An Ecosystem Playbook: Engage, Experiment And Execute

It is hard to predict future outcomes when you start a greenfield work in nascent space, and I was in a greenfield situation five years ago in a developing area called FinTech. On 3 August 2015, I took up a new job as the Chief FinTech Officer of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) after a long stint at Citibank. I was apprehensive, excited and also optimistic about the possibilities of developing a body of work which is both transformative and foundational. Early expectations were set on how the success would look like after Managing Director, Ravi Menon’s speech, “A Smart Financial Centre” at Global Technology Law Conference 2015 on 29 June 2015,3 where he laid out a framework to establish ourselves as a smart financial centre by 2020. Fast-forward and now at the end of the five-year journey, when I look back, it feels like we had an excellent plan to execute and deliver. The reality is we didn’t plan for this outcome nor had a pre-defined five-year strategy. Instead, we agreed on two things — first, build a competent team within MAS, and to outsiders, we will act as enablers with an entrepreneurial spirit; secondly, a guiding rail to take the journey which was, “we will engage deep, we will experiment a lot, we will execute our promises, and we will be empathy driven”…