On February 19 the IFoA submitted its feedback and recommendations to HM Treasury on the Phase II Consultation of the Financial Services Future Regulatory Framework Review. [...]

Here are sixty-one tips which I have distilled from my sixty-one years of life for young actuaries. These lessons are roughly in the order of my appreciating and applying them. [...]

Professor Richard Smith of Singapore Management University and I published this short article, “Managing Across Borders” in May 2019. We contrast leadership traits between Asian and Western leaders. I have been a partner and guest lecturer of Professor Smith’s Human Capital and EMBA classes in SMU since 2012.

I represented NTUC Income on the Executive Committee of the International Cooperatives and Mutual Insurance Federation (ICMIF). In May 2014, I contributed a short blog on their website, where I argued that the time for business to adopt the Triple Bottom Line has arrived. The 3 Ps are Planet, People and Profit, coined by an Englishman, John Elkington many years ago.

From 2007 to 2013, I was the CEO of a big composite insurance cooperative in Singapore called NTUC Income and from 2013 to 2017 I was the first GCEO of the holding company (NTUC Enterprise) of all the cooperatives. We called our cooperatives Social Enterprises. In these first of two articles which were published in the national dailies, I reflected on my own learning.The gist of this is that for business to thrive they have to make social sense, and for social enterprises to thrive they have to make business sense. In that regard, we have to transform ourselves, so that we can continue to be driven by our social purpose nut at the same time increase our quest for commercial excellence.

The title of this article “Why did no one seemed to see the crisis coming” mirrored exactly what the Queen of Great Britain asked when she visited my alma mater London School of Economics in December 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis. In this article, which was published in our national daily The Straits Times, I attempted to answer the question.

On 20 August 2007, NTUC Income kick started a 1500-day transformation process which we called the “Cultural Revolution”. We had many good values like trust, teamwork and execution orientation. But we were weak in having a sense of ownership, independence of thought, achievement orientation, and creativity. We drew inspiration from Hofstede’s cultural dimensions to rally and sustain the Revolution.

In this article, I assured the public, that “doing good” remain the foundational value of NTUC Income, even as we embarked on our Cultural Revolution.