Bankers should keep an open mind, stay agile in digital age: UOB’s Kevin Lam

KEVIN Lam believes that having an open mind and being ready for new ideas is key in the ever-changing banking industry.

“When you go into digital banking, there is no proven model. Who can say that they know exactly the way?” said Lam, head of TMRW and group digital banking at UOB.

Lam was appointed to his role in 2020. He started his career over 30 years ago in consumer banking, and has taken up various positions over the years including head of loans in Singapore, head of consumer banking in Malaysia and group chief executive officer (CEO) in Indonesia.

Noting that the banking sector is getting increasingly disrupted by digital banking initiatives, Lam said there is a need to be agile to find suitable solutions, especially since digital banking is still a new area.

“We need to test and learn; we need to experiment. But we need to also always reflect and be courageous enough to acknowledge when something is not working, when we need to change course, or when we need to do something different,” he said.

Here are some excerpts from Lam’s conversation with The Business Times:

How did you end up here?

I have been in UOB for 17 years now; and on average, I take up a new role every 3 years.

After the launch of TMRW in Thailand in 2019, we were going to launch TMRW in Indonesia. Then, being the CEO of Indonesia, I was very excited to receive this new digital banking service. There was a lot that we did to prepare — our whole infrastructure, our service culture, our call centres, our marketing, everything about UOB — to get ready.

One year after that, during Covid, this position opened up because the predecessor left. The group CEO had called me and said, “Kevin, come back to Singapore and do this.”

Sometimes in life, it's not so much that you plan where you want to go and what you want to do. But rather, opportunities open up, and you're at the right place at the right time.

Can you elaborate on a key trend you see within your area?

A broad trend is disruption and transformation. With new competition coming in, it’s clear that we need to change and look at ways where we can disrupt our conventional business model.

Because if we don't attempt to be wary and mindful of this potential disruption, it can become the moment you become irrelevant.

The essence of this is hyper personalisation. In the past, in banking and marketing, we often talk about segmentation. The opportunity today is to segment to the customer of 1. For example, if you have 5 million customers, every one of your 5 million customers should be treated differently.

How does this affect your role?

The mandate the group CEO gave to me was to disrupt the conventional business model. So we need to have the digital capability to serve existing customers, but also at the same time, be able to look out of the horizon and at things that are being done by the new competition: Are they able to redefine banking?

Being a part of a conventional bank, we are trying to straddle both sides. We need to serve existing customers, because there are people who want to keep it a little more stable and simple. But you also have a group of people who may be open to these new ideas.

Up till the last year or so, I've been more like a conventional banker, so there are a lot of things that I needed to relearn and unlearn about banking.

One thing to look out for is I need to have a fresh mindset, and open mind to learn new things. When I first came to this role, I was working with a very international team. The language that they use and the way in which they think, made me realise that I needed to take courses.

I've been a CEO before, but that doesn't mean I know everything. I still have to relearn how to do things, or unlearn some of the assumptions that we have.

The Banker is a monthly column on changing roles in banking and finance.