DBS chief information officer Jimmy Ng is more than just ‘coder in chief’
Besides deploying technology and having IT skills, how else can business leaders help enable continuous innovation and drive growth?
Over the past decade, DBS Bank’s continued rise is a success story of the global banking industry. Under the leadership of CEO Piyush Gupta, the Singapore-headquartered bank has embarked upon a journey of deep digital transformation, seeking to become more of a tech company than a financial institution.
Its efforts have paid off — it was recognised as the best bank in the world by New York-based financial publication Global Finance last year, beating out other more established global names.
Despite Gupta’s prominence in leading this digital transformation, the CEO also relies heavily on the bank’s chief information officer (CIO) to execute his vision for the organisation. He has credited former CIO David Gledhill for playing a defining role in shaping this transformation over the decade. The veteran banker retired in 2019 and is now serving in a part-time advisory role.
Stepping into these large shoes is the bank’s former deputy head, group technology and operations Jimmy Ng, who has been the CIO for close to two years now. He is no newcomer to DBS, joining just one week before Gupta. After more than a decade at the bank, Ng has experienced DBS’s digital transformation first hand, helping to pioneer the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in managing the bank’s ATM fleet and streamlining its auditing processes.
Not that Ng’s foray into technology roles has been a conventional one. While he earned an undergraduate degree in information systems, most of his career has been spent in a wide range of banking functions that have nothing to do with technology. These include stints as the executive director of risk advisory services at ABN-AMRO, the head of derivative operations, APAC at RBS Global Banking and Markets, and regional head of FX audit at
Digital readiness
Ng says that the drive to digitalise DBS’s operations was initially a logical solution to solve a collective business problem rather than a deliberate move to digitise. “We had the aspiration of becoming the ‘Asian Bank of Choice’,” he explains. But this motto required the bank to become more customer-centric. So, digital technology was harnessed due to its potential to improve customer experiences such as helping reduce ATM wait times and machine breakdown rates.
Building on the strong foundation of his predecessor, Ng aims to steer DBS towards its vision of becoming the “best bank for a better world”, combining top-class banking with changing the world for the better.
But the onset of Covid-19 interrupted these plans and the bank huddled down to weather the economic storm. Ng sees the pandemic as not only a challenge, but also an opportunity for innovation. “[The pandemic] actually accelerated a lot of thinking about how we should be taking our technology forward over the next five years,” he says.
While there had previously been doubts on whether certain segments of the workforce (such as the older workers) would ever be able to achieve digital readiness, many of these workers stepped up and adapted during the “circuit breaker”.
People, he says, are also increasingly asking “how something can be done” instead of “why it cannot be done”, signalling a more progressive and innovative mindset within the bank.
Tech for all talents
It is perhaps Ng’s unique journey to the CIO role and his experiences during the pandemic that have influenced his understanding of who is able to partake in this digital revolution. The stereotype of tech workers is unfortunately that of socially inept tech nerds. While science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduates have been encouraged to boost these ranks, it is often assumed that these jobs are not meant for non-STEM graduates.
Ng disagrees with such a misconception. He argues that graduates in these disciplines have a unique and valuable contribution to make to a digitalised firm. “The ability for us to problem-solve is not just about technology — it is about bringing in different skill sets,” he says, adding that DBS’s approach is to get people from various disciplines and train them in the basics of technology so they can apply their unique skill sets within a digital context.
For instance, Ng observes that the question of data privacy is not just about the technical ability to protect data, but also about understanding the ethical concerns behind upholding that privacy and building that into tech solutions.