Greater public-private cooperation, enabling policies to accelerate MSMEs’ digital shift, says fintech leaders

MANILA, Philippines, Nov. 18, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Micro, small, and medium enterprises in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are seen benefiting from increased cooperation in the region, which allows financial technology players to better serve small businesses, according to industry players.

Rowena Zamora, Chief Strategy Officer of Mynt, the parent company of GCash, said ASEAN initiatives that support fintech companies in empowering small businesses include the ASEAN Single Window, which has allowed more streamlined digital processing for fintech firms and MSMEs.

“We have to democratize policies and processes to expand MSMEs’ access to the market, both from a domestic and the larger ASEAN regional lens, and provide practical innovations that address issues like the cost of participation and the cost of regulatory compliance,” she said.

GCash, which has been enabling the digital transformation of roughly six million merchants, offers MSMEs alternatives to traditional financing, alongside partnerships with the Philippines’ national policymaking agencies and regulatory bodies.

With ASEAN standardizing cross-border regulations and GCash enabling cross-border transactions, including for MSMEs that require sourcing from foreign countries, the cost to participate in the regional market becomes significantly lower, said Zamora.

Zamora made these remarks at a panel discussion during the Public Forum of the World Trade Organization in September this year at Geneva, Switzerland.

The panel session, titled “Beyond Borders: ASEAN’s Bold Paths to MSME Digitalization,” was co-organized by the Philippine Mission to the WTO and GCash. It also convened other stakeholders from the region, namely, Indonesian open-platform digital wallet DANA, and the Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS) Innovation Hub.

In his opening remarks at the panel, Ambassador Manuel Teehankee, the Philippines’ Permanent Representative to the WTO, underscored the importance of accessibility in cross-border interoperability to help MSMEs face the increasing complexity of global markets.

He also reaffirmed the Philippines’ backing of the Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA), which aims to build an integrated ASEAN digital market, ahead of the country’s ASEAN Chairmanship in 2026.

Felix Sharief, vice president of Public Policy and Government Relations at DANA, also said in the panel that the Indonesian e-wallet platform has benefitted from ASEAN’s standardization of e-commerce processes and economic cooperation, lowering costs, and allowing them to provide more services for unbanked populations.

Sharief also noted critical investments that provide MSMEs access to the digital economy, saying, “Collaboration between the public and private sectors shapes the landscape, with private companies supplying the technology and innovation, and the public sector creating enabling policies. This way, we can have transformation and digitalization, and make sure financial means are accessible to all of society.”

Zamora also took part in the working session, “Digital Payments in ASEAN: From Innovation to Inclusion,” organized by the Indonesian government, which discussed cross-border QR interoperability and regional payment connectivity.

SAPPORO, Japan, Nov. 18, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Ferme La Terre Biei, a confectionery brand from Hokkaido loved for its Butter Cheese Sandwiches made with locally sourced ingredients, is making its Taiwan debut this winter.

Beloved for its rich butter flavor and delicate handmade texture, the brand continues to share the taste of Hokkaido’s natural bounty beyond Japan’s borders.

Taiwan Debut Pop-up Stores

Ferme la terre Biei will open two limited-time pop-up stores in Taipei this winter:

①SOGO Taipei Zhongxiao Store

• November 21–30, 2025: 1F, No. 45, Section 4, Zhongxiao East Road, Taipei City
• December 1–14, 2025: B2F, No. 45, Section 4, Zhongxiao East Road, Taipei City

②Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Xinyi Place A8

• January 5–24, 2026: B2F, No. 12, Songgao Road, Xinyi District, Taipei City

Each pop-up store will feature La Terre Biei’s signature Butter Cheese Sandwiches, along with limited-edition items that have become favorites at the brand’s flagship store in Biei.

La Terre Biei will present its signature “Butter Cheese Sandwiches” in three delightful flavors.

Double Cheese – The most popular plain flavor, combining cream cheese and mascarpone for a rich yet gently sweet taste.

Acacia Honey & Apple – A smooth cream filled with crispy apple compote and infused with Hokkaido acacia honey, offering a refreshing sweetness.

Chocolate Ganache & Chips – Made with 61% bittersweet chocolate, this indulgent flavor pairs silky ganache with crunchy chocolate chips for a playful texture.

About Ferme La Terre Biei

Ferme La Terre Biei is a confectionery brand based in Biei, Hokkaido, Japan.

With the concept of “Living Naturally,” the brand creates sweets, bread, and café menus that highlight Hokkaido’s locally sourced ingredients while minimizing additives.

La Terre Biei operates multiple stores across Hokkaido, including its flagship in Biei and its Shin-Chitose Airport “Craft Studio” location, and continues to promote the region’s food culture through sustainable craftsmanship.

Bringing the Warmth of Biei to Taiwan

La Terre Biei’s first overseas expansion marks an exciting new chapter for the brand.

In Taiwan, a market known for its deep appreciation of fine desserts and Japanese craftsmanship, the brand aims to share the authentic flavors and gentle spirit of Hokkaido.

Through these pop-up stores, La Terre Biei hopes to connect people across borders with the simple joy of natural, heartfelt sweets.

NSFOCUS is recognized for redefining cybersecurity operations through precision-driven AI innovation, intelligent automation, and global scalability.

SAN ANTONIO, Nov. 18, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Frost & Sullivan is pleased to announce that NSFOCUS has received the 2025 Global Competitive Strategy Leadership Recognition in the AI-driven security operations industry for its exceptional achievements in technological innovation, strategy execution, and measurable customer impact. This recognition highlights NSFOCUS’s leadership in applying advanced artificial intelligence to transform security operations, enhancing accuracy, efficiency, and resilience in an increasingly complex global threat environment.

This recognition highlights NSFOCUS’s leadership in applying advanced artificial intelligence to transform security operations, enhancing accuracy, efficiency, and resilience in an increasingly complex global threat environment.

Frost & Sullivan evaluates companies through a rigorous benchmarking process across two core dimensions: strategy effectiveness and strategy execution. NSFOCUS excelled in both, demonstrating its ability to align strategic initiatives with market demand while executing them with scale and precision. According to Pranav Sahai, a Frost & Sullivan industry analyst, “NSFOCUS exemplifies how artificial intelligence can redefine modern security operations. Its NSFGPT and ISOP platforms are tangible demonstrations of innovation that bridge data, analytics, and human expertise to deliver unprecedented efficiency and accuracy. By integrating AI into the core of cybersecurity operations, NSFOCUS not only enhances defensive capabilities but reshapes how enterprises perceive and respond to digital threats.”

Guided by a forward-looking growth strategy centered on AI innovation, automation, and global collaboration, NSFOCUS has redefined the operating model for cybersecurity. Its continued investment in research and development, accounting for 27% of its annual revenue, has led to industry-defining solutions such as NSFGPT, an AI security empowerment platform that combines machine learning, threat intelligence, and expert knowledge. NSFGPT addresses alert fatigue, one of the industry’s most persistent challenges, by leveraging multi-model collaborative modeling to assign confidence levels to alerts, automate triage, and escalate complex threats to human analysts. This synergy between machine intelligence and human expertise achieves a 97% alert noise reduction rate, accelerating incident response times to under 30 minutes.

Complementing NSFGPT, the company’s ISOP platform integrates SIEM, XDR, and SOAR capabilities into a unified, AI-empowered framework for detection, investigation, and response. By automating repetitive workflows and dynamically generating tailored response strategies, ISOP enables organizations to reduce manual interventions by up to 70%. Together, these platforms embody NSFOCUS’s mission to transform cybersecurity into an intelligent, adaptive, and continuously evolving discipline.

NSFOCUS ISOP deeply integrates AI capabilities into the entire security operation process, forming a collaborative “operation hub + AI base” model. It achieves significant value enhancement in alarm handling, threat defense, operational efficiency, and other key areas, while also adapting to multi-industry scenarios. This combination perfectly addresses the pain points of alarm overload and low signal-to-noise ratio in traditional security operations. After integrated application, it enables the full-process efficient operation of threats from discovery to disposal. It can reduce the threat response time to 30 minutes and realize end-to-end automated response for over 40% of security incidents.

In addition, Fengyunwei’s precise identification capability for “known families, unknown variants” of attacks complements the limitations of ISOP’s traditional detection methods, jointly breaking through the bottleneck of unknown threat detection.

The integration of AI capabilities into all key links of security operations not only lowers the operational threshold but also optimizes decision-making scientificity. This collaborative model continuously accumulates disposal experience and solidifies it into automated paradigms, constantly reducing reliance on manual work. It drives the security operations center (SOC) to gradually evolve towards an advanced stage of autonomous operation, completely innovating the traditional manual-dependent security operation model.

NSFOCUS’s agility and integration capabilities have accelerated its global expansion across finance, telecommunications, and energy sectors. Strategic partnerships with AWS, Alibaba Cloud, and Tencent Cloud have enabled elastic scaling, real-time threat mitigation, and compliance automation. These alliances have yielded measurable customer outcomes, such as a 40% reduction in compliance costs and 70% faster certification timelines for regulated industries. NSFOCUS’s seven global scrubbing centers provide 7T DDoS protection with 10-minute response times, demonstrating the company’s operational maturity and responsiveness.

At the core of NSFOCUS’s competitive strategy lies a commitment to continuous learning and ecosystem collaboration. The company fosters cross-functional task forces and innovation labs that integrate real-time operational data with AI model refinement, ensuring sustained performance optimization. This approach reduces false positives, improves accuracy, and enhances decision-making efficiency across all security layers.

Frost & Sullivan commends NSFOCUS for setting a new benchmark in strategic foresight, AI innovation, and customer-centric delivery. Its focus on scalable value creation—combining cost efficiency with high-performance security operations—has redefined the global cybersecurity landscape. Through continuous AI model enhancement and human-machine collaboration, NSFOCUS demonstrates how precision, intelligence, and adaptability can deliver tangible outcomes at scale.

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents the Competitive Strategy Leadership Recognition to a company that demonstrates outstanding strategy development and implementation, resulting in measurable improvements in market share, customer satisfaction, and competitive positioning. The recognition celebrates organizations that are not only innovating within their industries but are shaping the direction of future growth through strategic excellence.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Recognition
Frost & Sullivan’s Best Practices Recognitions honor companies across regional and global markets that exhibit exceptional achievement and consistent excellence in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer experience, and strategic product development. Each recognition is the result of a rigorous analytical process in which Frost & Sullivan industry experts benchmark performance through comprehensive interviews, deep-dive analysis, and extensive secondary research. The goal is to identify true best-in-class organizations that are driving transformative growth and setting new industry standards.
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Contact:
Tarini Singh
E: Tarini.Singh@frost.com 

About NSFOCUS
NSFOCUS, Inc., a pioneering leader in cybersecurity, is dedicated to safeguarding telecommunications, Internet service providers, hosting providers, and enterprises from sophisticated cyberattacks.
Founded in 2000, NSFOCUS operates globally with over 4000 employees at two headquarters in Beijing, China, and Santa Clara, CA, USA, and over 50 offices worldwide. It has a proven track record of protecting over 25% of the Fortune Global 500 companies, including four of the five largest banks and six of the world’s top ten telecommunications companies.
Leveraging technical prowess and innovation, NSFOCUS delivers a comprehensive suite of security solutions, including the Intelligent Security Operations Platform (ISOP) for modern SOC, Volumetric DDoS Protection, Continuous Threat Exposure Service (CTEM) and Web Application and API Protection (WAAP). All the solutions and services are augmented by the Security Large Language Model (SecLLM) and other cutting-edge research achievements developed by NSFOCUS.