Fair Finance Asia Calls for Stronger Equitable Governance and Benefit Sharing in ASEAN's Critical Minerals Trade and Finance

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, Sept. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states are often written out of value chains built on their critical minerals, according to a new report from the Fair Finance Asia (FFA) network and research partner, Profundo.

Among the first to examine the region's critical minerals trade agreements alongside the finance behind them, FFA's report, Extraction to Equity, asks whether deals involving Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand advance environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards.

Drawing on public information up to December 2025, the report found that local-benefits clauses, sustainability standards, and equitable value sharing are consistently missing from agreements and memoranda of understanding (MoUs), leaving source countries shipping raw minerals while processing happens elsewhere. The report also questions how much of this demand may be driven by defense, not renewables, and whose needs are being prioritized.

The report calls on ASEAN member states and financial regulators to incentivize alternatives to extractivism and endorse the UN Principles to Guide Critical Energy Transition Minerals Towards Equity and Justice.

Bernadette Victorio, Program Lead, Fair Finance Asia: "FFA is among the first into this terrain of analysis for one reason: communities living with extractivism are the end beneficiaries of our advocacy, but they cannot demand terms that have not been mapped."

Juliette Laplane, Senior Researcher, Profundo: "Critical minerals agreements must move beyond market access. They need enforceable safeguards including local value addition, fair pricing, and civil society participation."

Sophoan Phean, National Director, Oxfam in Cambodia: "Cambodia is still at an early stage of critical mineral development and must center community rights, environmental protection, and revenue transparency and accountability before large-scale extraction expands."

Victoria Fanggidae, Executive Director, The PRAKARSA: "Banks and investors must make human rights due diligence, community consent, transparent benefit-sharing, and credible decarbonization conditions of finance."

Yuki Tanabe, Program Director, Japan Center for a Sustainable Environment and Society: "Major Japanese banks and companies involved in the mining, refining, processing, and procurement of critical minerals in Southeast Asia must strengthen their ESG standards."

Joel Chester Pagulayan, Climate Justice Portfolio Manager, Oxfam Pilipinas: "ASEAN and national regulators must replace voluntary commitments with mandatory safeguards that advance community rights, free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), and equitable development."

Ponpakin Phruttiwongwanit, Project Coordinator, Fair Finance Thailand: "Unless ASEAN governments and financial regulators close policy gaps, people and ecosystems at the frontline of extraction will keep paying for a transition designed without them."

Access the report: bit.ly/4hraS6Q

Media contacts: 

Kyle Cruz

Influencing and Campaigning Manager

Fair Finance Asia

kylejuliene.cruz@oxfam.org

About Fair Finance Asia

FFA is a regional network of Asian civil society organizations working to ensure that financial institutions' funding decisions respect the social and environmental well-being of the communities where they operate. Learn more: fairfinanceasia.org

** This press release is distributed by PR Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **

Fair Finance Asia Calls for Stronger Equitable Governance and Benefit Sharing in ASEAN's Critical Minerals Trade and Finance

DUBAI, UAE, Sept. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Flytxt, a global provider of Enterprise AI for subscription businesses, today announced that it has been recognised as a Challenger in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for CSP AI-Enabled Marketing and Sales Solutions.

Flytxt views this positioning as a progression from its recognition as a Niche Player in 2025, reflecting the company's continued growth and strong competitive position in the CSP AI market. It comes amid an expanding global footprint, broader coverage of AI-enabled marketing and sales use cases, and sustained investment in enterprise AI capabilities designed to drive business outcomes at scale. 

"We view our inclusion in a Gartner Magic Quadrant for the third time, and our positioning as a Challenger this year, as an affirmation of our pioneering work in enterprise AI," said Dr. Vinod Vasudevan, CEO, Flytxt. "Our vision is to move beyond Co-pilots and task automation agents by creating an AI Expertforce that combines domain intelligence with agentic execution to autonomously drive growth and marketplace efficiency for CSPs."

Flytxt's AI combines causal reasoning, counterfactual simulation and privacy-preserving federated learning. These capabilities enable it to understand the factors influencing outcomes, evaluate alternative scenarios and determine an effective course of action tailored to each CSP's business context, enterprise policies and data privacy requirements.

Through a continuous perceive–reason–act–learn cycle, Niya-X operates as an outcome-directed AI Expertforce rather than a collection of standalone task agents. It supports sales and marketing decisions across the value chain - from product and proposition design to growth marketing and continuous optimisation. By directly connecting customer and market signals with decisions and execution, Niya-X helps CSPs shorten the path from signal to outcome and adapt quickly as customer behaviour, market conditions and business priorities change.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for CSP AI-Enabled Marketing and Sales Solutions, Pulkit Pandey, Khurram Shahzad, September 2026.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organisation and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

To know more, visit www.flytxt.ai

** This press release is distributed by PR Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **

Flytxt Recognised as a Challenger in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for CSP AI-Enabled Marketing and Sales Solutions