Sarah Chew covers Southeast Asia’s technology, fintech, digital policy, and AI adoption landscape for RECATOOLS. Her work focuses on how regulation, platform shifts, and emerging technologies affect businesses, consumers, and digital markets across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

129
Articles
ASEAN Tech
Primary beat
May 2026
Writing since
~915 min
Total reading
All 129 ASEAN Tech 71 Finance 51 Business 4 AI & ML 3

Articles · ASEAN Tech Showing 11–20 of 71

People seated around a wooden table with notebooks, drinks and a laptop
ASEAN Tech

Plaud Bets S$20m That Singapore Can Teach Its AI to Code-Switch

A wearable recorder company put its regional base at Marina Bay because Singapore meetings change language mid-sentence, which is the hardest thing its product has to do.

17 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A miniature shopping trolley resting on a stack of printed supermarket receipts
ASEAN Tech

OpenAI Is Funding an NTU Tool That Predicts What People Do With Handouts

Trained on a million people's actual spending records, not surveys. Half the grant is model credits, and the data is South Korean.

17 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
A concrete hydroelectric dam with spillway gates, set in a green river valley under low cloud.
ASEAN Tech

Firmus Wants A$7bn on the ASX, With OpenAI as Its Anchor Tenant

Seven claimed AI factories across Australia, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, 900MW contracted, and a valuation that four reports put at four different numbers.

16 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Aerial view of Manila, with high-rise towers lining a brown river and dense low-rise housing spreading behind them.
ASEAN Tech

The Philippines May Make Its National ID the Age Check for Social Media

The statistics authority says PhilSys can confirm an age threshold without exposing a name. The privacy commission wants the check to return yes or no, and nothing else.

16 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Jakarta's high-rise skyline at dusk, with office and residential towers under a pink and blue sky.
ASEAN Tech

Indonesia Says X Has No Office There, and May Make Platforms Open One

X had locked about 250,000 under-16 accounts against an estimated seven million. Indonesia's minister says platforms may be required to keep a representative office.

15 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
A rendered grey ballot box with red arrows converging on it — illustrating a platform built to steer voters towards a result.
ASEAN Tech

An Istanbul Firm Built a Voter-Targeting Platform for All 222 Malaysian Seats

Anthropic says the operators used census data, a thousand fake X accounts and a fake news site — and pitched Malaysia's communications regulator. The MCMC says that is not its business.

14 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Bundles of cable clipped in rows along a wall-mounted tray — illustrating the shared duct access that decides whether a new operator can build.
ASEAN Tech

Philippine Telcos Will Spend $2.2bn in the Year Their Moat Was Removed

A new law lets competitors build networks without an act of Congress. The three incumbents answered by committing $2.2bn to reach households first.

14 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
The Kuala Lumpur skyline at dusk, the Petronas Towers lit above the city
ASEAN Tech

Malaysia Ranks Second in ASEAN. The Index Is the Operators' Own.

The GSMA placed Malaysia behind Singapore on infrastructure, data governance, cybersecurity and AI policy. Three of those four pillars score policy, not outcomes.

13 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
A thick sheaf of loose papers fanned open on a pale surface
ASEAN Tech

ASEAN's Digital Agreement Is Worth $2 Trillion. Four Per Cent Have a Plan.

A survey of 184 firms found 35 per cent had not heard of DEFA and 49 per cent had heard of it and not looked at it. The respondents are the well-resourced ones.

12 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A hand holding a blank white plastic card with a magnetic stripe, bearing no name or number
ASEAN Tech

Vietnam deleted the rule that made its ID numbers decodable, and nobody stopped decoding them

Since 1 July 2024 no Vietnamese instrument says the 12-digit citizen ID has any internal structure. The decree defining it was expressly repealed, the circular carrying the province codes lapsed the same day, and the replacing law says only that it is a sequence of twelve natural digits. A provincial police portal was still teaching the old decode nine months later, citing the article that says nothing of the kind.

5 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
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