Ant International's PET Sandbox Use-case Mentioned by Singapore's Minister for Communications and Information

Singapore’s Minister for Communications and Information Josephine Teo recently mentioned Ant International as an example during her opening address at the Personal Data Protection Week 2025. 

Teo said that in the last three years, Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and the Personal Data Protection Commission Singapore (PDPC) have run a Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) Sandbox to encourage businesses to explore and experiment with the use of PETs across a variety of sectors and use cases.

Ant International was brought up as a financial institution which has joined the PET Sandbox.

Her remarks are as follows:

“For instance, Ant International, a financial institution that joined the Sandbox, used a combination of different PETs to train an AI model with their digital wallet partner without disclosing customer information to each other. The intention was to use the model to match vouchers offered by the wallet partner with customers of Ant International, who were most likely to use them.  Ant International contributed voucher redemption data of their customers, while the digital wallet company contributed purchase history, preference and demographic data of the same customers. The AI model was trained separately with both datasets, without each data owner seeing or ingesting the other’s data. This led to a vast improvement in the number of vouchers claimed; the wallet partner increased its revenues, while Ant International enhanced its customer engagement.”