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Monica
Millares
Chief Product Officer & Podcast Host
BigPay
Michelle is the Chief Product Officer (CPO) at BigPay, one of Southeast Asia's largest NeoBanks, where she focuses on building sustainable, profitable FinTech that delivers Financial Safety for all. With 20 years of experience split equally between traditional finance and building FinTech startups across the UK and SEA, Michelle brings deep industry expertise and a superpower of resilience coupled with positivity. She oversees the end-to-end product strategy for Payments, Lending, and Remittances across Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Michelle is also the insightful host of a podcast, sharing her expertise on scaling FinTechs and building resilient teams.
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12 February 2026 12:15 - 12:45
Beyond the API: Why your data moat requires a custom model strategy
You've built products on third-party APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.). That was the easy part. Now, the strategic question is, how do you build a durable, defensible product that can't be copied tomorrow? The answer lies in moving beyond 'rental' access to the models and developing a custom strategy. This session is an executive roadmap for investing in your own 'data moat.' We’ll dissect the core debate for product leaders, when does fine-tuning a foundational model become a competitive necessity? When is it time to look at fully proprietary, smaller models? We will cover the critical trade-offs between cost, latency, data security, and performance. Join us to learn how to future-proof your product by turning your unique enterprise data into a truly defensible, proprietary model asset."