Setting a New Benchmark for Personal Data Protection in Southeast Asia

PLDT Inc. (PLDT) is the Philippines’ largest fully integrated telco. Through its principal business groups – from fixed lines to wireless – PLDT offers a wide range of telecommunications and digital services across the Philippines’ most extensive fibre optic backbone, and fixed line and cellular networks. Smart Communications Inc. (Smart) is the group's wireless services provider offering innovative prepaid, postpaid, and mobile broadband services. The PLDT family of companies is responsible for the personal and business data of millions of Filipinos and invests significantly to maintain data security and build customer trust.

Challenge: How to Enable Responsible Data Use at Scale 

With Smart serving over 59 million wireless subscribers and PLDT Home connecting 3 million fixed-line customers, the PLDT Group needed a solution to centralise and streamline the management of customer privacy choices. The goal was to ensure compliance with evolving consent regulations, enhance customer trust, and enable responsible data use at scale. The Philippines has a mature data privacy regulatory landscape, and companies like PLDT are subject to laws such as the Data Privacy Act 2012 established by the National Privacy Commission.

Beyond regulatory expectations, the organisation also faced growing operational challenges in managing consent across multiple brands, systems, and touchpoints. Ensuring the integrity, accuracy, and usability of consent data became increasingly difficult without a centralised governance model or user-empowered features that could provide a consistent and reliable view. 

This underscored the need to prioritise a unified privacy and consent management program.

Solution: How OneTrust Universal Consent & Preferences Management (UCPM) Transforms Privacy management & Customer Engagement at Scale

PLDT and Smart implemented the OneTrust Universal Consent and Preference Management (UCPM) solution, which centralises how customer privacy choices are collected and managed. This one change empowered more individuals than any other telco in Southeast Asia to control how, and how much personal data, they share. The solution streamlines compliance, enables efficient and targeted direct marketing, and provides deeper customer insights for personalisation—all while upholding privacy standards.

Despite the complexity, the implementation was completed in just nine months, an accelerated timeline by internal transformation standards. Despite the compressed schedule, the project was delivered on time and in full, thanks to close coordination among stakeholders. 

In addition to UCPM, PLDT and Smart also leveraged several complementary OneTrust modules to strengthen their enterprise-wide privacy infrastructure:

• Privacy Notice Management, to ensure consistent, up-to-date privacy notices across all digital touchpoints;
• Consent Management Platform (CMP), to manage website tracking technologies in line with user consent;
• Mobile Application Tracking Management, to govern app-based tracking and ensure mobile data transparency. 

Together, these tools complete the PLDT Group’s end-to-end consent and preference ecosystem, reinforcing both regulatory compliance and customer trust across digital channels.

Results: Enabling Compliance and Customer-Centric Innovation

According to Leah Jimenez, Chief Data Privacy Officer of PLDT and Smart:

“Our commitment to privacy by design is reinforced through UCPM. It empowers our customers by giving them control over their data while positioning us to enable responsible data monetisation in the future.”

Ojas Rege, SVP & General Manager at OneTrust, adds:

“The PLDT Group’s implementation of OneTrust’s UCPM solution sets a new standard for consent management in Southeast Asia. Consent drives personalisation and, therefore, value for customers, enabling long-term connection and loyalty. This shows companies can prioritise customer trust and ensure responsible data use while accelerating innovation.”

While full measurement of outcomes is still underway, early indicators are promising. Opt-in rates have increased monthly across all consent purposes, even before using consent rate optimisation (CRO). This trend points to a significantly improved consent experience (CX) enabled by the UCPM platform.

Beyond customer sentiment, the platform is expected to deliver meaningful strategic and operational value, including:

• Reduction in Redundant Development Costs
  • Avoided repeated CAPEX on building custom consent tools per system
  • Reusable SDKs and standardised integration patterns streamline onboarding
• Faster Time to Market
  • Average integration lead time reduced by up to 40%
  • Digital teams no longer need to start from scratch per campaign
• Improved Audit and Regulatory Readiness
  • A centralised “single source of truth” for consent and preference history
  • Easier audit prep and reduced compliance risk from inconsistent consent practices

These outcomes not only support compliance but also lay the groundwork for data-driven business innovation.