The over-a-century-old conglomerate Aboitiz Group defies the well-known adage: An old dog can in fact still learn new tricks. On 22 November, during the 5th Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence, the Group's Data Science and Artificial Intelligence arm Aboitiz Data Innovation was recognized as "One to Watch for Data Access & Exchange".

The Ones to Watch category recognizes new and innovative solutions that leverage technology to meet regulatory requirements, whether in their early stage of development or industry adoption. For Data Access & Exchange, Regulation Asia singled out Parlay, a data exchange platform powered by ADI that has successfully unlocked the Aboitiz ecosystems.

Parlay creates a secure workspace for users to publish and access data so it can be used for analysis and modeling. The platform is designed to allow external third parties to freely interact with data to innovate new data products, while still preserving control and security over the data.

"Parlay is significantly speeding up innovation by allowing it to take place in an open environment that still preserves protections over sensitive data. This is a brilliant technology-driven proposition that truly enables true collaboration between innovators and will ultimately speed up time to value for their projects," noted one of the judges of the Regulation Asia Awards panel.

The data exchange platform was developed by ADI in partnership with Habr, a data sharing and commerce platform. Parlay currently serves as a data ecosystem for the business units across industries under the Aboitiz Group, including power, banking and financial services, construction, real estate, food, and manufacturing businesses. Parlay allows them to securely house and provide access to wholesale data sets. Enabled by built-in Amazon Web Services data science tools and endpoints, permissioned users can interact with the data in secure virtual workspaces and use on-platform development tools to perform analysis and develop high-value data products and relevant DSAI solutions.

"There couldn't be a more deserving winner of these awards, Harbr Co-Founder Anthony Cosgrove said. "Aboitiz has shown great leadership and innovation in the area of data sharing within and between organizational boundaries. The early success of Parlay is a perfect example of Harbr's flexible and secure vision of data sharing. We're excited to see how Parlay continues to foster data science excellence, as well as the emergence of other Harbr platforms in the region through our strategic partnership."

"This partnership has enabled us to take a giant leap forward in terms of our time to market and data product development," ADI Chief Operating Officer for Financial Services Guy Sheppard added. "The secret sauce behind Parlay is that this platform allows for data access and sharing in a secure cloud environment. This enables our Data Science and AI teams to collaborate and interact directly with the source, sensitive, or production data–inspiring synergies for new opportunities and accelerating business objectives,"

External organizations from the public and private sectors are being invited to join pilot programs on Parlay in a second phase of its rollout.