The recipient of the CIO of the Year award at the IDC Future Enterprise Awards 2022 for Singapore, Jimmy Ng, the group chief information officer and head of Group Technology & Operations at DBS Bank, list among his experiences: middle office, operations, risk advisory services and product control.
However, his passion is in using technology as a key strategic enabler to make a difference.
Early days at DBS
“When I joined DBS in the Consumer Banking Operations team nearly a decade ago, I combined my passion for technology with digitalising operations. We used our customer-centric mindset to help us harness data analytics and machine learning techniques to develop our ATMs/Self Service Banking,” recalled Ng.
Other experiences include using AI/ML technologies to digitise auditing approaches such as continuous auditing, predictive auditing, and agile auditing. In the middle office technology, his team transformed into a digitally driven unit in tackling the AML/KYC challenges that all banks experience.
“Today, we have one of the most digital, AI-enabled AML/KYC workflows in the industry. As part of the Enterprise Architecture/Site Reliability Engineering team, our digital leadership caught the eyes of many technology giants who asked us to share our experience,” he commented.
Lessons in leadership
The first lesson is trade-offs. Ng acknowledged that part of leadership is learning to balance risks and rewards, whether that is long- or short-term. “There is no such thing as the “perfect solution”; only optimal trade-offs that we will make do with,” he explained.
The second is to find the “method in the madness”. “Finding the secret sauce and mastering it regardless of my role. Staying curious keeps me learning and transforming,” he divulged.
Other key traits include being ambidextrous in embracing both the hardware and “heartware”, in both areas of technology and creativity, and connecting the dots across industries and global affairs.
Ng reckons the role of the CIO is a mix of a “heart surgeon” and a “neurosurgeon”. “As the heart surgeon, to rally the troops, boost morale, and keep the lights on, especially in times of crisis; as a neurosurgeon, to lead the transformation and change to empower effective teams to inspire trust, collaboration and ultimately innovation,” he continued.
He believed that nurturing a people-first mindset and dealing with change are important skill sets to empower effective teams. Within the DBS Technology and Operations (T&O) leadership team, have a collective commitment to role model and bring to life how T&O should think and work as a team of equal partners with our business teams.
Ng refers to this as transformational leadership, a culture where every employee is a leader who will create an environment and ethos in the company that will make DBS a true learning organisation.
An evolving landscape
Ng opined that digital adoption and consumption have changed irrevocably following Covid-19. One of the biggest changes is the massive increase in digital adoption by customers who are conventionally slower to warm up to e-transactions.
“Consequently, innovation to adopt digital solutions on all fronts accelerated, even digital banking. We delivered on major projects we faced and helped Team DBS move into remote working in record time with virtually no productivity loss, extend banking services to customers, and protect employees,” he added.
New technologies like blockchain are at a tipping point. “At DBS, we have numerous projects aimed at unleashing the potential of a blockchain-driven world such as Project Orchid and Project Guardian,” revealed Ng.
He pointed to DBS’ Fix Marketplace, a fully digital issuance platform, where issuers directly connect with investors, as an example of how DBS reimagined and digitalised capital markets.
Attitude towards new technologies
Recognising the accelerating advances in technology, Ng says the team keeps a close eye on the maturity scale of emerging technologies and seizes new opportunities to disrupt the financial industry.
To stay ahead of the innovation curve, DBS took an outside-in view to help it identify disruptive technologies and “Big Themes” that “redefine the world through relevant and new focus areas that deepen our understanding through experimentation, and ultimately, adoption.
“Currently, we’re exploring the metaverse, decentralised finance (DeFi), tokenisation beyond financial assets, and digital twin technology. So, I say “Game On”, and allow our staff to experiment and broaden their horizon and thinking.
“Our “North-Star” future-casting intervention allows the bank to envision the world in the far future and see potential social, economic, and technology changes in the long run while keeping the customer at the heart of everything we do," he elaborated.
Ensure compliance while promoting innovations and growth
Ng says the organisation uses the Barbell Strategy to balance the need for innovation and resiliency. “We innovate without compromising regulatory requirements, security, or resiliency,” he added.
In so doing, the bank saw its release cadence rise to 64,000 from 50x. “Our co-created accelerator programs allowed us to soar on the innovative front and craft digital solutions respectively,” said Ng.
“Our regulatory compliance takes a service-centric approach in examining our end-to-end functions and dependencies that support critical business services. The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practice sets guardrails for us to innovate at scale in a safe and reliable manner.”
Jimmy Ng
Testing tools simulate failures and attacks to detect weaknesses and enhance resilience by sieving out potential failure points. “We have a set of guiding principles that ensure our approach to data is purposeful, unsurprising, respectful and explainable,” he continued.
People and team strategy
According to Ng, DBS focuses on nurturing our talents and experts to stay ahead of the curve through accelerated career paths, management tracks, and hands-on training.
“Our employees are encouraged to think critically through innovation, growth, and customer centricity to improve our customer experience. Not only that, but they’re also given opportunities to meet different people and situations to experiment with ideas and collaborate within DBS Asia X, the fintech community,” he elaborated.
“We are also big on cultivating a culture of blameless incident retrospectives, which advocates learning without reproach, with an inquiring, objective and positive mindset,” he added.
Role in corporate ESG and sustainability aspirations
Ng says as CIO, optimising technology is key to becoming the best bank for a better world.
“As such, we are committed to achieving net-zero operational carbon emissions across our markets by the end of 2022. To increase our compute power, while shrinking data centres across Asia, we’re investing in cloud infrastructure and rearchitected our applications to be cloud-ready,” he elaborated. “As part of our growth towards a more sustainable future, we retrofitted DBS Newton Green into a net zero building, making it Singapore’s first net zero building by a bank.”
DBS joined Temasek, SGX and Standard Chartered, to co-found Climate Impact X (CIX), a global platform for the exchange of high-quality carbon credits.
Advice for future CIO leaders
Ng believes that the road to greatness is seldom straightforward, with the world being complex and the risk landscape always shifting. He says CIOs must be prepared for unprecedented times, and how to apply technology to the appropriate scenarios and maximise value-add for the firm.
“Our people are our secret sauce. Build a transparent and psychologically safe culture to encourage teams to thrive despite adversaries, and value every member’s contribution.
“Find meaning in what you do. Explore your path with humility and humour, and find balance. And when facing challenges, a dose of optimism reminds us that our work is not done until it’s better."
Jimmy Ng
“Building a great team is key to success and keeping the focus on a greater purpose makes all the difference. As they say: “If you want to run fast, run alone. If you want to run far, run together.”
