Building partnerships in Asia that actually deliver revenue

Partnership deals in Asia are easy to sign and hard to activate. The announcement is real. The press release is published. The MOU is framed on someone's office wall. Six months later, the revenue is zero and both parties have moved on to the next announcement. The partnerships that produce real distribution have specific structural characteristics — and most of the partnerships you will be offered do not have them.

Why most Asia partnerships fail to activate.

The MOU culture of Asian business development is a genuine phenomenon. Large companies across Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia sign partnership agreements as a form of strategic signalling — to investors, to regulators, to competitors — with no genuine commitment to activation. The signing ceremony is the point. The business development executive at the conglomerate who signed the MOU is rewarded for announcing partnerships, not for the revenue those partnerships generate. The incentive structure produces exactly the behaviour you observe: many announcements, little activation.

The specific failure patterns repeat across markets. The partner has no dedicated headcount for the partnership — when you ask who is driving activation, the answer is "the BD team is handling it," which means everyone is responsible and no one is accountable. The partner's sales team has not been trained on your product, has no spiff or commission incentive for selling or referring it, and treats it as an additional ask rather than a revenue opportunity. The contract contains no performance milestones — you cannot exit or renegotiate until the initial term expires, which is typically 12-24 months. The consequence is that you have exchanged exclusivity, revenue sharing, or co-marketing commitments for a distribution relationship that exists only on paper.

The founders who navigate this well have learned to distinguish between two types of partnership conversations: the strategic announcement (mutual signalling, minimal activation commitment, useful for brand credibility, not for revenue) and the commercial partnership (joint go-to-market, named owners, revenue targets, performance milestones). Both can be valuable but they require different structures, different expectations, and different measures of success. Most founder-operator negotiations conflate the two and end up with a strategic announcement dressed up as a commercial partnership.

The three characteristics of partnerships that work.

Look at the partnerships that actually generate revenue and a pattern becomes clear. They share three structural characteristics that are non-negotiable.

First: the partner has a clear financial incentive tied to revenue outcomes, not relationship value. This means a specific commission structure, a revenue share arrangement, or a joint product where the partner's economics improve materially when customers adopt your product. The incentive needs to be large enough to compete with the partner's other revenue priorities. A 5% referral fee on a $5,000 ACV SaaS deal is $250 — not enough to motivate a sales rep at a major Indonesian bank. A 20% first-year revenue share on an enterprise deal that averages $50,000 is $10,000 — meaningful. Calibrate the incentive to the effort required and the earnings baseline of the people who need to execute.

Second: there is a named internal champion at the partner organisation who has budget authority and personal accountability for the partnership's success. Not a BD manager who signed the deal and will move on to the next one. Not a committee that meets quarterly. A specific person — ideally a business unit head, a regional GM, or a VP of Sales — who has agreed to put their name on a revenue target and whose compensation or performance review is affected by whether the partnership delivers. This person is your distribution mechanism. Without them, nothing activates.

Third: the activation plan is written and agreed before the contract is signed, not as a post-signature follow-up workstream. The activation plan includes: specific customer names or segments to target first, a joint sales playbook with discovery questions and objection responses, a training schedule for partner sales staff, a 90-day revenue target, and a named owner for each action item. The existence of a detailed activation plan before signing separates the partners who are genuinely committed from the ones who will sign the paper and defer the work indefinitely.

Financial institutions as channel partners: specific considerations.

Banks and financial institutions are the most sought-after channel partners in SEA for fintech, payroll, HR tech, and SMB software companies. They have the customer relationships, the trust, and the distribution reach that take years to build independently. They are also among the most difficult partnership channels to activate for reasons specific to their organisational structure.

Banks in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines are organised around product lines (deposits, lending, trade finance, digital) with P&L accountability at the product level. A fintech partnership that touches multiple product lines — as most do — requires cross-departmental alignment that can take 6-12 months of internal consensus-building before external execution begins. The partnership executive who signs your MOU typically does not have authority to commit the retail banking team's distribution channel, the corporate banking team's customer relationships, or the digital product team's app real estate. Each of these requires a separate internal approval process.

The bank partnerships that activate quickly are the ones where you have built the relationship at the business unit level before involving the BD or partnerships team. If the head of SME Banking at BCA in Indonesia is already convinced your product solves a problem for their SME customers and is personally advocating for the partnership internally, the formal partnership process moves much faster. The BD team becomes an enabler rather than the primary decision-maker. This bottom-up internal advocacy model requires 6-12 months of relationship-building at the business unit level, but it produces activations that the top-down MOU model cannot.

Telco partnerships: high reach, complex activation.

Telcos in Southeast Asia — Telkomsel, Indosat in Indonesia; AIS and True (which merged with DTAC in 2023) in Thailand; Globe and PLDT in the Philippines — have aggregate customer bases in the hundreds of millions and distribution capabilities that can move consumer apps from zero to scale faster than any paid acquisition channel. They are also among the most difficult commercial partners to activate for technology companies.

The telco partnership challenge is structural. Telcos monetise their distribution in two ways: through content billing (charging customers' mobile bills for digital subscriptions) and through bundle arrangements (including your product in a mobile plan). Both require integration with the telco's billing system — a process that takes 6-12 months for a tier-one telco in Indonesia and requires dedicated engineering resources on both sides. The commercial terms typically involve revenue sharing of 30-50% of subscriber fees, which is viable for high-volume consumer apps but may not be for SaaS products with lower transaction frequencies.

The telco partnerships that deliver in Southeast Asia are typically structured as distribution pilots before full integration — a defined cohort of the telco's customers exposed to your product through a landing page or in-app placement, with performance tracked over 90 days before committing to full billing integration. This pilot model allows both parties to validate the commercial case before the engineering investment, and it surfaces activation problems — conversion rates, usage patterns, churn — in a controlled environment where they can be fixed without the reputational cost of a failed full launch.

The conglomerate partnership trap.

The CP Groups, Central Groups, Ayala Corporations, and Salim Groups of Southeast Asia can appear to be ideal distribution partners. They have brand trust, customer relationships across every consumer and B2B segment, and the capital to invest meaningfully in a partnership. They are also slow, risk-averse in ways that favour incumbency over innovation, and structured around family control in ways that make decision-making opaque to outsiders.

Foreign technology companies that have signed conglomerate MOUs in SEA consistently report the same experience: the relationship starts with enthusiasm from the innovation or ventures team, moves into a lengthy internal evaluation, surfaces a series of conditions that were not in the original discussion (exclusivity, equity participation, local entity requirements, technology escrow), and eventually stalls in a committee that cannot make a decision. The innovation team that initiated the partnership has no authority over the business units that would activate it.

The exception is conglomerate partnerships where the champion is a family member or a C-suite executive with direct authority over the relevant business unit. These partnerships move quickly precisely because the internal authority problem does not exist. If you are considering a conglomerate partnership, spend the time before signing the MOU to map who actually controls the distribution channel you want. If the answer is not someone with a direct line to the family or the CEO, the partnership will follow the standard pattern regardless of how enthusiastic the initial meetings feel.

• 01
  Write the activation plan before you sign the contract. The activation plan is the test of whether the partner is genuinely committed. A partner who will not agree to specific 90-day revenue targets, named owners, and a joint sales calendar before signing is not ready to activate the partnership. Use the pre-contract activation planning process as a filter: the partners who engage with it seriously are the ones worth signing. The ones who defer it to "after we sort out the legal" are signalling that activation will also be deferred.
• 02
  Identify the champion with budget authority before the partnership is proposed. The BD or partnerships executive at your prospective partner does not have budget authority. Find the business unit head, regional GM, or product owner whose P&L is affected by your product's distribution. Build the relationship with that person directly, present the commercial case in terms of their P&L, and get their informal buy-in before the formal partnership discussion begins. Partnerships proposed from the top down through BD teams rarely activate. Partnerships advocated from inside a business unit frequently do.
• 03
  Build meaningful financial incentives into the partnership structure. The incentive must be large enough to change the partner's sales behaviour. For channel partnerships, this means a referral or commission structure where a single successful referral produces a meaningful income event for the person making the referral — not a token 5% fee. For joint products, this means the partner's economics improve materially when your product is in the stack. Calculate what the incentive looks like at the level of the individual partner rep who is expected to recommend your product, and design the incentive for that person, not for the corporate relationship.
• 04
  Limit exclusivity aggressively. If a partner insists on exclusivity, limit it to 90 days with automatic expiry unless specific commercial milestones are hit. Frame this as standard practice — "we use performance-gated exclusivity to ensure both parties are invested in activation." Partners who resist this framing are telling you that they want the exclusivity but have not committed to the activation. Exclusivity without activation milestones is a distribution block, not a distribution agreement.
• 05
  Run a pilot before full integration for any telco or banking channel partnership. Full billing or system integration with a telco or bank in SEA takes 6-18 months and requires significant engineering investment. Pilot first with a defined customer cohort and a 90-day performance window. This validates the commercial case, surfaces integration issues in a low-stakes environment, and gives the partner's internal stakeholders a data-driven rationale to approve the full rollout. Pilots that succeed create internal momentum. Pilots that fail give you exit optionality before you are committed to a multi-year integration timeline.
• 06
  Distinguish announcement partnerships from revenue partnerships from the outset. Announcement partnerships have value — they signal market presence, provide regulatory credibility, and attract subsequent commercial partners who follow the lead of an anchor partner. But treat them as brand infrastructure, not pipeline. Set a separate budget, separate ownership, and separate success metrics for announcement partnerships versus revenue partnerships. Conflating the two leads to inflated pipeline projections, investor mismanagement, and six months of follow-up calls trying to activate a partner who was never commercially committed.

Frequently asked questions.