Kelvin Lee: Digital and Marketing Transformation

🎬 I was invited by National University of Singapore to talk about my mid-career learning journey on Channel News Asia/ CNA (an Asean broadcast news network) in April 2023.

During the height of Covid in 2020, I thought it was the opportune moment in life (especially if biz and leisure travel would be very limited) to return to the University environment to attempt a Masters program!

After evaluating a range of MBAs and MSCs programs in Singapore, I applied and was accepted into the / NUS-ISS Master of Technology in Digital Leadership 2-year part-time program (https://lnkd.in/gQtGGE-R).

🧗The journey was tough but one I don't regret.

The program stretched me out of my comfort zone 'in marketing' - and has given me a deeper understand of the technology side of enterprise digital business models, architecture, platforms and ecosystems, and picked up needed skills such as leading through digital complexity and building digital teams.

Most importantly, it has helped me to catalyze new relationships with my course mates from various sectors, the lecturers, the guest-speakers and Capstone Project business sponsors at Bolloré Logistics, one of the global top 10 international transport and logistics operators.

🥃 After 24+ months (including thousands of hours of reading, assignments and presentations) multi-tasking and not sleeping much in between a significant job change, and one more new-born, 2 trips halfway around the world to visit family in Canada, plus the world opening up, I've finally come out alive on the other side.

Thanks to my previous and current bosses and team members, and not forgetting my wife especially for supporting me through the journey.

It was said that the first evidence of banking activities began around 2000 BC, in Assyria, India and Sumerian. The commodity of lending then was grain to facilitate farmers trade between cities and towns.

People around the world now benefit from the centuries of financial markets development since that milestone in history. Fast forward to 2021, we no longer have to barter tea leaves, cows and chickens (not in most places anyway!). In most of our retail banking needs, we no don't have to visit a bank branch to withdraw, transfer money or trade shares and cryptocurrencies- we can simply do so via our mobile or even wrist device.

Since the dawn of this century, we have seen an industry wide push on developments such as APIs adoption, data-driven culture, cloud, big data and predictive analytics. IDC research suggest that the global IT tech spend by banks will reach $250B in 2024.

Banks have been restructuring their legacy IT stack towards an agile, stackable digital platform infrastructure that provides real-time and improved insights on customer intelligence, creating a positive cycle of customer first-centricity - a core foundation of any bank or fintech.

A glimpse into the future of work

The old world of bustling office environments probably isn’t coming back in it's full force before the Covid pandemic of 2020-21. The future of work has created a critical need for financial institutions to implement remote working measures. More than just about ‘working from home’ tools, Anywhere Ops or the 'anyway office of tomorrow' is a business critical and resilient operating model that ‘supports customers everywhere, enable employees everywhere and manage the deployment of business services across distributed infrastructures’.

Virtual and augmented reality is heading up the slope of enlightenment. META, Facebook's new entity name announced in Oct 2021, is investing $10B into developing and managing the metaverse ecosystem. Current tools as Zoom, On24, and Teams has resulted in a passive and fairly static experience, leading to ‘Zoom fatigue'. If major enterprises choose to invest more readily, VR/AR applications could see an accelerated trajectory growth - if the timing of the intersection of the software, hardware and content can be met.

Customer Experiences 4.0

There are scalable opportunities to enhance experiences in product (immersive data exploration, virtual trading floors - eg. UBS and Hololens), marketing (virtual conferences, CAB, corporate networking, story-telling and content marketing); sales (virtual financial agents e.g. Fidelity Labs; user-training) and HR/ employee (VR interviews, team building workshops e.g Fidelity) experiences.

Needless to say, blockchain also the potential to disrupt finance in areas such as smart contracts, clearing and settlement, digital identity and international payments. However, the adoption across the industry at the global stage is still at a conceptual stage. Whilst we have seen the likes of Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) leveraging blockchain and DBS’s trade financing platform for agricultural commodities, the creation of a purposeful end-to-end platform whilst on-boarding multiple counter-parties is a not a straight-forward task - and can take years of regulatory and legal discussions.

Banks have also rolled out artificial intelligence-enabled initiatives such as intelligent conversation agents on their website, credit assessment, customer on boarding and fraud-detection. In the next 2-3 years, we will witness workflows and processes being incorporated into the trend of hyper-automation 10 - a combination of RPA, AI and machine learning, allowing repetitive tasks to be automatically created by themselves.

'Phydigitalisation'

Robots will ‘be promoted’ from the retail branch (e.g. HSBC’s Pepper Humanoid robot in USA) into the headquarters’ middle-office and back-end. There will be more humanoid/ physical robots present and pervasive inside the bank operations, virtually assisting humans.

Looking towards the next decade, the banking industry should see a mainstream adoption of a 3D banking world - a digital ‘metaverse’ twin. The traditional thinking is that this is relevant for manufacturing and industrial operations but use cases in banking could evolve into channel and branch management, ESG and other data related forecasting models as well as risk modelling. Individual and businesses may very be increasingly represented by secured digital avatars, linked to our real-world identities - in the process, creating a virtual banking industry, powered by cryptocurrencies and blockchain for payments and transactions.

Balancing today's needs and tomorrow's challenges - leading the transformation

Digital leaders in finance need to embrace the future of business models improvements and possibilities whilst keeping today's operations strong and profitability up.

Customer needs - Attain an end to end understanding of the customer journey, identify pain points, address opportunities using design thinking approaches. Through building prototypes, align and combine today’s technology with tomorrow’s possibilities, allowing mutual strengths to shine.

Outside-in view - Understand and assess the strategic industry shifts, key events, major M&A activities, via news alerts, industry reports and white-papers.

Inside-out view - Drive a culture of lifelong learning across the firm, achieved with senior leadership endorsement, via skills-gap identification and incentives to drive positive behaviours. Enable and empower teams to explore data and innovations for cross-team experimentations.

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This blog was written in Feb 2021 and updated in Nov 2021, as part of my assignment in the Master of Technology in Digital Leadership program I am currently pursuing at the National University of Singapore - Institute of Systems Science. My views and opinions written are my own - and have no relation to work at my past or future employers. 

Please join my network on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter. I also invite you to view my other contributions to the marketing industry at iamkelvinlee.com. Thanks for reading!

References

1 Wikipedia - History of Banking : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_banking

2 Reuters - Banks roll out robots as pandemic shakes up IT plans : https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-banks-technology-focu-idINKBN27E190

3 Gartner Top Strategic Tech Trends for 2021 https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/trends/top-strategic-technology-trends-hyperautomation-gb-pd

4 TED - Zoom Fatigue is real. https://ideas.ted.com/zoom-fatigue-is-real-heres-why-video-calls-are-so-draining/

5 Finextra - UBS Trials virtual reality trading floor https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36600/ubs-trials-virtual-reality-trading-floor

6 Fortune - Amazon and Fidelity labs collaborated on a virtual reality financial agent https://fortune.com/2018/05/15/amazon-fidelity-labs-virtual-reality/

7 WSJ - Fidelity Investments Tries Collaboration Via Virtual Reality https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-hires-to-the-holodeck-fidelity-investments-tries-collaboration-via-virtual-reality-11601890201

8 KMPG - Blockchain in Finance : https://home.kpmg/uk/en/home/insights/2019/03/bffb-blockchain-in-finance.html

9 DBS - Agrocorp taps into DBS APIs to launch blockchain trade platform for commodity trade https://www.dbs.com/newsroom/Agrocorp_taps_into_DBS_APIs_to_launch_blockchain_trade_platform_for_commodity_trade

10 Gartner Top Strategic Tech Trends for 2021 https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/trends/top-strategic-technology-trends-hyperautomation-gb-pd

11 HSBC Bank Rolls Out Pepper Robot at Flagship U.S. Branch

https://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/retail-hospitality/hsbc-bank-first-pepper-robot-nyc-branch/

Similar to Alphabet/ Google, Facebook is planning to announce a new name for the company on Oct. 28, though the company could unveil it sooner.

The change is meant to reflect the company’s move from social media toward what has been dubbed the #metaverse in which experiences in the physical and virtual worlds are combined.

The new company would house Facebook's collection of businesses including the Facebook social network, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus.

https://www.breakingviews.com/considered-view/facebooks-new-name-grandiose-banal-or-honest/?

“Often today, because we’re so nose deep in analysis paralysis, we lose sight of the magic behind marketing which is the true, genuine, emotional connection with our customers." Insightful interview from  Eugene Lee McDonald's the ongoing battle and balance between performance and data-based marketing vs story-telling, brand and creative campaigns marketing.

Incredibly bullish on VR for business marketing. Who can advise me on rolling this out for a lead gen or retention use case? Except from Channel News Asia article

“With 90 per cent of employees at some of the world's biggest financial firms now working at home due to a resurgence in COVID-19 infections, more and more companies are experimenting with VR.” 

PwC and American Express use VRtuoso, a virtual reality presentation platform, that utilises headsets made by Pico Interactive for training and boosting sales.

So far, most of VR's real-world business applications are in medicine and retail, including training department stores salespeople how to deal with difficult customers.

Julie Ask, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, a US based-market consultant, says more widespread adoption is inevitable.

"I think VR technology adoption is going to continue to grow over time," she said.

Move away China and Silicon Valley ... the others are catching up ... read more

“Expansion strategies vary by region and sector. How quickly tech challengers move to replicate their success in other emerging markets or to set up shop in developed markets depends in part on the size of their home country or region. Southeast Asian challengers tend to focus on their region, while Chinese and Indian companies split between their large home markets and others. Faced with a limited local market, challengers from such countries as Israel and the UAE tend to “go global” from birth.

Although the tech challengers average $2 billion in revenues each, they are still growing at an average annual rate of almost 70%, which is six times faster than the tech sector in developed markets. Their average valuation of $6.3 billion puts most of them well beyond unicorn status. Companies based in China and Southeast Asia have the highest valuations—a reflection, in part, of their large local or regional markets. As a group, our challengers seem to be weathering the COVID-19 crisis well, with increases in both customers and usage frequency. Indeed, some sectors, such as gaming, edtech, and video streaming, have seen accelerated growth.”

I built a VR 360 app over summer!

Will VR be the common way we shop/ travel/ learn or market to customers within this decade?

Virtual Reality has been around for a few decades. Limitations such as headsets and dizziness (for some people) exist but I believe there is a massive untapped growth opportunity for marketing and product experiences.

During this past summer ‘lockdown’, I enrolled for a 6 week (every Saturday, all day!) 'Immersive VR 3D development' course at Mages Singapore to learn the basics of Unity (a cross-platform game engine to develop video games for web plugins, desktop platforms, consoles and mobile device), identify the building blocks of VR, create 3D environments, animations and EFX and how to publish an APK file into a Google Android device.

The learning was tedious - it was especially excruciating after lunch at 3 pm!

For my project submission at the end of the course, I decided to build a prototype VR app which simulates a possible reality in 30-40 years in which we can travel beyond physical spaces to various actual planets, moons and stars by checking ourselves into a SpacePort, strap in a full body Neuralink-enabled VR device and travel.

The app was actually exported into a APK file (which you can import into an Android phone and play it using Google Cardboard or something similar). I recorded a video capture here but it is unfortunately missing each environment’s soundscapes (I spent a lot of time looking for Hans Zimmer-esque stuff).

Learning and doing some basic programming on Unity has definitely made me realise the tremendous complexity and work involved in building games, camera positioning, scene transitions and SFX creations.

VR is the next frontier for Facebook - they acquired Oculus in 2014, and have recently announced that Oculus, Spark AR and Portal will now be part of the Facebook Reality Labs team.

I am very bullish that the future for VR will be in business, marketing, learning and product experiences - especially in the post Covid-19 pandemic world. 

The (The American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai (AmCham Shanghai) conducted a flash survey (involving 140+ respondents) in late August 2020, on the impact of a potential ban of #WeChat for American firms.  

▶ 88% of respondents said there would be a negative impact on operations stemming from the loss of WeChat as a communication tool and 56.3% said it would lead to a loss of competitiveness.

▶ Nearly half of respondents (41.5%) said there would be a negative impact on their revenue.

[10 min special podcast] I had the pleasure of speaking to the United Nations DP team on my journey on the topic of #socialmedia and how it applies to a firm's business and communications strategy.

Listen to the podcast here

I joined Marie Faulkner, Senior Social Media Manager at Marie Curie, and Chris Smith, Associate Director - Research & Analytics at Ketchum to discuss the ins and outs of writing an influencer marketing business case, led by our Onalytica’s Jack Morel-Paulo. 

I've seen numerous friends and contacts commenting about how 2019 has been 'c**p' and 'can't wait to go into 2020'. 

 2019 has definitely not been an easy year for me as well. I've experienced the spectrum of tremendous sadness and extreme joy, but my point is that if you're reading this now, we got through it. 

 We are alive. It's never been a better time to be alive and healthy despite ‘market volatility’, ‘brexit’, ‘impending market downturn’ ... because our physical and mental health is all that matters. 

Singapore (13 June 2019) - Was privileged to have shared the stage this week at ICONXQ19 with Sarah Lewis (Founder and Managing Director of Marketing By Design, ex- Head of Digital Marketing, in APAC for Baker Mackenzie) and Scott Bales, Managing Director of Innovation Labs Asia - as we discussed martec, digital tools, social media, social selling, video marketing and employee advocacy.

This was part of the series of ICON events, Market Leadership Conferences. Of course, shout out to Priyanka Nadkarni, Board Member at ICON and MD of Window Seat Consulting and Chui Mei at Hogan Lovells for inviting me.