Building the roads data travels on
Trust is Infrastructure. That basically sums up my takeaway from the ASEAN Tech Summit Manila 2026.
I was glad to be a part of the summit as panel moderator when it opened recently at the Manila Marriott Hotel Grand Ballroom in Pasay City. Over two days, government officials, regulators, financiers and technology leaders worked through a question that matters to every one of us in the region: How do we build a digital economy that is secure, sustainable, inclusive and borderless?
Organized by FinTech Alliance.PH with the ASEAN Business Advisory Council Philippines, the Asia FinTech Alliance, the ASEAN FinTech Forum and the ASEAN Innovation Business Platform, the summit had the support of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Departments of Finance, Trade and Industry, and Information and Communications Technology. Organizers expected more than 4,000 delegates.
The timing could not have been better. The Philippines is ASEAN chair this year, and negotiations on the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA) closed in May, with signature targeted for November. DEFA is meant to enable trusted data flows, interoperable systems and cross-border digital trade across the bloc. DICT Secretary Henry Aguda delivered the opening keynote on behalf of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
FinTech Alliance.PH founding chairman and RCBC executive vice president Lito Villanueva set the tone in his welcome address. He described agentic AI, tokenized finance and cybersecurity as converging forces and projected that by 2030, most transactions may involve little or no human intervention. He also floated two regional proposals: an ASEAN Resiliency Wealth Fund and a regional Network Anti-Scam Hub. Both are proposals, not agreed measures.
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao gave keynote remarks and joined a session on regulated stablecoins. Trade Secretary Cristina Roque argued that DEFA could ease friction in digital trade and help micro, small and medium enterprises scale across ASEAN markets.
ASEAN-BAC Philippines chairman Joey Concepcion called for speed and execution over another round of frameworks, a sentiment I share.
The program ran across six themes: Agentic AI and Intelligent Automation, Stablecoins and Cross-Border Finance, Seamless Digital Payments, Cybersecurity and Digital Resilience, Data Governance and Digital Infrastructure, and Policy, Governance and Digital Growth.
The Global Finance and Technology Network announced a long-term collaboration with the Philippines, including its Select Series in Manila, an ASEAN Financial Health Challenge with the BSP, and a five-year AI Horizon Philippines Program. The 2026 Philippine FinTech Report was also launched.
As ASEAN’s digital economy grows, so does the sophistication of digital fraud. Generative AI can now be used to clone voices, create deepfakes, automate scams and target thousands of people at a scale that was once impossible.
At the summit, I moderated the Futurecast Panel entitled “The War on Digital Fraud: Protecting Trust in an AI-Powered World.” I was joined by Chye Kit Chionh, co-founder and CEO of WIDTH and treasurer of the Singapore FinTech Association; Prof. Ben Teehankee, chairman of the Responsible AI Council; Richard Velasco, regional sales leader for the Philippines and Thailand at Darktrace; and Carlo Chen Delantar, co-founder and partner of Gobi-Core Philippine Fund.
Our discussion looked beyond technology and focused on a larger question: can trust evolve faster than deception?
The answer pointed to one thing: trust has to be built into the digital economy, not added after something goes wrong. That means stronger fraud prevention, responsible AI governance, secure digital identity, and cybersecurity, without creating barriers that slow innovation.
But technology alone cannot solve the problem. As AI makes deception easier and more convincing, responsibility must also be shared across governments, financial institutions, technology platforms, businesses, and digital citizens. The challenge for ASEAN is to make that cooperation move just as quickly as the threats we are trying to stop.
I came to the summit from a different vantage point than most of my fellow speakers.
Metro Pacific’s portfolio sits in the infrastructure the digital economy quietly depends on: power, water, logistics, connectivity and transport. That experience shapes how I think about trust. Nobody asks whether a bridge or a water system is trustworthy every time they use it, because reliability was designed in from the start. The digital economy needs to earn that same quiet confidence.
The same logic applies to the rest of the stack. A cross-border data flow is not a policy abstraction. It travels through undersea cables, data centers and power grids that someone has to finance, build and maintain for decades. Cybersecurity and digital resilience cannot be separated from grid resilience and physical redundancy, and data governance cannot be separated from where data centers are sited, powered and cooled.
That is why I believe the private infrastructure sector deserves a seat at the DEFA table, even though we are seldom invited into the fintech conversation directly.
The signing in November should not be read as a finish line. It is closer to a groundbreaking, the point where the harder, less glamorous work of building the connective infrastructure of a digital region begins. The initiatives announced at the summit, from the GFTN programs to the proposed resiliency fund and anti-scam hub, will only land if the financial, physical and institutional foundations across member states can absorb shocks in the first place.
If ASEAN wants a digital economy that is secure, inclusive and borderless, trust must become part of the infrastructure itself. *
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