This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on December 15, 2025 - December 21, 2025

As the curtains begin to draw on Malaysia’s chairmanship of the Asean Business Advisory Council (Asean-BAC), I reflect on our two-plus-one-year journey as having been immensely rewarding but, at times, hugely frustrating. Rewarding because we achieved much of what we set out to do and we have nudged Asean integration forward. Frustrating because it should not have been so difficult to get good things done.

When I was appointed chairman of Asean-BAC Malaysia in April 2023, alongside my fellow council members Tony Fernandes and Lim Chern Yuan, we agreed early on that our Asean-BAC chairmanship in 2025 had to be a consequential one. We wanted to make our term count, to contribute meaningfully to Asean’s economic integration and to move the dial on private sector regionalism.

We knew that preparations during the first two years would be key. Asean chairmanship years move quickly as one is consumed by regional meetings and summits. We started with very little infrastructure, a minimal budget but an ambitious agenda. Within weeks, however, we managed to establish the Asean-BAC Malaysia Circle (ABMC), a group of 25 Malaysian companies that would help fund our operations and contribute domain expertise on the key issues inhibiting business regionalism.

ABMC became the backbone of our efforts, and together, we came up with 12 flagship projects — meticulously chosen and refined through many iterations — each designed to advance Asean’s integration in tangible ways, for our chairmanship year. We established teams, workstreams and detailed time-tables to ensure that the research and recommendations for our projects would be substantially ready even before our chairmanship year even began.

When our chairmanship did start, it was a sprint from day one, focused on progressing our 12 flagship projects and organising the many obligatory meetings and gatherings. But just as we set up sail, US President Donald Trump rocked the boat, disrupting the world trading waters with tariffs and bilateral deals. Regional cooperation was tested but Asean countries found some common ground in ensuring no retaliation but engagement with the US, and focusing on ramping up intra-Asean trade and the diversification of markets.

Asean-BAC came out in support of Asean governments’ common posture. We then went on a series of Asean-BAC roadshows across the region and beyond — to the UK, Japan, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and the US — to engage governments, corporates and knowledge partners to highlight Asean’s potential and opportunities. The warmth and openness we encountered reaffirmed that other countries and regions are more eager than ever to do business with Asean.

We also organised the Asean-GCC-China CEO Roundtable, held on the sidelines of the historic inaugural Asean-GCC-China summit in Kuala Lumpur in May 2025. We brought together top CEOs from across the three regions to identify potential arenas for collaboration and we concluded with the top three sectors being energy transition, food security and digital connectivity.

As we were promoting Asean and our flagship projects, it became clear to us that Asean-BAC as a platform in its current form was ill-equipped for its role. Similarly, the support systems in terms of the Asean secretariat and member state governments were not effective. So we convened the inaugural Asean-BAC offsite in July in Manila where council members came together to reflect, brainstorm and propose new ways forward for the organisation. It was a candid and forward-looking session aimed at structural reforms. The recommendations are now at hand but most will need governments to agree and execute, beginning with the commitment of governments to select only qualified and capable council members and including new disciplines like attendance monitoring and actioning council decisions.

All of our groundwork culminated in October in what many have described as the best Asean Business and Investment Summit (ABIS) and Asean Business Awards (ABA) ever. ABIS 2025 was, in many ways, the distillation of our entire journey — a multidimensional platform that captured Asean’s diversity, ambition and emerging influence on the global stage while being realistic about our ability to get things done.

The fireside chats were a particular highlight: leaders from South Africa, Brazil, Canada, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia shared their thoughts on global realignments and Asean’s role within them. It was a refreshing change from the usual “keynote” — conversational, insightful and at times, provocative. We featured 10-min TED-Talk-style idea capsules by key opinion leaders, which took the audience into themes like next-generation leadership, creative industries, Asean identity and even sport. We also found many fans in our 50-minute panels, particularly on geoeconomics, energy, education and the entertainment industry, which sparked lively debates and reinforced just how much interest there is in Asean’s next growth chapter. Most people’s favourite was arguably the first-ever US$2 trillion Asean panel with the CEO/CIO of Temasek, the EPF, Brunei Investment Agency, Danantara and TPG on stage together.

All in all, I am proud of the work Asean-BAC Malaysia has done over the course of this year. We have three proposals on the agenda of policymakers, four substantive reports, five new platforms/councils, and several cross-border deals and products. A particular highlight has been the Asean Business Entity (ABE) announced in the recent Malaysian government Budget 2026. ABE will allow companies to seamlessly operate and move talent across multiple Asean markets — a long-awaited breakthrough in the pursuit of regional integration. Unfortunately, a simple but potentially highly impactful idea like ABE has only been adopted by one country so far despite months of hard campaigning to leaders across all member states. I am even more frustrated that the Asean securities regulators have stalled on our proposal to introduce the Asean IPO prospectus to enable companies to raise funds from any Asean market that recognises the Asean IPO prospectus. Such a simple idea that Malaysia and Singapore could launch any time, yet we just could not get the two securities regulators to agree in time. I just hope Asean-BAC continues to campaign for these and our other projects in 2026.

As expected, most of our 12 projects could not be completed in the one year we had. And yet next year, Asean-BAC’s priorities will be determined by the new chair, the Philippines. We have therefore decided to get around this dependency by setting up five new platforms to continue our workstreams, namely the Malaysia Artificial Intelligence Council, the Malaysia Carbon Markets Association, the Asean Private Market Council, the Asean CSR Council and Asean Sustainability Reporting Advocacy Collaborative. They will work with Asean-BAC or on their own to progress our agenda.

As we hand over to the Philippines, we do so with pride and with no apology for setting a high benchmark. That’s how an organisation like Asean-BAC should be — ambitious, forward-looking and continuously improving itself. I am deeply grateful to my fellow council members, our many sponsors and the Asean-BAC team for their support and belief in this mission. The past two-plus-one years have proved that when the Asean private sector works together, it can be a powerful force for regional transformation. Hopefully, in the years to come with regional integration becoming more important in a fragmenting world, it becomes easier to get good things done.

We may not have achieved everything we hoped for, but we have certainly laid the foundation for more. And sometimes, that is the most meaningful legacy one can leave behind.

Tan Sri Nazir Razak is the chairman and founding partner of Ikhlas Capital, an Asean private equity firm.

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