Debia Malaysia meets Bank Negara Malaysia requirements for commencement, marking the Group’s next step in building a Southeast Asian payment ecosystem

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia and SINGAPORE, Oct. 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Debia is expanding its merchant acquiring business into Malaysia, marking the next phase of the Singapore-headquartered payments group’s regional growth strategy.

The expansion follows Debia Sdn. Bhd. (“Debia Malaysia”) meeting the expectations and conditions stipulated by Bank Negara Malaysia (“BNM”) for the commencement of its merchant acquiring operations. This builds on the In-Principle Approval previously granted by BNM and paves the way for Debia Malaysia to roll out merchant acquiring services across the country.

Entry into Malaysia extends Debia’s acquiring footprint beyond Singapore, establishing a strategic operational base from which the Group can deepen its participation in Southeast Asia’s increasingly interconnected payments landscape.

Debia Malaysia will leverage the Group’s acquiring capabilities, payment technology, and partner network to support Malaysian businesses across physical and digital commerce. Its integrated platform supports a comprehensive range of payment methods, including major card schemes, QR payments, digital wallets and alternative payment channels.

By combining Debia’s technology and infrastructure with local market capabilities and strategic partnerships, the Malaysian arm is positioned to respond to the evolving needs of local merchants while strengthening the Group’s cross-border connectivity.

Derrick Tham, Group Chief Executive Officer of Debia, said:

“Malaysia represents a significant milestone in Debia’s evolution as a regional payments business. Meeting Bank Negara Malaysia’s requirements reflects the rigorous work undertaken to establish strong governance, compliance, and operational foundations for our Malaysian operations.

“Our focus now is execution — building a sustainable business in Malaysia, fostering strong local partnerships and delivering practical payment solutions that are relevant to how merchants operate and grow. As commerce becomes increasingly integrated across Southeast Asia, we aim to build Debia with strong local roots and cross-border reach, maintaining the discipline required for long-term scalability.”

Malaysia marks the next phase of Debia’s regional expansion as the Group systematically scales its merchant acquiring and payment infrastructure across Southeast Asia. The Group’s regional strategy is centred on establishing robust local operations supported by a shared technology core and extensive payment connectivity, anchored by regulatory compliance, governance, and operational resilience as foundations for sustainable growth.

About Debia

Debia is a Singapore-headquartered payments technology group providing merchant acquiring and payment solutions to businesses.

Debia Pte. Ltd. is licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore as a Major Payment Institution to provide merchant acquisition, domestic money transfer and cross-border money transfer services.

Through its integrated payment platform and network of payment partnerships, Debia supports businesses across multiple payment methods and channels. The Group is expanding its presence across Southeast Asia, with Malaysia representing the next stage of its regional development.

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SOURCE Debia Pte. Ltd.

SINGAPORE, Oct. 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Zenika today announced that Adrien Nortain, Group Chief Technology Officer, has moved his base from France to Singapore, strengthening the company’s technology leadership in Asia and supporting the next phase of its growth strategy.

As Group CTO at Zenika, Adrien navigates the full spectrum of modern IT challenges, driving enterprise transformation by aligning technical execution with high-level business strategy. Leveraging deep expertise in system architecture and engineering, he systematically addresses critical modern IT friction points, from managing legacy system modernization and scaling complex architectures to mitigating security risks and tech debt. By prioritizing sustainable tech practices, especially in the AI era, alongside operational resilience, Adrien equips organizations to master high-stakes technical complexity while maintaining agile, future-ready IT infrastructures.

Returning to Singapore, where he was previously based, Adrien will continue to lead Zenika’s global technology direction and manage its CxO Advisory Team, while working more closely with regional teams and clients. He will also help ramp up Zenika Singapore’s consulting services, connecting the company’s global thinking on AI, Data, Cloud and Engineering Excellence with the needs of organisations across Asia.

“Singapore is an important base for Zenika as organisations across the region move quickly from experimentation towards more structured adoption, while leveraging modern AI capabilities. I’m looking forward to working closely with our teams and clients here, while connecting the expertise and practices being developed across Zenika globally to navigate the complexity of this AI era,” said Adrien Nortain.

The move further strengthens collaboration between Zenika’s European and Asian engineering communities and reinforces Singapore’s role in the company’s broader technology strategy, as Adrien will also act as the bridge between the Singapore and France teams, keeping collaboration running smoothly across both offices.

Timothée Dufresne, Managing Director of Zenika Singapore, said: “Having Adrien based in Singapore brings Zenika’s global technology leadership closer to our regional teams and clients. It will help us accelerate the way we develop, adapt and apply our technical offering across Asia.”

About Zenika:

Founded in 2006 by Carl Azoury, Zenika is a digital services boutique specializing in business transformation, IT modernization, and innovation. With 600 employees across 12 offices worldwide, Zenika partners with organizations in telecom, finance, and retail to deliver sustainable digital solutions. Zenika places people and innovation at the heart of its approach, valuing proximity, loyalty, and a deep respect for its founding values: innovation, sharing, and passion. This commitment guarantees an environment conducive to sustainable innovation and talent development, where the growth of each individual contributes to shared success.

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SOURCE Zenika Singapore

CometAPIis a platform that platform brings multimodal models and newly released frontier APIs into a single OpenAI-compatible interface

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — As artificial intelligence moves rapidly from experimentation into production, developers are facing a new infrastructure challenge: the number of available AI models is growing faster than the tools and workflows needed to manage them.

Instead of working with a single model provider, modern AI teams increasingly need access to multiple large language models, image generators, video models, audio systems and specialized AI services. Each provider can introduce different APIs, authentication methods, SDKs, pricing structures and technical requirements. For developers, keeping pace with the model market can therefore mean spending significant engineering resources on integration and maintenance rather than product development.

CometAPI is positioning itself as an infrastructure layer designed to address that fragmentation. The platform provides a unified, OpenAI-compatible API through which developers can access more than 500 AI models, using a single API key and interface. According to CometAPI, the platform currently serves more than 10,000 active developers and provides average response times of less than 400 milliseconds and a 99.9% service uptime target.

Building AI Infrastructure Around Developers

The idea behind CometAPI is rooted in a problem that has become increasingly familiar to AI developers: model innovation is accelerating, but the underlying process of accessing those models remains fragmented.

CometAPI CEO Lee Sonic has described the motivation behind the platform in similarly practical terms. In a public statement about the company’s origins, Sonic said that he started CometAPI after becoming frustrated with the multiple registrations, incompatible APIs, credit-card requirements and billing dashboards involved in testing different AI models.

“As a developer, I was exhausted from dealing with fragmented AI tools,” Sonic wrote when describing the origins of CometAPI.

His broader argument is that AI infrastructure should absorb this complexity rather than transfer it to application developers. In another public post, Sonic described CometAPI not simply as an API aggregator, but as an infrastructure layer designed to make AI development less dependent on individual model providers.

That philosophy is reflected in the platform’s technical architecture. Developers can use a single CometAPI credential to access models from multiple providers and switch models by changing the model parameter rather than rebuilding an application’s entire integration layer.

For teams developing AI-powered SaaS products, coding assistants, automation systems, research applications and multimodal products, the model-agnostic approach can provide a way to evaluate different models according to quality, latency, availability and cost without maintaining an entirely separate integration for every provider.

CometAPI’s public platform currently highlights more than 500 AI models, more than 10,000 active developers, average response times below 400 milliseconds and 99.9% service availability. The company also states that its pricing can provide ongoing savings of approximately 20% to 40% compared with official provider pricing, depending on the model and usage.

The underlying proposition is straightforward: as the number of AI models continues to increase, developers need infrastructure that can absorb model complexity rather than add another layer of it.

Frontier Models and Full Multimodal Coverage, Led by GPT-6 Astra

CometAPI prioritizes rapid integration of the industry’s most capable models. Notably, the platform recently added OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra (On September 5, 2026) , a flagship reasoning and computer-use model featuring a 1.05-million-token context window and strong performance on complex coding, research, and agentic workflows. Developers can access GPT-6 Astra through the same unified key and dashboard used for all other supported models, at rates approximately 20% below official OpenAI standard pricing for both short- and long-context usage.

Beyond text and reasoning, CometAPI provides comprehensive multimodal support, including image generation, video generation (such as Kling and Veo series), audio transcription and synthesis, and specialized tools. This breadth allows teams to build end-to-end pipelines—combining language models with vision, video, and speech—under a single credential and consistent interface. This model diversity is particularly relevant as AI applications become less dependent on a single “best” model. Different tasks can require different trade-offs. A model optimized for reasoning may not be the most economical option for high-volume classification, while a specialized image or video model may be better suited to a creative workflow.

Independent developers and engineering leaders have echoed the practical benefits. Leonid Dolgirev, SDE-2 of Servicenow, stated: “As developers, we really enjoy communicating with the CometAPI support team, and we would not want to switch to alternative API services.” Kevin, CEO of Bytewatchers, added: “We sincerely appreciate the CometAPI team for the excellent API support, partnership, and assistance—your help has enabled the successful use of API keys in the Claude Code setup and provided valuable second opinions, making you a fantastic partner.” Daniel Schweig, a developer working with Kindle Direct Publishing workflows, noted the desire to consolidate LLM and image traffic onto the platform because of competitive pricing and unified access.

Faster Model Integration and Lower API Costs

The speed of AI model releases is creating a new requirement for infrastructure providers: keeping up with the frontier.

For developers, a model announcement is only the beginning. The next steps are accessing the API, testing performance, evaluating costs, comparing results with existing models and determining whether the new capability can improve a production workflow.

CometAPI has built its product roadmap around this continuous integration cycle. 

Cost is another part of the equation.

CometAPI currently promotes **20% to 40% ongoing cost savings** compared with official model pricing, with a pay-as-you-go model and no monthly subscription requirement. The company says its pricing advantage comes in part from its ability to aggregate large-scale model usage and pass pricing efficiencies to developers.

The distinction becomes increasingly important as AI moves into production. A model that costs only a few cents per interaction at prototype scale can represent a substantial operating expense when multiplied across millions of API calls. For AI agents, automated workflows and high-volume SaaS products, the ability to compare models and optimize the balance between performance and cost can become an important part of infrastructure management.

CometAPI therefore combines three elements within a single platform: access to a growing range of frontier and multimodal models, a common API layer for integration, and pricing designed to reduce the cost of model usage.

Users highly value the CometAPI platform, likely because it genuinely offers them greater convenience.

Neha Jain, a Senior ML Engineer at PayPal and former Microsoft SDE, said, “CometAPI aims to make models available as quickly as possible—ideally on day one—once stable access is ready. So, instead of the workflow: **new model → find a provider → set everything up → start testing**, the process becomes much closer to: **new model → change the model name → start testing**.” Kriti Jaiswal, an SDE-2 at ServiceNow, notes: “CometAPI places multiple models behind a single OpenAI-compatible API, making it easier to test routing strategies without the need to maintain separate integrations.”

About CometAPI

CometAPI is an AI infrastructure platform designed to provide reliable, controllable and scalable access to multiple AI models through a unified API layer. The platform provides developers and businesses with access to more than 500 AI models through a single API and credential, covering language, image, video and audio use cases. CometAPI is designed to reduce integration complexity, support flexible model selection and provide transparent cost and usage management for AI applications in production environments.

Media Contact

CometAPI
Email: support@cometapi.com
Official site: View here

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SOURCE CometAPI