competitive field is also active. Singapore-founded bolttech is one of the most prominent global insurtech platforms with a strong Asia presence, while Australia-born Cover Genius works with digital companies worldwide on embedded protection. In Indonesia, PasarPolis has long focused on microinsurance and digital distribution, while Qoala operates across Southeast Asia with an agent-assisted and digital insurance model. Igloo’s differentiation lies in its infrastructure-led pitch and deep platform partnerships, but rivals are chasing the same broad shift: making insurance available through everyday digital channels rather than traditional sales routes.

The next test

For Igloo, the next 12 months will be about proving that FY2025 was not a one-off improvement. Revenue growth of 45.9 per cent is strong, but the company’s more consequential claim is that it can keep expanding without a material rise in operating expenditure.

Also Read: Health, wealth, and legacy planning converge as new wave of SEA insurtechs emerges

If it reaches adjusted EBITDA breakeven by the end of 2026, Igloo would stand out in a sector where many players have struggled to balance growth, regulation and unit economics. If it misses, investors will likely look more closely at the cost of partner acquisition, market-level profitability and dependence on large distribution channels.

For now, the audited FY2025 accounts show a company moving in the right direction: bigger revenue, smaller losses and a clearer profitability target. In Southeast Asia’s still-developing insurtech market, that may be the most important policy Igloo is trying to underwrite.

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Nine months ago, Thailand unveiled its first national semiconductor roadmap, a 25-year plan to graduate from backend electronics work to high-value chipmaking. This month, Bangkok approved its first national semiconductor and advanced electronics strategy, again. The headline number has grown, though: roughly US$80 billion in cumulative investment and more than 230,000 new jobs by 2050.

The repetition is less odd than it sounds. January’s announcement set out the vision; the version now cleared by the National Semiconductor and Advanced Electronics Policy Board, chaired by Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Ekniti Nitithanprapas, puts formal targets and a workforce programme behind it, according to the Thailand Board of Investment (BOI). But the drift is worth noting. In January, investment figures of around US$73.5 billion were doing the rounds. That number has since grown by more than US$6 billion without a single new fab breaking ground.

Also Read: 15 Southeast Asian semiconductor startups moving beyond assembly

Such is the nature of 25-year industrial plans: the targets are aspirational, execution is never guaranteed, and the people who announce them are rarely in office when the deadline arrives.

Starting where Thailand already has credibility

To its credit, the strategy does not pretend Thailand can become the next Taiwan. It runs in three phases. Until 2030, the focus is on strengthening the country’s existing assembly and testing base while moving into advanced packaging — the increasingly valuable craft of combining multiple chips into one compact module, and a frontline of the AI hardware race. The same phase is meant to lay the groundwork for front-end wafer production, the capital-hungry business of fabricating chips on silicon that demands cleanrooms, uninterrupted power and water, and a deep bench of engineers.

By 2040, Bangkok hopes to have attracted chip design and wafer fabrication. By 2050, it wants a complete domestic supply chain.

The three technology bets are the plan’s most sensible part. Photonics, which moves data using light rather than electrical signals, matters for the data centres now mushrooming across the region. Power semiconductors, which convert and manage electricity, are essential to EVs, grids and energy storage — a natural fit for a country that is already Southeast Asia’s largest automotive production hub and whose mobility future is being rewired by electrification. Sensors build on existing strength in MEMS, the microscopic devices that detect motion, pressure and temperature inside phones, cars and medical equipment.

In short, Thailand is picking fights it might win, rather than chasing leading-edge logic chips, where TSMC, Samsung and Intel deploy capital on a scale no ASEAN budget can match.

The talent number got more realistic

This is where the story gets more interesting. Alongside the strategy, the government approved a workforce programme targeting 86,600 people by 2030: 84,900 highly skilled workers and about 1,700 advanced researchers, trained through specialised curricula, industry placements and overseas stints.

Also Read: From assembly line to innovation engine: Can Philippines climb the chip value chain?

In January, the talent targets being floated ranged from 17,500 to more than 200,000 engineers by 2030. Landing well short of the upper end is arguably more honest. It is also a reminder that the binding constraint on this plan is not tax holidays but people.

Chipmakers do not choose locations on incentives alone. They need process engineers, maintenance technicians, materials specialists and suppliers who understand what a speck of dust can do to a production line. Neighbours have learned this the hard way. Vietnam has pulled in Intel, Samsung and Amkor, yet is now wrestling with how to keep the engineers it trains. Malaysia, whose Penang cluster is a global force in assembly and testing, is discovering that AI demand does not lift every player.

The pipeline is real, but read the fine print

The BOI says it received investment-promotion applications for 879 semiconductor and advanced electronics projects worth about 909 billion baht (US$27.2 billion) between 2023 and the first half of 2026. Across the wider electronics sector — printed circuit boards, components and chip-related products — Thailand has attracted more than US$30.5 billion since 2023.

Applications, however, are not capital spent. Promotion requests are cheap to file and easy to shelve when demand turns, and the chip cycle has turned sharply more than once in the past five years.

A more concrete test arrives this week. Infineon Technologies is scheduled to open its first Thai factory, in Samut Prakan, on October 1. The plant will produce and package advanced power modules for EVs, energy storage and clean energy, and the German chipmaker plans an R&D centre and joint curricula with Thai institutions. An anchor investor squarely in one of the three priority segments is exactly what the strategy needs. Whether it seeds a cluster or remains a single impressive building will depend on how many local suppliers grow up around it.

A crowded neighbourhood

Thailand is not making this bet in a vacuum. Singapore, the region’s most mature chip hub, packaged its ambitions under a new national identity, SG Semiconductor, only on Friday. Malaysia is trying to pivot from assembly to indigenous design. Indonesia is courting Nvidia and AWS.

There is an awkward shadow, too. Thailand was among the jurisdictions named in a US case alleging that roughly US$2.5 billion worth of AI servers were routed through Southeast Asian intermediaries to China — part of the region’s wider chip-smuggling problem. Any country pitching itself as a trusted node in Western supply chains will need its customs and export enforcement to be as ambitious as its investment targets.

Also Read: Chips, corruption, and credibility: Malaysia’s semiconductor gamble faces a trust test

Thailand’s advantage is that it is not starting from zero. Decades of building hard drives, cars and electronics give it a foundation few emerging markets can match. Its risk is the familiar one of long-range industrial policy: the announcements keep getting bigger while the hard work — training engineers, building reliable utilities, nurturing local suppliers and keeping investors committed through downturns — moves at its own, much slower pace.

US$80 billion is a statement of intent. The first real scorecard lands in 2030, and 86,600 trained people is the number worth watching.

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For much of the past three years, the politics of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolved around relatively familiar questions. Will AI take jobs? Who owns the copyright to the material on which models are trained? Can companies protect personal data? And who should be responsible when an algorithm causes harm?

Britain’s latest AI debate suggests we may be entering a very different phase. More than 70 MPs and peers have urged Prime Minister Andy Burnham to support legislation prohibiting the development of artificial superintelligence (ASI) and pursue an international agreement preventing its creation.

The proposal is unlikely to become government policy immediately. ASI remains hypothetical, its definition contested, and Britain continues to see advanced AI as an important source of economic growth and strategic advantage.

But focusing on whether Westminster actually bans superintelligence misses the more important development.

The politics of AI safety is moving from technology policy into national security. Once that happens, the threshold for government intervention changes. Policymakers become more willing to impose restrictions despite economic costs.

Voluntary commitments become less persuasive. Companies accustomed to dealing with technology ministries and regulators suddenly encounter defence establishments, security agencies and heads of government.

Telecommunications infrastructure and semiconductor supply chains have already undergone versions of this transition. AI may be travelling along the same path.

The argument is changing inside the industry too

What makes the latest debate particularly significant is that calls for restraint can no longer easily be dismissed as coming from people outside the technology industry.

Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has argued that AI companies should deliberately pace the rate at which capabilities advance, giving safety research and safeguards time to catch up.

His position is not simply to stop AI development. Amodei continues to argue that AI could deliver enormous benefits. His concern is that capabilities may now be advancing faster than our ability to understand and control them, particularly as AI itself becomes increasingly useful in developing subsequent generations of AI. But something more striking has now happened.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has publicly backed Amodei’s argument that the industry needs to “pace the frontier”, saying it has been a primary subject of discussion inside OpenAI. He has also committed OpenAI to Amodei’s proposal to give independent evaluators employee-like access to assess safety practices.

Elon Musk, whose xAI competes directly with both companies, offered an even more succinct endorsement: “Dario is right.”

The significance lies less in the individual statements than in who is making them.

These are fierce commercial competitors with very different views about AI and its governance. Yet leaders of three major frontier AI companies are now publicly acknowledging that there may be circumstances in which capability development should slow.

OpenAI has gone further. It is advocating mandatory, capability-based national AI safety regulation, independent safety assessments and international standards for determining when development should slow or stop.

That represents an important change in the regulatory debate. The question may no longer be simply whether governments should accelerate or constrain AI. It could become how fast the frontier should move, and what safeguards must accompany each increase in capability.

Also Read: Why Southeast Asian enterprises need AI governance before scaling generative AI

From self-regulation to supervision

This could have profound consequences for business. Amodei has proposed giving independent external evaluators ongoing access to parts of Anthropic’s operations, comparing the concept with regulatory supervisors embedded within financial institutions. OpenAI has now said it will do the same.

The analogy should attract policymakers’ attention. Financial regulation did not develop on the assumption that banks could simply declare themselves safe. Independent supervision, stress testing, capital requirements and disclosure became embedded in the system.

Something similar could eventually emerge around frontier AI. Saying that a company takes safety seriously may no longer be sufficient. Governments may demand that companies demonstrate it through independent testing, incident reporting and measurable thresholds beyond which additional safeguards become mandatory.

AI governance could therefore be moving from promises towards verification.

Britain faces its own contradiction

The Burnham government consequently faces a difficult balancing act. It wants Britain to be a serious AI power, requiring investment, infrastructure, talent and companies willing to develop increasingly capable models.

Yet it must simultaneously convince voters that those technologies will not create unacceptable risks.

There is no simple national solution because AI development is inseparable from geopolitical competition. If democratic countries slow their programmes while competitors do not, restraint could create a national-security vulnerability.

That makes international coordination increasingly important.

Britain will host the G20 in 2027. Rather than an improbable global prohibition on superintelligence, governments may find more practical territory for cooperation: prohibiting narrowly defined dangerous applications, developing common testing standards for cyber and biological risks, or establishing internationally recognised capability thresholds.

Also Read: AI governance in banking operations and decisioning

Once policymakers start discussing AI in the conceptual language of arms control rather than digital regulation, politics have fundamentally changed.

For Singapore, this matters.

Singapore has deliberately pursued a pragmatic model of AI governance: encourage adoption and innovation while developing frameworks for testing, accountability and risk management.

Its experience with AI assurance, combined with its position as a trusted and technologically sophisticated economy, could give it a useful role in shaping the standards and verification mechanisms that a more internationally coordinated system would require.

Political risk becomes operating risk

For business, this is ultimately the lesson. AI companies can no longer treat regulation as a compliance exercise conducted after technology strategy has been decided. Boards need to understand how political perceptions of their technology are changing.

Government affairs teams need relationships extending beyond technology ministries. Frontier developers may increasingly need to accommodate independent scrutiny that once would have seemed commercially intrusive.

Companies using advanced AI should pay attention too. If regulation becomes capability-based, obligations may increasingly follow what an AI system can do rather than the industry in which it is deployed.

The immediate proposal to ban artificial superintelligence may succeed or disappear. But something more consequential has already happened.

Politicians are contemplating prohibiting the most advanced forms of AI. Leaders of competing frontier laboratories are openly discussing whether development sometimes needs to slow. OpenAI is advocating mandatory capability-based safety regulations. And proposals involving independent monitors, regulatory thresholds and coordinated restraints on development are moving towards the mainstream.

The important question therefore no longer be whether greater regulation is coming.

It is whether safety can keep pace with capability – or whether governments and the companies building the technology will eventually decide that capability itself must slow down.

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Boost has secured a US$20 million equity investment from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), bringing the World Bank Group’s private-sector investment arm onto its cap table as the Malaysian fintech looks to deepen its digital lending and financial services business.

The deal gives Boost a development finance institution as a strategic shareholder at a time when Southeast Asian fintechs are under pressure to prove they can grow lending responsibly, serve underserved customers and build sustainable economics beyond payments.

For IFC, the investment is part of a broader push to support private-sector financial inclusion in emerging markets by backing digital players that can reach small businesses and consumers outside traditional banking channels.

Also Read: Bridging the financial gap: How digital lending is powering financial inclusion in Southeast Asia

Boost, part of the Axiata ecosystem, operates across Malaysia and Indonesia and has built its business around digital financial services for consumers and merchants. Its offering now spans fintech services and digital banking, including Boost Bank, a joint venture between Axiata and RHB in Malaysia.

The company said the IFC investment will support the development and scaling of digital financial products, including financing solutions for SMEs and consumers.

The cheque is modest by late-stage fintech standards, but its strategic value may matter more than its size. IFC brings not only capital but also experience investing in financial institutions and fintech businesses across emerging markets. According to the announcement, IFC has made more than 80 fintech investments globally.

Why IFC’s entry matters

Digital lending remains one of the most important, and most difficult, areas of fintech in Southeast Asia. The region has millions of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) that are too small, too informal or too thin-file for banks to serve efficiently. Many lack collateral, audited financial statements or long credit histories. Consumers face similar barriers when they work in informal jobs, have irregular incomes or are new to formal finance.

Fintech lenders try to close this gap by using alternative data and digital distribution. Instead of relying only on traditional credit files, they may assess transaction behaviour, merchant sales patterns, repayment histories, wallet usage or other signals to underwrite loans. Done well, this can widen access to credit. Done badly, it can push vulnerable borrowers into unaffordable debt.

That balance is likely one reason IFC’s participation matters. Development finance institutions typically place heavier emphasis on governance, risk management, consumer protection and impact measurement than purely financial investors do. In digital lending, those disciplines are not optional. They are central to whether financial inclusion becomes a durable business or another cycle of easy credit followed by defaults.

Farid Fezoua, Director of Equity, Funds, and Venture Capital at IFC, said innovative financial instruments are “essential to expanding access to finance at scale”, adding that the investment would support financing opportunities for underserved MSMEs.

The comment points to the heart of the opportunity: SMEs need working capital to buy stock, pay suppliers, hire workers and survive cash-flow gaps. In markets such as Malaysia and Indonesia, where merchants increasingly use digital payments and online tools, fintech platforms may have better real-time visibility into business activity than banks relying on static documents.

Boost’s regional play

Boost was launched in 2017 and has since served users and merchants in Malaysia and Indonesia. In Malaysia, its profile has grown through Boost Bank, the digital bank formed by Axiata and RHB. The bank is part of Malaysia’s broader digital banking wave, which regulators hope will extend formal financial services to underserved individuals and smaller businesses.

Malaysia has taken a relatively measured approach to digital banks compared with some other Asian markets. Bank Negara Malaysia awarded five digital bank licences in 2022, to consortiums led by Grab and Singtel, YTL and Sea, AEON, KAF Investment Bank, and Boost and RHB. The framework gives new entrants a chance to build alternative models, but it also places them under regulatory expectations around capital, risk and consumer protection.

Also Read: GXS Bank acquires Validus Capital to accelerate SME financing solutions

It is in this context that IFC’s investment lands. Boost is not just competing to acquire app users. It needs to show that its data, distribution and banking partnerships can translate into responsible lending at scale.

Sheyantha Abeykoon, Group CEO of Boost, said IFC’s backing brings “not only capital, but deep expertise in financial services and emerging markets”. He added that the partnership could help the company develop digital financial solutions that address the barriers faced by consumers and businesses.

Nik Rizal Kamil, Group CEO and Managing Director of Axiata Group, framed the investment as part of Axiata’s portfolio strategy, saying IFC’s entry reinforced confidence in Boost’s business model and governance.

The competitive field

Boost operates in a crowded Southeast Asian fintech market where payments, lending and digital banking increasingly overlap. In Malaysia, it faces competition from Touch ‘n Go eWallet, Grab, BigPay, Sea’s fintech arm and other digital finance platforms. In digital banking, Boost Bank competes with GXBank, backed by Grab and Singtel, and other licensed players as they roll out services.

Across the region, the challenge is even broader. Grab Financial, Monee (formerly SeaMoney), GoTo Financial and Kredivo have all used large consumer or merchant ecosystems to push into lending and other financial products. Traditional banks are also digitising quickly, often with stronger balance sheets and lower funding costs.

Boost’s edge will depend on how effectively it can use its merchant relationships, data and partnerships with Axiata and RHB to underwrite customers that others cannot serve profitably.

Financial inclusion, but with harder questions

The announcement uses the language of inclusion, but the next phase will be measured in execution. Southeast Asia has seen a wave of fintech enthusiasm over the past decade, followed by a more sober funding environment. Investors now want clearer paths to profitability, stronger credit controls and evidence that lending books can withstand economic stress.

That matters because digital credit can scale faster than traditional lending. A well-designed product can help a small merchant access capital within hours. A poorly designed one can create repayment pressure just as quickly. Regulators across the region are paying closer attention to digital lenders, especially around transparency, debt collection and customer affordability.

Boost and IFC say their collaboration will support alternative credit assessment and scalable digital lending. The practical test will be whether these tools can reduce exclusion without weakening underwriting standards.

IFC’s own mandate gives the deal a development angle. In fiscal year 2025, the institution committed US$71.7 billion to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries. Its investment in Boost fits that broader model: using private capital and expertise to expand access to finance in markets where conventional banking does not reach everyone.

Also Read: Digital banks win transactions, not loyalty: A missed opportunity in Indonesia

For Malaysia, the deal adds another marker to the country’s digital finance landscape. The market is not as large as Indonesia, nor as regionally central as Singapore, but it combines banked consumers, underserved SMEs, strong regulators and telecom-linked fintech players. That makes it a useful testing ground for models that may later scale elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

The US$20 million investment will not transform Boost by itself. But it gives the company a shareholder whose priorities go beyond rapid user growth. If Boost can combine IFC’s development finance discipline with its own digital reach, the more important outcome may be a lending model that expands access without repeating the mistakes of loose credit cycles.

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Cynthia Wihardja’s LinkedIn post begins not with a legal argument, but with a distinction: “There are two ways to lose your freedom. One is done to you. The other, you do to yourself.”

The first, she says, is what has happened to her brother, Donald Wihardja, the former head of MDI Ventures, who has begun serving a five-year prison sentence in Indonesia over the venture capital firm’s investment in TaniHub. The second is what he is trying to resist: the slow erosion of hope, discipline and self-worth that can follow a loss of liberty.

It is a strikingly personal intervention in a case that has unsettled Indonesia’s startup and venture capital community. TaniHub, once one of the country’s most closely watched agritech startups, collapsed amid allegations of fraud and governance failures. Prosecutors pursued not only the company’s founders, but also investors from state-linked corporate venture capital firms, arguing that losses from their investments represented losses to the state.

Also Read: Four VC executives. Zero personal gain. Three years in prison

Alongside Wihardja, Adrian Hartanto, formerly a vice president at MDI Ventures, was sentenced to two years. Nicko Widjaja, former CEO of BRI Ventures, and William Gozali, previously the firm’s chief investment officer, received three-year and two-year sentences, respectively.

For investors, the case has raised an uncomfortable question: when public-linked capital is channelled into venture-backed startups, where does investment failure end and criminal liability begin? For Cynthia, however, the question is also more intimate. What does a person build inside himself when the outside world has taken almost everything away?

A sister’s portrait, not a legal brief

Cynthia’s post avoids the usual language of campaign statements. It does not read like a defence prepared by lawyers. Instead, it offers a portrait of a man trying to remain whole inside prison.

Donald, she writes, “didn’t choose a cell. Indonesia’s legal system chose it for him — a system still learning to distinguish a failed venture capital bet from a crime.” She places his case within his broader career, from his early days at Indomog to his role in building MDI Ventures, Telkom Indonesia’s corporate venture capital arm.

Her central argument is not that investors should be above scrutiny. It is that venture capital depends on risk, and that Indonesia’s startup ecosystem is still developing the legal and institutional language to separate fraud, negligence and ordinary failure.

“Every mature VC market took decades of failed bets and hard lessons to work out the line between a bad investment and a crime,” wrote Cynthia, who runs a fashionable antiques business in the UK. “Indonesia is having that reckoning now, in real time, with real people’s lives caught in it.”

That line captures why the post has resonated. It turns what might otherwise be seen as an industry dispute into a story about an ecosystem maturing under pressure, and about the people paying the price while that happens.

Why TaniHub became a flashpoint

TaniHub was founded in 2016 with a compelling promise: use technology to connect farmers more directly with buyers, improve market access, and reduce inefficiencies in Indonesia’s fragmented food supply chain. Its related financing platform, TaniFund, offered loans for agricultural projects.

The thesis made sense. Indonesia is one of Southeast Asia’s largest agricultural markets, but smallholder farmers often face limited access to working capital, opaque pricing, and long chains of intermediaries. For years, agritech founders across the region have tried to solve this by combining digital marketplaces, logistics networks and embedded finance.

Investors bought into TaniHub’s vision. In 2021, the company announced a US$65.5 million Series B round led by MDI Ventures, with participation from BRI Ventures, Flourish Ventures, Intudo Ventures, Openspace Ventures, UOB Venture Management, and Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India, among others.

The story later unravelled. TaniHub reportedly shut its consumer-facing grocery business in 2022 to focus on business-to-business services. TaniFund came under regulatory scrutiny after lenders complained of unpaid returns. Indonesia’s Financial Services Authority (OJK) eventually revoked TaniFund’s licence, marking one of the most visible failures in the country’s agritech and fintech-linked startup scene.

Also Read: Nicko Widjaja’s legal defence team on the prospect of winning: “We are confident enough”

What made the case larger than TaniHub was the involvement of venture investors linked to state-owned enterprises. MDI Ventures is tied to Telkom Indonesia, while BRI Ventures is linked to Bank Rakyat Indonesia. Prosecutors treated losses connected to those investments as state losses, opening the door to corruption charges against investment executives.

That is the part that has alarmed many in the VC industry. Venture capital portfolios are expected to include failures; the model assumes that many bets will not work, while a few outliers return the fund. If state-linked investors face criminal exposure for failed investments, executives may avoid riskier sectors altogether, especially agritech, healthtech, climate and financial inclusion, where the need is large but the path to scale is messy.

Resilience inside confinement

Cynthia’s post is most powerful when it leaves the courtroom and enters the routines of prison life.

She writes that Donald has chosen to understand “his playing field” rather than surrender to bitterness. He sees his case, she says, as part of Indonesia’s difficult learning curve. That view may not erase the injustice he feels, but it gives him a way to survive it.

She also says he has urged Indonesian talent not to give up on the country, even as the phrase “kabur aja dulu” (roughly, “just leave first”) has gained popularity among young Indonesians frustrated by the country’s economic and institutional challenges. Donald’s message, according to Cynthia, is the opposite: stay, build, return.

Perhaps the most vivid detail is physical. Prison lights never go off, she writes, making sleep difficult. To cope, Donald began running two to five kilometres a day, despite not being someone who exercised much before. The running is practical: he needs to tire his body enough to protect his mind.

He has also stayed socially and spiritually connected. Cynthia says he prays with a rosary given to him by another inmate, attends church regularly, helps organise fundraising, spends time at a Buddhist temple, learns Chinese, and reads about artificial intelligence.

“He isn’t wasting away,” she wrote. “He is learning Chinese, reading about developments in AI. He’s still, unmistakably, Donald: jolly, geeky, sharp, endlessly helpful.”

The larger test for Indonesia

The TaniHub saga will continue to be debated in legal, political and investment circles. Fraud must be prosecuted, and those who abuse public-linked capital should be held accountable, as the eFishery case has shown. But if investment losses alone are treated as corruption, Indonesia risks discouraging precisely the kind of risk-taking needed to build new industries.

Also Read: Nadiem Makarim, eFishery, and the end of blind faith in startups

Cynthia’s post does not settle that debate. What it does is remind the ecosystem that behind every precedent are human lives.

“Donald is stuck in prison, yet he’s making sure he isn’t imprisoned,” she wrote.

For Indonesia’s startup community, that sentence now carries two meanings. It is a sister’s tribute to her brother’s resilience. It is also a warning: if the country cannot clearly define the difference between fraud and failed risk, its innovation economy may learn to protect itself by dreaming smaller.

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In the last week of August, Viettel’s network engineers were doing something most of their customers never saw. They were moving traffic in real time, pushing 800 gigabits per second onto one undersea cable, another 300 onto a second, then routing whatever was left over a terrestrial fibre line that runs through Laos into Singapore. Four of Vietnam’s eight international subsea cables had failed within days of each other. Roughly 30 per cent of the country’s international bandwidth disappeared overnight.

Most businesses running in Vietnam did not notice a total outage. They noticed something worse for planning purposes. Everything got a little slower, a little less reliable, for a stretch of weeks with no fixed end date. Payment confirmations lagged. Cloud dashboards took longer to load. Customer support tickets crept up. Nothing broke cleanly enough to justify an emergency response, and nothing worked well enough to ignore.

This is not a Vietnam story. It is a scaling story that happens to be playing out in Vietnam first.

The utility that is not one

Every operator I work with who is expanding across two or three Southeast Asian markets treats international bandwidth the way they treat electricity. It is there. It is billed monthly. Nobody budgets for the version of the business that runs at half the speed for six weeks. That assumption is the real scaling risk, not the cable fault itself.

Vietnam connects to the world through eight main subsea cable systems, and most of the region’s traffic still funnels through a small number of landing points and hub cities, chiefly Singapore and Hong Kong. Four systems failing in the same fortnight is unusual. But the reason four failures cost 30 per cent of capacity is not unusual at all. It is the direct consequence of a region that scaled its digital economy faster than it diversified the physical routes carrying it.

The same fault plays out differently at each layer of a business. A solo operator running a small e-commerce store absorbs it as a personal, annoying delay and works around it with local caching or a manual process. An SME running real-time inventory or payments tied to a Singapore-hosted platform absorbs it as a measurable hit to fulfilment times and support load, with no infrastructure team to buffer the impact.

A regional platform absorbs it as an engineering bill, emergency capacity purchases, rerouted traffic, customer communications about degraded service. At the national level it becomes the argument for the next decade of cable investment, repair vessel capacity, and diversified landing infrastructure. Same fault. Four completely different cost structures, depending on how much architecture was already in place before it happened.

Also Read: Scaling beyond AI pilots: Six-move Capability Cycle

The fix is real, and it is still four years away

Nine days after the outage, Thailand’s Gulf Development and Singapore’s Singtel announced a partnership to build new subsea capacity between the two countries, with a Vietnam link as the first project. It read, at first glance, like the system correcting itself. A failure happens, capital shows up to fix it.

Look closer and the timeline tells a different story. This is not a new idea responding to a fresh problem. Singtel and Viettel first proposed a version of this same Vietnam-Singapore cable back in 2024, targeting service by 2027. This week’s announcement, with Gulf Development now a partner and a wider Thailand-Singapore-Vietnam route, pushes the live date to 2030. A project meant to fix exactly this kind of fragility has itself slipped three years before a single strand of fibre goes in the water.

That is the detail that should change how you plan, not the cable fault. New subsea capacity is not a fast fix. It is a capital-intensive, multi-year commitment that depends on specialised vessels, permitting, and seabed rights across several jurisdictions. If your scaling plan for the next three years assumes this structural weakness gets solved by someone else’s infrastructure spend, you are planning around a fix that has already proven it runs late.

Two ways to build around it

For businesses with heavy Vietnam-Singapore data flows already, the answer is not to complain about reliability. It is to treat international connectivity as a capital allocation decision, not an operating expense you assume away. That means multi-path architecture, real redundancy across more than one route, and edge caching that keeps core functions running locally when the international layer degrades. It also means governance maturity around how you communicate a slowdown to customers before it becomes a trust problem, not after.

Also Read: The creator economy is distribution, not marketing. Most Asian businesses are still scaling it like a campaign

For businesses less exposed to this specific corridor, the constraint is an entry point. Regional operators with capacity or peering relationships that can absorb Vietnam-bound traffic have a genuine counter-cyclical opportunity while others are constrained. Positioning a platform as resilient by design, provably multi-path rather than just claiming reliability, becomes a real differentiator for any customer who has just lived through six weeks of degraded service and is now asking the right questions for the first time.

Taiwan learned this the expensive way

Taiwan has been through this cycle more than once. Repeated cable faults, often from the same geological and shipping pressures Vietnam is dealing with, forced both operators and the state to treat route diversity and repair vessel access as strategic infrastructure rather than a line item. Japan took a similar path earlier, investing directly in its own repair vessel capacity rather than depending entirely on shared regional fleets. Neither country solved this cleanly or quickly. Both treated it as a permanent design constraint rather than a one-time emergency, which is the actual lesson for any business scaling through the region now.

Most of the businesses that use my scaling framework are no longer asking whether their cloud provider is reliable. They are asking a sharper question, which parts of our operation can survive six weeks of degraded international bandwidth, and which parts cannot.

The cable will get fixed. The next one, eventually, will get built. Neither of those facts should be the basis of anyone’s scaling plan. The businesses that come out of this stretch stronger will be the ones that already treated their digital architecture the way they treat their balance sheet, built for a bad quarter, not just a good one. In Southeast Asia, scale was never just about which markets you enter. It is about which parts of the system underneath you were never really yours to depend on.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.

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I was sitting in a cafe in Kuala Lumpur recently, sipping an iced mixed coffee with orange, when I realised that the way I organise for trips is exactly how I used to try to “organise” my startup. I was obsessed with the perfect project management software, the flawless internal wiki, and the 18-month roadmap—not because the business needed that level of rigid order, but because I needed the security blanket.

Founders are prone to what I call a “messy organising compulsion.” We mistake activity for progress. We build elaborate scaffolds of processes and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) because we are terrified of the unknown. We want to neutralise every variable, from churn rates to product bugs, by burying them in a beautifully organised Jira board.

But a startup isn’t a museum; it’s a living, breathing organism that feeds on chaos. The sweet spot for a founder isn’t found in the perfectly laminated roadmap; it’s found in “structured serendipity.”

The illusion of total control

Psychologists call the desire to exert control over chance events the Illusion of Control, a cognitive bias where we overestimate our influence over external factors. For startup founders, this manifests as “management theatre”—the belief that if we optimise the processes enough, we can eliminate the volatility inherent in market entry.

However, complex systems—like startups—do not respond to deterministic management. As Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework suggests, in complex domains, we cannot rely on “best practices” or command-and-control hierarchies. Instead, we must probe, sense, and respond. By attempting to impose rigid structure on a complex, unpredictable environment, founders aren’t creating efficiency; they are creating fragility.

The theory of slack

The drive for 100 per cent efficiency is one of the most dangerous myths in the startup ecosystem. In his seminal book, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, author Tom DeMarco argues that companies operating at full capacity have no room for innovation. When every team member is utilised at 100 per cent on current projects, there is zero room for the experiments that define the next growth spurt.

Also Read: Taiwan bets on Gen Z founders to move beyond its chip-supplier image

Structured serendipity is the deliberate creation of “slack” in your organisation. It is the tactical decision to leave white space in your roadmap, allowing for the inevitable pivot when the real world hits your assumptions.

Four rules for the founder who wants to lead without suffocating potential

To build an organisation that thrives on both structure and spontaneity, you have to shift your perspective on what “management” actually means. Here are four rules for leading without killing the magic:

• The rule of scalable slack (the half-empty pouch)

Stop optimising your team’s capacity to 100 per cent. If your developers and operators are running at full tilt, you have zero room for innovation or the inevitable market correction. Leave “white space” in your roadmap—intentional capacity for the experiments that haven’t been invented yet.

• The loose-tight framework

Borrowed from the classic management philosophy of Peters and Waterman in In Search of Excellence, the concept is simple: Be tight on your mission, values, and core metrics. Be loose on the how. Don’t build a cage; build a compass. Your team needs a framework to ensure a safe landing, but they need the freedom to find their own route to the destination.

• The security of redundancy

It is okay to keep a “security blanket” in your stack—a tool, a consultant, or an extra safety net—simply because it helps you sleep at night. Research into Organisational Resilience shows that redundant systems actually provide greater stability in volatile environments. Don’t apologise for it. Once your anxiety is managed, you gain the mental bandwidth to focus on the truly high-leverage, risky decisions.

Also Read: The 90-second pitch that helps foreign founders crack Tokyo’s networking scene

• The three hour chaos budget

As noted by Christian Busch in The Serendipity Mindset, serendipity isn’t just luck; it is a skill that can be cultivated. Every week, you must schedule a “Chaos Budget.” This is time explicitly removed from your calendar for non-goal-oriented activity: deep-diving into raw user feedback, exploring a random competitor’s pivot, or just sitting with the data until it stops looking like numbers and starts looking like human behaviour. This is where product-market fit is actually found.

The ultimate shift

The highest form of founder leadership isn’t controlling the chaos; it’s curating the environment for it to happen productively. You have to trust that the framework you’ve built is robust enough to handle the disruption.

If you stop trying to control the journey entirely, you might just find the surprise that defines your next growth spurt.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.

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Asia’s ETF market has never been more dynamic. Assets are growing, new issuers are entering the market, investors are more engaged and product innovation is accelerating.

For many years, the region’s ETF industry was defined by its potential. Today, that potential is becoming reality, with Asia emerging as the world’s fastest-growing ETF market. Yet growth is only one side of the story. As it expands, the infrastructure supporting it is facing pressure. The question for issuers, authorised participants and servicers is whether the systems underpinning the market are ready.

Growth brings complexity

The ETF industry has been built on innovation. Investors value ETFs for transparency, liquidity and accessibility, while issuers use them to bring new exposures to market. Across Asia, that innovation is becoming more sophisticated, from active and thematic strategies to digital assets, cross-border listings and new distribution models.

This deepens investor choice, strengthens local markets and helps Asia play a more influential role in the global ETF ecosystem. But operationally, growth creates complexity.

Many ETF servicing processes were designed for smaller, simpler markets. In parts of Asia, primary market workflows remain manual, fragmented and inconsistent. Issuers and participants often must navigate different local practices, settlement models, platforms and operating requirements.

A workflow that operates efficiently in one market may require significant adaptation in another. As volumes rise and products become more sophisticated, every additional market, product type or distribution channel can add manual intervention, reconciliation and operational risk.

This is especially true in the primary market, where ETF units are created and redeemed. While secondary trading has become faster and more efficient, the operational engine behind issuance has not always kept pace. In a region as diverse as Asia, that gap is becoming harder to ignore.

A region moving at different speeds

Asia’s strength is its diversity, but that also creates operational challenges.

Taiwan’s rapid growth, fuelled by strong retail participation, is placing greater demands on issuance and servicing infrastructure.

Hong Kong is an established regional hub for cross-border investment and remains at the forefront of ETF innovation, including digital and tokenised structures. But faster settlement cycles and cross-border activity place greater demands on funding, reconciliation and visibility. Market makers must know where orders are in the lifecycle, where cash is moving and where risk sits.

Also Read: Why Southeast Asia’s next healthtech winners will be built around healthcare workflows, not just AI

Singapore’s regulatory stability, fintech capability and concentration of global asset managers bode well for it to become a larger ETF hub. Success will depend not just on product development, but on connecting issuers, distributors, platforms and service providers through more efficient infrastructure.

These examples illustrate that Asia’s ETF industry is not growing uniformly. It is developing through multiple local models, structures, investor bases and operational requirements. That makes scalable infrastructure even more important.

The need for real-time servicing

The ETF market operates in real time and its servicing infrastructure must follow.

This matters as ETF creation and redemption models evolve. Cash creation and redemption structures place greater emphasis on transparency across the transaction lifecycle. Authorised participants and market makers cannot wait until the last minute to understand order status, funding requirements or settlement positions.

In a faster, more complex market, delayed visibility creates risk. It can affect hedging, liquidity management, funding decisions and participants’ ability to operate globally.

For Asia, geography and market structure pose challenges. The region encompasses different currencies, regulatory environments and operating practices. Many firms are trying to scale across markets that do not work in the same way.

Automation alone is insufficient. The industry needs connected workflows that allow participants to see and manage the full ETF order lifecycle in real time. The objective is not simply to remove manual processes, but to support growth without adding friction.

Distribution is becoming the next frontier

The next stage of Asia’s ETF development will not be defined by product innovation alone, but also by access.

Across the region, ETF demand is expanding beyond institutional investors. Retail investors are becoming more active, wealth platforms are broadening their product ranges and asset managers are seeking new ways to distribute ETFs alongside mutual funds and other products.

Also Read: Why Asia’s Physical AI boom will be decided at the camera, not the model

ETFs suit investors who value transparency, liquidity and ease of access. But many traditional wealth and fund distribution platforms were not built to support ETFs efficiently. This creates an opportunity to rethink distribution.

The industry needs better connectivity between platforms, custodians, brokers, issuers and market infrastructure providers. It also needs operating models that let ETFs integrate more easily into existing wealth and fund distribution ecosystems, without forcing every participant to re-engineer processes.

Developments such as fractional ownership, unlisted ETF share classes and digital distribution models are therefore especially relevant. For asset managers, ETF share classes are also a distribution strategy, allowing existing fund capabilities to reach new channels and investor segments.

In Asia, where retail participation and digital adoption is strong, this shift could be powerful. The next wave of growth may come from making more ETFs easier to access, hold and integrate into everyday investment journeys.

Tokenisation as a distribution story

Tokenisation is often viewed as a technology story. In the context of ETFs, however, it is increasingly a distribution story.

The opportunity is not simply to digitalise existing processes or create blockchain-native versions of familiar assets. It is to help products, including ETFs, reach new investor demographics through digital channels, wallet-based ecosystems and more flexible forms of access.

Investors in Asia are increasingly comfortable with digital platforms and new forms of financial interaction. In some markets, the boundary between traditional investing and digital asset engagement is becoming less distinct.

Tokenised ETF structures, tokenised unlisted ETF share classes and blockchain-enabled distribution models are still nascent. Asset managers are exploring how regulated investment products can be accessed through new digital environments while preserving the benefits of established fund structures.

For ETFs, this is a watershed moment. The first phase of ETF growth was about making listed market access cheaper and more transparent. The next may be about making investment products more digitally accessible, connected and adaptable to how investors want to engage.

Building the infrastructure for Asia’s next phase

Asia’s ETF market is no longer catching up with global trends, but helping to define them.

The region combines scale, innovation, retail engagement and regulatory ambition. But to sustain that momentum, the industry needs infrastructure capable of supporting emerging complexity.

This entails transcending fragmented workflows and manual workarounds, creating more interoperable primary market processes. These will give issuers, authorised participants, custodians and distributors real-time visibility across the ETF lifecycle. By building operating models that can support today’s products, more complex, cross-market and digitally enabled structures will follow.

That transformation is already underway. Across the industry, technology is improving automation, transparency and connectivity, helping participants streamline creation, redemption and settlement while supporting the distribution models that will define the next phase of growth.

Asia’s ETF opportunity remains enormous. The region’s ability to capture it will depend on whether its infrastructure can keep pace with its ambition. The next chapter of Asia’s ETF story will be written by the technology, connectivity and operating models that make growth sustainable.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.

Join us on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn to stay connected.

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Singapore Airlines’ expanding artificial intelligence (AI) portfolio shows that adoption is no longer the main issue. The harder question is what an AI system should be permitted to do.

The Business Times reported on 18 August that Singapore Airlines, or SIA, has deployed more than 160 AI applications and identified over 550 potential generative-AI use cases. Reported benefits include improved customer satisfaction and crew scheduling, while a chief executive-led committee oversees the strategy.

The numbers show scale, not that hundreds of autonomous systems are making consequential decisions. More applications do not automatically mean more autonomy.

The AI label can conceal fundamental differences in authority. Agentic AI generally refers to systems that can plan and act towards a goal, rather than only produce an answer. Yet tools that summarise documents and change passenger bookings may both use AI. Their consequences and reversibility differ sharply.

A practical classification can help. A system may recommend an outcome, decide among options within an approved limit, or act by changing a booking, issuing compensation, adjusting seat availability or modifying a crew roster. Governance should reflect its highest authority, the severity of a plausible failure and whether people can reverse the action.

Commercial and safety systems need different safeguards

Aviation leaders must distinguish commercial applications from safety-related and safety-critical systems.

Commercial applications support customer service, ticket pricing, travel distribution, workforce planning and passenger recovery. Their governance sits mainly within enterprise risk management, data protection, consumer protection, cybersecurity and commercial contracts.

Applications used in air traffic management, flight operations and aircraft maintenance face more demanding assurance when their outputs can affect safety. Aviation organisations manage them through Safety Management Systems: formal processes for identifying and controlling operational risks. Regulators provide statutory oversight, while approval or certification may also apply.

Both domains require accountability, traceability and meaningful human oversight, but their potential harm and evidential requirements differ. Commercial errors can cause financial loss, discrimination, denied passenger assistance or widespread disruption. Failure in a safety-critical function could have catastrophic consequences and demands much stronger testing and controls.

The S$4 billion air-navigation programme announced by the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) on 22 July illustrates this regulated environment. Over the next 15 years, CAAS will replace or upgrade more than 30 systems. AI-enabled tools will help controllers anticipate traffic and weather conditions, recommend aircraft sequencing and spacing, and manage disruptions.

CAAS describes decision-support systems, not independent air traffic controllers. Licensed officers remain at the centre of operational decisions.

Also Read: The true cost of AI is beginning to surface

A July 2026 Flight Safety Foundation report, Data and AI for Operational Safety: Opportunities and Responsibilities, reaches a related conclusion. It argues that AI should strengthen existing Safety Management Systems rather than create a parallel structure. Human responsibility for safety decisions remains unchanged. It also highlights operational validation, audit logs, fallback procedures and testing under degraded or emergency conditions.

The report is not binding guidance, but it reinforces an important principle: aviation should integrate AI into established safety frameworks. The unresolved issue is how to apply similar discipline to commercial systems executing transactions across airlines, technology vendors and travel-booking partners.

Risk does not always follow the organisation chart. Crew-scheduling software may appear to be a productivity tool, but it acquires safety relevance when its recommendations affect flight-time limits, fatigue controls or whether a crew member may legally operate a flight. Classification should follow authority and consequence, not departmental ownership.

When advice becomes a transaction

Aviation executives should resist labelling every automated algorithm as agentic AI. Airlines have long used forecasting, mathematical optimisation, business rules and human review in pricing and inventory control. A simple rules engine can execute a consequential transaction, while an advanced AI model may only produce a summary. What matters is whether the system has access to act.

A model that forecasts demand performs analysis. A system that recommends stopping the sale of discounted seats provides decision support. A system that stops the sale, changes a price, rebooks a passenger or issues a refund crosses the point of action.

Airline transactions often extend beyond one company. Airlines exchange fares, availability and booking instructions with travel agencies, online booking sites and technology networks.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA)’s New Distribution Capability, or NDC, provides a modern format for airlines and travel sellers to exchange offers. ONE Order aims to replace separate booking and ticket records with a single order. These standards can improve data exchange and servicing, but they do not determine accountability for an automated action.

Legacy booking systems and modern platforms will coexist during a lengthy transition. An airline may understand its internal model, yet lose visibility when an action passes through a technology provider, a global distribution system (GDS), an online travel agent or another servicing partner. Governance must cover the complete transaction chain.

Also Read: Your startup has an AI strategy. Does it have a human strategy?

Govern the point of action

Authority register

Every aviation organisation needs a live authority register covering AI and automated decision systems. It should identify each system’s owner, purpose and data dependencies; whether it recommends, decides or acts; the most serious plausible harm; and whether its actions are reversible. It should also name the executive authorised to suspend it. A project catalogue is insufficient if management cannot tell which systems can alter operational or customer records.

Controls at the transaction point

Technical controls should sit where a recommendation becomes an action. Low-impact, reversible tasks may execute automatically within approved limits. Actions with substantial safety, consumer, financial or operational consequences should require human approval or predefined escalation. Access controls should prevent prohibited actions rather than rely only on policies.

Evidence, recovery and recourse

Every consequential action needs a protected, tamper-evident record of the model or rule version, relevant inputs, operating constraints, human interventions and final transaction. Contracts with vendors and intermediaries should preserve access to this evidence for audits, disputes and investigations.

Human control must remain genuine. Staff need enough information, authority and time to challenge a recommendation. High-impact applications require tested fallback and manual recovery arrangements for incomplete data, vendor outages, contradictory outputs and large-scale disruptions. Passengers need human assistance when an automated system produces a disputed outcome.

Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA)’s updated Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI provides a useful cross-sector starting point. It asks organisations to limit an agent’s authority, define human checkpoints, establish technical controls and protect end users. It does not replace aviation-specific oversight. Commercial applications need corporate and transaction governance, while safety-critical systems must remain anchored in statutory oversight and established Safety Management Systems.

SIA demonstrates how rapidly AI can scale across commercial airline operations. CAAS demonstrates how sharply assurance requirements rise when technology enters a safety-critical environment.

Singapore’s next aviation advantage will not come from counting algorithms. It will come from governing when a system may act, preserving accountability across the transaction chain and enabling people to recover control when it fails. That is how responsible AI earns operational trust.

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