Elton Dsouza, VP Data Solutions SEA, WPP, looks at why connected intelligence is the key to SEA’s data future…

Southeast Asia does not have a shortage of data. It has a shortage of connected intelligence. Banks, retailers, telcos, platforms, and brands each hold signals that could make the others' decisions more informed. The challenge is that the data itself often cannot, and should not, be brought together. That is changing the way organisations think about data advantage. The competitive edge is no longer simply having more data. It is being able to connect differentiated data with trusted partners, while keeping control of the underlying information. 

Across Southeast Asia, data protection law has become significantly more mature in recent years, from Thailand's Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) to Indonesia's Personal Data Protection Law (PDP Law) and Vietnam's Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL), which came into force in January 2026. Advertisers, agencies, and data owners have responded by putting more weight on their first-party data, and many are exploring data collaboration technologies to unlock its value. Most of these laws are still new, though, and practical guidance on how to use data well within them is still taking shape.

Rather than treating privacy as a reason to lock data away, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and the Personal Data Protection Commission (PDPC) have spent several years encouraging organisations to use privacy-enhancing technologies to put data to work safely. In July 2026, the PDPC published new guidance on federated learning, a way of training AI models on data that stays where it is, building on Singapore's wider investment in privacy-enhancing technologies through IMDA's PET Sandbox, where organisations, including those in advertising, are already putting these technologies into practice.

For marketers across the region, data collaboration is now part of how they will work. The real question is how to do it while keeping control of their own data.

The question that has changed

However, data collaboration technologies are not all built the same way. Many still require data to be copied or moved into a shared environment, whether that belongs to a cloud provider, a platform, or a technology partner. Once it is there, the business that owns it relies on someone else's infrastructure, policies, and intentions to keep it safe.

When I talk to brands and data owners across the region, the technical explanation of data that never moves can take a while to land. What lands straight away is the question of control. Data protection laws across Southeast Asia distinguish between the organisation that decides how personal data is used and those that process it on its behalf. Hand your data over to a third party's environment, and you may have given away more control over it than you intended.

A decentralised approach reverses that. Each organisation's data stays in its own environment, and the analysis is taken to the data, so partners can share insights without handing over the customer records behind them. The data owner keeps the keys throughout.

Connected, not collected

Keeping data where it sits also changes what organisations should be aiming for. For most of digital advertising's history, the winning strategy was accumulation, on the assumption that whoever gathered the most data understood the customer best. That is harder to defend every year, as third-party signals decline and regulation tightens.

More importantly, no single organisation has the full picture. In Southeast Asia, some of the most valuable consumer insight sits with banks, e-wallets, telcos, retailers, loyalty programmes, and travel platforms, each holding a different slice of how people live and spend. Few are willing to hand their data to someone else to complete it.

Connecting those datasets where they sit makes partnerships possible that would otherwise never get past the first meeting. It is why interest is building quickly in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. Over the past few months, financial services firms, point-of-sale platforms, telcos, retailers, and loyalty card providers across these markets have started building decentralised data collaborations with InfoSum, with more expected before the end of the year.

For data owners, this kind of collaboration lets them make their data work harder commercially, at scale, without it ever leaving their control. In our experience, partners are far more willing to open up richer, more differentiated signals when they retain control of their data.

For advertisers, that means better inputs. Rather than relying on broad segments such as "sports fans" or "music lovers", brands can draw on purchase behaviour, commerce signals, and verified demographic insight from partners with real, consented relationships with their customers.

Measurement improves too. Connecting a media owner's ad exposure data with a brand's sales or conversion data shows which campaigns drove results, without either side seeing the other's customer records.

Then there is AI. AI does not create an advantage on its own. It multiplies whatever it is given. Models built on narrow, siloed data produce narrow results. AI makes the value of differentiated data even greater. Models are becoming increasingly accessible, but the proprietary signals, context, and customer relationships that inform them are not. The organisations that can connect those differentiated signals, while keeping data governed and under control, can give AI better context without creating new centralised pools of personal data. 

Where to start

For organisations looking at data collaboration, a few questions are worth asking early:

1. Does our data ever leave our own environment to use this technology? If it does, who controls it once it has gone?
2. Which of our partnerships have stalled because one side was reluctant to share data? Those are often the best places to begin.
3. Are we building our AI ambitions on data we control, or on data that sits inside someone else's ecosystem?

Southeast Asia has the policy settings, the talent, and the regional reach to set the standard for how Asia uses data responsibly. Southeast Asia's next data advantage will not come from collecting more. It will come from connecting what organisations already know in ways their competitors cannot. The winners will be those that can connect proprietary signals and trusted partnerships to build intelligence their competitors cannot replicate, then put AI to work against it, while keeping control of the data that makes that intelligence possible.