Orient
Building Networks Connecting Business Creating Opportunities WWW.BRITCHAM.ORG.SG
MCI(P) 068/10/2017
THE OFFICIAL MAGAZINE OF THE BRITISH CHAMBER OF COMMERCE - SINGAPORE
SPECIAL FEATURES
15 27 ISSUE 64
ISSN 0219-1245
9 770219 124002
64
18TH ANNUAL BUSINESS AWARDS IN FOCUS: LUC ANDREANI, MANAGING DIRECTOR, FOODPANDA
ISSUE 64 / DEC 17
AUSSIE-RULES Skills for life
Integrity
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respectful and caring world Cae. Itati a doluptatur? Ximille custet, cuscitizen endae omnimus andandi stioreprovid evel id unti te vid ut We celebrate our students’ fugiatendus exped undipsamacademic, sporting and artistic achievements - day in and day out. However, we also instil a deeper quality - one which drives them to spur on their classmates, help a straggler over the wall and gracefully applaud the successes of others. The building of character is woven into everything we do. Speak to our friendly Admissions Team about becoming part of our community.
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Contents
09
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
11
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE
SPECIAL FEATURES 15
18th Annual Business Awards
27
In Focus: Luc Andreani, Managing Director, foodpanda
FEATURES 23
Moving People, not Buses
33
The Importance of a Collaborative and End-toend System for Client Lifecycle Management
36
Measuring Success, One KPI at a Time
39
Why the Gig Economy is a Huge Opportunity
43
Why Emotion Matters in Marketing
47
Aren’t we all Evidence-based Anyway?
50
Buying a Car in Singapore
AT THE CHAMBER 54
Britain in Southeast Asia News
56
Business Group News
58
Business Services News
60
BritCham New Members
62
Sterling News
65
Corporate News
68
Members’ Offers
70
Events
W W W. B R I T C H A M . O R G . S G
British Chamber of Commerce, Singapore, Sponsors GOLD AND DIVERSITY SPONSOR
GOLD SPONSORS
SILVER SPONSORS
BRONZE SPONSORS
SUPPORTING PARTNER
BRITCHAM BOARD: PRESIDENT: Bicky Bhangu: Rolls-Royce Singapore VICE-PRESIDENTS: Damian Adams: Simmons & Simmons Sian Brown: Barclays Bank PLC SECRETARY: Cecilia Handel: Tanglin Trust School Ltd TREASURER: Veronica McCann, Manulife US Real Estate Mgmt Pte Ltd BOARD MEMBERS: James Nesbitt, Standard Chartered Bank Richard Warburton: Arcadis Annabel Moore: Diageo Singapore Pte Ltd Haslam Preeston: Jardine Cycle & Carriage Limited David Pugh: The Fry Group Mark Chowdhry: Baxters International Andrew Vine: The Insight Bureau Andrew Pickup: Microsoft Asia Chris Reed: Black Marketing — Enabling LinkedIn For You Robert Williams: British Airways Damian Hills: The British Club COMMITTEES: Business Group: Richard Warburton Events: Sian Brown External Affairs: Bicky Bhangu Membership: Damian Adams
Editor: Nicole Alison Lim alison@britcham.org.sg
Orient is a quarterly magazine published by the British Chamber of Commerce, Singapore.
Co-Editor: Alexandra Teng marcoms@britcham.org.sg
© All rights reserved.
39 Robinson Road #11-03 Robinson Point Singapore 068911 Tel: +65 6222-3552 Fax: +65 6222-3556 Email: info@britcham.org.sg www.britcham.org.sg
The views and opinions expressed or implied in Orient are those of the authors or contributors and do not reflect those of the British Chamber of Commerce, its officers or editorial staff. No reproduction of articles without the prior permission of the Chamber. Unsolicited transparencies and articles are sent at owner’s risk
BUSINESS GROUP CHAIRPERSONS: Built Environment: Marius Toime (Chairperson), Rick Hancock (Co-Chair) Diversity & Inclusion: Stephen Trevis (Chairperson), Nella Goodarzi (Co-Chair) Energy & Utilities: Tim Rockell (Chairperson), Bree Miechel (Co-Chair) Entrepreneur & Small Business: Jonathan O'Byrne (Chairperson), Miles Gooseman (Co-Chair) Financial & FinTech: Ashley Jones (Chairperson), Nick Barlow (Co-Chair) InfoComm Technology: Andrew Pickup (Chairperson), Magda Chelly (Co-Chair), Hitan Mehta (Co-Chair) Leadership, Talent & Professional Development: Chris J Reed (Chairperson), Mark Chowdhry (Co-Chair), Joe Tofield (Co-Chair) Marketing & Creative: Beatrice Seilern (Chairperson), Chris J Reed (Co-Chair) Scottish Business Group: Neil Mclnnes Sustainability & Responsibility: Rosie Danyluk (Chairperson), Sarah Cragg (Co-Chair) Transport, Logistics & Supply Chain: Simon Petch Women in Business: Angel Cheung Young Professionals: Joe Tofield MANAGEMENT TEAM Executive Director: Olivia Widen Deputy Executive Director: Lucy Haydon Membership Manager: Nicole Wharfe Membership Administrator: Sharmila Maniam Marketing & Communications Executive: Nicole Alison Lim Senior Events Manager: Zoe Fazan Events Manager: Sophie Gowing Finance Manager: Pauline Yeo Business Services Manager: Carole McCarthy Senior Business Services Advisor: Nico Putri Safari Business Services Advisor: Jessie Or Office Administration Executive: Anna C Garciso
and the Chamber accepts no liability for loss or damage. Copy is not for sale and images belong to their respective owners. They are for illustrative purposes only, and no copyright infringement is intended. Designed by:
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Contact: Simon Cholmeley, Simon.Cholmeley@johnbrownnovus.com Design: Erika Wong, Erika.Wong@johnbrownnovus.com Khairunnisa, Khai.Anis@johnbrownnovus.com Creative Services: Kwan Gek Lian, GekLian.Kwan@johnbrownnovus.com Pearlyn Kwan, Pearlyn.Kwan@johnbrownnovus.com
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President’s Message
W W W. B R I T C H A M . O R G . S G
Dear Members, As the year draws to an end, we reflect on 2017 and the progress the Chamber has made on our commitment to support the business community in Singapore. Throughout the year, we have focused on encouraging this community to work together; sharing insights and best practice across professions and industries. We have taken this spirit of sharing beyond our borders and are working closer with Chambers in the ASEAN region. Collaboration is key for future success, which is why we were delighted to be involved in this year’s landmark charter with the Singapore Business Federation (SBF), joining 30 Singapore trade organisations and chambers to collaborate and facilitate the growth of the business community in Singapore. This is just one of the ways we are helping to strengthen the UK-Singapore relationship.
Bicky Bhangu
President, British Chamber of Commerce, Singapore
In 2017, we have focused on strengthening links with the UK, hosting a number of Ministerial Visits and Trade Missions. Synergies between the two countries is a common and prevailing theme in discussions. A clear demonstration of this alignment can be seen in the future economic strategies for both countries, with the UK’s Industrial Strategy and Singapore’s Committee on the Future Economy emphasising the importance of skills development, technology and innovation. These synergies provide opportunity for business and talent in both countries. The UK also recognises the key role that Singapore continues to play within ASEAN, with businesses using Singapore as a hub to springboard into the region. 2018 will see Singapore assuming the role of Chair for ASEAN, with a commitment to work actively to enhance integration between member nations. Within the Chambers, we also strive to collaborate with our partners in ASEAN to build and develop a strong business ecosystem in the region, as demonstrated by our Britain in Southeast Asia (BiSEA) Conference, where we brought together Presidents, Chairmen and Executive Directors from Chambers across the region to start building a collective voice for UK-ASEAN relations. Our members have also achieved a number of key successes across all industry sectors in 2017. It is important that we take time to recognise and celebrate these outstanding achievements and I was delighted to see a record number of entries for the 18th Annual Business Awards. Congratulations once again to all our winners, and thank you to everyone who submitted their entries. Looking ahead, we will continue to focus on areas where we can provide real value to our members. Our Business Groups have been streamlined to provide better and more opportunities for collaboration and sharing of insights. We look forward to seeing the outcomes from the newly-created Leadership, Talent & Professional Development business group and recent repositioning of the Diversity & Inclusion and Financial & FinTech business groups. In October, we welcomed Olivia Widen to our management team as Executive Director. Olivia’s global and regional experience will be invaluable as we continue to build a diverse and inclusive network across Singapore, the UK and throughout the region. This renewed focus, improvements to our business groups and growth in the Chambers are only possible thanks to the commitment and effort of the board, management team, business group chairs, committees and our members. I’d like to thank everyone for being part of this successful year, and I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and prosperous new year ahead. I look forward to seeing you all in 2018. Best Regards,
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Executive Director’s Message
W W W. B R I T C H A M . O R G . S G
Dear Members, This is my first message as Executive Director for the Orient magazine, to members and the wider BritCham community and magazine readership. I would like to begin by thanking Lucy Haydon for her outstanding work as Interim Executive Director and the continued support she will provide in her role as Deputy Executive Director. Likewise, the wider team for continuing to deliver above and beyond during this period. The continued success of the Chamber is a testament to their excellent and hard work. A note of recognition as well to Brigitte Holtschneider, with whom I have worked with in my prior role running the British Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia. Her leadership and the drive of BritCham set the benchmark for what we aspired to build there. It is against this backdrop that I take up my role with great enthusiasm and look forward to participating in contributing to the Chamber’s great success, a success that is not possible without our members.
Olivia Widen
Executive Director, British Chamber of Commerce, Singapore
Your engagement and commitment to BritCham underpins the very identity and purpose of the Chamber. I look forward to meeting each of you and hearing what we can do to ensure we are meeting your needs and vision for our organisation. Similarly, we will strive to continue delivering on value and remaining a diverse and welcoming Business Chamber in Singapore. I further look forward to working closely with the Board to deliver on our objectives and vision for 2018. As we enter the new year, we will look to articulate and share this with you all. Season’s greetings to you and all the best for 2018.
Best Regards,
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/britishchamber-of-commerce-singapore Twitter @britchamsg Instagram @britchamsg Facebook @bccsingapore
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Sterling Members
W W W. B R I T C H A M . O R G . S G
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THE CLUB WELCOMES ALL NATIONALITIES Call 6410 1100 or email membership@britishclub.org.sg to reserve your Club tour now! 73 Bukit Tinggi Road Singapore 289761 www.britishclub.org.sg FOLLOW The British Club on
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Special Feature
18 Annual Business Awards th
Congratulations to the winners of our 18th Annual Business Awards! Thank you for joining us in celebrating business excellence at the Gala Presentation and Dinner on 28th September 2017 at the Shangri-La Hotel, Singapore. The awards were presented to winners in nine categories by our Chamber President Bicky Bhangu and His Excellency Scott Wightman, the British High Commissioner. The Awards Presentation was expertly hosted by Sharanjit Leyl from the BBC for the 12th year, and our 300 guests comprised of British, Singaporean and International business leaders, owners, CEOs and senior executives both in global and regional roles. We were also delighted and honoured to be joined on the evening by our guest of honour and keynote speaker Josephine Teo, Minister, Prime Minister’s Office and Second Minister for Manpower and Foreign Affairs.
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Special Feature: 18th Annual Business Awards
Presenting the Winners of the 18th Annual Business Awards:
Outstanding UK-Singapore Collaboration
Winner:
As pioneers of high-value advanced aerospace manufacturing activities in Singapore, Rolls-Royce’s remarkable synergy between its Singapore- and UK-based teams, in addition to a strong partnership with the Singapore government, has resulted in growth of the aerospace industry. Judge Chow Wan Thonh, Head of Global Banking & Head of Corporate, Financials & Multinationals Banking for South East Asia, HSBCSingapore, was particularly impressed by Rolls-Royce’s ability to “develop talent in the country, collaborate with the local universities and build a regional hub in Singapore through knowledge transfer from the UK.” Judge Phil Townend, Chief Commercial Officer at Unruly APAC further commended Rolls-Royce on their "deliberate, continued progress as an integrated and key trade partner for UK-Singapore."
L-R: H.E. Scott Wightman, British High Commissioner; Lee Brough, Manufacturing Executive, Rolls-Royce; Dr. Bicky Bhangu, President of the British Chamber of Commerce
Finalists:
Excellence In Technology & Innovation
Winner:
Rebel & Soul are revolutionising brands’ and consumers’ perceptions of the memorable impact which events can achieve. Creating holograms, presenting the world’s first real-time virtual DJs, and staging augmented reality golf games are some of many ways in which Rebel & Soul have combined neuroscience and marketing technology to craft truly novel experiences. Judge Phil Townend, Chief Commercial Officer at Unruly APAC applauds Rebel & Soul on their ingenuity in combining multiple disciplines and media while achieving performance objectives: “Rebel & Soul are pushing the boundaries of innovation at the nexus of technology, music, experience and immersion. The future is theirs to own!” L-R: Dr. Bicky Bhangu; Kristy Castleton, Founder and Managing Director, Rebel & Soul
Finalists:
Category Sponsor:
Co-sponsored by:
Investing In People
Winner:
Swire Pacific Offshore (SPO) has worked out their commitment to develop employees in technical expertise as well as ground them in the company's core values, nurturing professionals who are not only skilled but also embrace humility and integrity in their pursuit for excellence. Judge Phil Townend, Chief Commercial Officer at Unruly APAC, speaks highly of SPO's practices, which have resulted in measurable success: "SPO is a multiple award-winning organisation that invests 6% of its turnover in people initiatives, and has a structured and demonstrable programme which clearly delivers." L-R: H.E. Scott Wightman; Dr. Bicky Bhangu; Colin Payne, HR Director, Swire Pacific Offshore
Finalists:
Outstanding Young Professional
Category Sponsor:
Winner:
Jonathan O'Byrne, Founder of Collective Works, is a design graduate, selftaught businessman and entrepreneur who grew his coworking space network to 13 times its founding size in the past four years. He now owns and operates a group of high-performance companies aligned to his vision of empowering businesses and the people within them. His resilience and foresight in blazing a trail, coupled with a genuine desire to catalyse his clients' success, won the vote of the judging panel. Judge Phil Townend says of him: "This is a remarkable story of entrepreneurship, betterment and a relentless drive to succeed. A fearless contributor to the ecosystem." "His eagerness to learn, test new business concepts, and achievements in such a short time is impressive. His willingness to give back is a differentiation," added Judge Chow Wan Thonh.
Finalists:
L-R: H.E. Scott Wightman; Jonathan O'Byrne, Founder, Collective Works; Dr. Bicky Bhangu
Category Sponsor:
Co-sponsored by:
18
Building Networks Connecting Business Creating Opportunities
Special Feature: 18th Annual Business Awards
Embracing Diversity & Inclusion
Winner:
As champions of cultural dexterity, PwC executes D&I programmes not as an obligation, but a determinant of success in their business. They have developed a Global Inclusion Index that requires its firms to use data analytics to plan, execute and track the progress of their D&I programmes. These programmes, which the judging panel deems “brilliant� and “progressive� are designed to attract, develop, and advance the most talented individuals regardless of their race, sexual orientation, religion, age, gender, disability status or any other dimension of diversity.
L-R: H.E. Scott Wightman; Karen Loon, Partner & Territory Diversity Leader, PwC; Dr. Bicky Bhangu
Finalists:
Category Sponsor:
Start-up Excellence
Winner:
Nova Satra Dx has a mandate to empower patients and physicians through advanced developments in molecular diagnostics. Led by an impressive management team, this start-up has raised over US$2m from institutional investors towards a game-changing blood test they’ve developed, capable of providing non-invasive, convenient and accurate detection of cancer based on Asian-specific epigenetic biomarkers. Our judging panel has great hopes for Nova Satra Dx, citing them as "potentially transformative� with “meditech which has been developed specifically for Asia. This will potentially enhance the lives of thousands." L-R: H.E. Scott Wightman; Kane Black, Chief Executive, Nova Satra Dx; Dr. Bicky Bhangu
Finalists:
Category Sponsor:
Co-sponsored by:
Excellence In Sustainability
Winner:
InfraCo Asia’s expertise is in creating viable infrastructure investment opportunities that balance the interests of host governments, local communities and domestic and international private sector investors. Judge Phil Townend was appreciative of the company’s “brilliant fund set up to de-risk and catalyse infrastructure projects which are changing the lives of thousands, whilst driving inward investment by the private sector.” Their projects "work across all countries, are low-cost and sustainable," commended Judge Bal Bagary, Interim Country Manager, Barclays Singapore & CFO, Barclays Asia Pacific. L-R: H.E. Scott Wightman; Dr. Bicky Bhangu; Allard Nooy, CEO, InfraCo Asia
Finalists:
Customer Engagement
Winner:
Our judging panel looked for strong and publicly visible customer-centric values that generate demonstrable improvements to customer satisfaction and profitability. With customers at the heart of their business, Tower Transit Singapore have achieved "fantastic reach", as pointed out by Judge Bal Bagary. "An absolute tour de force (excuse the pun) of a case study in multi-touchpoint consumer engagement. Bringing personality, technology and community activation to what has been a stagnant sector," said Judge Phil Townend.
L-R: Lucas Kwan, Customer Experience Officer, Tower Transit; Logan Narayanan, Customer Service & Revenue Officer, Tower Transit; Siti Jumat, Customer Experience Officer, Tower Transit; Wawa Abdullah, Customer Experience Officer, Tower Transit; H.E. Scott Wightman; Glenn Lim, Group Communications Director, Tower Transit; Deng Zhong Ming, Bus Captain, Tower Transit; Tan Kok Peng, Bus Captain, Tower Transit; Dr. Bicky Bhangu
Finalists:
Co-sponsored by:
20
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Special Feature: 18th Annual Business Awards
Success In ASEAN
Winner:
As Asia’s very own online social fundraising platform, SimplyGiving enables non-profits and social enterprises to crowdfund for donations and social loans that support causes in ASEAN and beyond. They work with over 950 partners and 34,000 donors and fundraisers across 20 countries, providing tailored online tools and support in order to increase donor reach. "An amazing example of a digital organisation whose platform touches the lives and communities of thousands across the region. Customised by language and currency, SimplyGiving is a truly region-wide community contributor," our judging panel affirms. L-R: H.E. Scott Wightman; Nikki Kinloch, CEO, SimplyGiving; Dr. Bicky Bhangu
Finalists:
Co-sponsored by:
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Special Feature: 18th Annual Business Awards
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Feature
W W W. B R I T C H A M . O R G . S G
Moving People, not Buses Glenn Lim, Group Communications Director, Tower Transit Group Public buses are often thought of as the transportation mode of last resort. However, transport operator Tower Transit challenges this perception with their unique approach to customer engagement and satisfaction. As winner in the Customer Engagement Category at BritCham’s 18th Annual Business Awards, their ever-developing success story is one we want to hear, tell‌ and even smell! Glenn lets us in on what makes their journey so special.
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P
ublic buses are often thought of as the transportation mode of last resort. And perhaps fairly so. Poorly maintained buses, unreliable arrival schedules, grimy seats and a complex olfactory cocktail of sweat and body odour are common complaints about public buses in cities around the world. In the UK, outside London, bus ridership has seen a decline through the years because people have come to expect the worst of public buses.
One UK-based bus operating company aims to change that perception right here in Singapore. On 28th February 2017, Tower Transit Singapore borrowed a leaf from the retail industry and rolled out
Feature: Moving People, not Buses
We see ourselves as being in the business of moving people, not buses. the world’s first scented buses, perfumed with its signature scent – a mix of fresh grass, citrus and peppermint. Created by the same engineers of ION Orchard’s and Changi Airport’s scents, the Tower Transit signature scent was designed to bring a sense of freshness to its buses. The idea was to revive the travel-weary passenger as he or she steps out of the humidity and onto a bus operated
by Tower Transit. And you know what Singapore’s humidity does to people. At some point in time, we’ve all been transformed from the perfect gentleman and lady into irritable troglodytes by the eternal Singapore summer. The story of the scented bus caught the attention of press around the world, and as Tower Transit’s Group Communications Director who also oversees customer experience, I was asked by the BBC, “Why?” Why spend all that money to put a scent on a bus? Passengers choose bus services based on where they go, not how they smell. And since fares are set by and go to the transport authority, a scent on a bus does not bring an extra cent in fare revenue.
W W W. B R I T C H A M . O R G . S G
“To elevate the customer experience for our passengers,” I replied. Who could blame the reporter for rolling her eyes? Reporters have to deal with PR-types and their perfectly rehearsed platitudes all the time, and my response seemed to her just that – PR speak. Naturally, she pressed me on for the ‘real reason’ behind introducing scented buses. It mystified her that there was not only no return on investment other than the potential for some branding, but that some very real costs were involved in installing buses with scent delivery systems. It just made no business sense to her. So why did we create a unique scent? Or give out National Day-themed stickers
on board our buses in August? Or curate themed trails along our bus routes called Discovery Journeys? Or host over 2,000 members of the public at a depot open day? It’s because we see ourselves as being in the business of moving people, not buses (talk about a platitude!). That means everything we do from running reliable, timely services, and keeping our buses well maintained, to customer engagement on board and online, is revolved around the passenger. We don’t always get it right, but it is an aspiration that supplies each employee at Tower Transit Singapore with the “why” of what they do.
Even employees who are not customerfacing have a stake in the customer experience. A vehicle technician who pulls his or her weight provides a roadworthy ride for the passenger, while a service controller directs bus drivers from our control centre to ensure that buses don’t bunch, but arrive at reliable, consistent intervals. The Bus Captain – as the title implies – is more than just a driver. He or she is also often a concierge, providing directions and hospitality – a tough job if you know the Singaporean commuter. A recent survey on passenger satisfaction in Singapore found that most people cited friendliness of their Bus Captain as the reason they
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had a pleasant experience on the bus. Not surprisingly, the lack of hospitality is a major factor for complaints. At Tower Transit, Bus Captains are aided in providing a good customer experience. They get customer service training, rewards and recognition for good service, as well as instant feedback on their driving standards from an on-board device to ensure they provide passengers with a safe and smooth ride.
Feature: Moving People, not Buses
But the customer journey often starts before you even board – especially online and at passenger boarding areas like bus stops and interchanges. We’ve designed our service brochures to be more visual, easier to read and friendly to the colour-blind. Where operators have kept passengers at a safe distance, we’ve opened channels of communication and engaged heavily with the public through social media. We’ve even been deliberate
about creating a brand personality that is personable and accessible by using visuals of our people, not infrastructure or vehicles. Why do we do all this? Because it is people that we move, not buses. And while that may sound like word play, it is in fact a fundamental difference in the way we think about bus services. Not as a way to get from point A to B, but as a journey.
About the Author Glenn Lim is Tower Transit’s Group Communications Director. He oversees customer experience in Singapore and corporate communications across the group’s business units in the UK, Singapore and South America. About the Company Tower Transit is a young and innovative transport operator. They work with governments to bring world-class bus services to the world’s top cities. Established in 2013, Tower Transit operates some of the busiest bus services in central London and was awarded Singapore’s first competitivelytendered bus operations contract in 2015. For more information, visit towertransit.sg
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In Focus
In Focus: Luc Andreani, Managing Director, foodpanda By Lucy Haydon In this issue, Lucy Haydon discusses the maturing landscape of Southeast Asian e-commerce with Luc Andreani, Managing Director of foodpanda Singapore, and how that differs from European and US markets. They also delve into big plans for 2018, following foodpanda’s recent rebranding.
W W W. B R I T C H A M . O R G . S G
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E-commerce is currently on an upwards curve with the introduction of major players such as Amazon Prime Now. How is the infrastructure set up in Singapore? I joined Lazada about four years ago in Vietnam, spending two years there before moving to Indonesia and covering departments from operations through to commercial. This gave me a good understanding of e-commerce in the region. I joined foodpanda as Managing Director at the start of this year and have had the opportunity to see the evolution of e-commerce over the past few years to a more mature, structured environment.
When both companies started in 2012, the main hurdle in South East Asia was not internet penetration. The region had high penetration, particularly on mobile. The challenge was mainly in educating people to have confidence in buying online and meeting customer expectations in delivery experiences. Building trust over time in a market new to online shopping requires offering convenience to customers, such as cash payment on delivery — this remains important in this region especially. This is a key difference with the more established European and US e-commerce markets. South East Asia has a particularly high percentage of first-time users preferring cash payments, eventually moving to cashless options as their confidence grows. The quality of the delivery experience in South East Asia is key. We have moved towards internalising delivery services, as the third-party supplier infrastructure is not sufficiently mature to cope with the requirements and volume at high standards. We initially started with vendor direct deliveries but this resulted in a loss of control on the customer experience, so we invested in building our own fleet and are now 100% self-sufficient. This is paramount to controlling the quality of our customer service.
Companies such as foodpanda are in a strong position to leverage on new technology and continue to innovate to succeed. Since the buyout from Delivery Hero in late 2016, what are the plans for future strides forward?
In Focus: Luc Andreani, Managing Director, foodpanda
Building trust over time in a market new to online shopping requires offering convenience to customers, such as cash payment on delivery — this remains important in this region especially. Over the years, expectations of product quality and personalisation in e-commerce have grown, prompting companies to look into catering the online or mobile experience based on prior search or purchase decisions. The main challenge at hand is enhancing the user experience to the maximum to achieve a simple, effective market-leading tool; taking into account personal preferences and requirements in a seamless and consistent omni-channel design. This is made possible with data collection, analytics and design, and we have achieved this in our customer service response process. In the past, we would dedicate multiple people to provide customised responses to queries, which proved to be suboptimal to productivity and costs. We now leverage on customer data. When a customer calls or chats with us online, an agent will quickly classify the issue into broader categories. An algorithm will assess the severity of the issue and correlate this with the customer’s recency of orders, frequency of orders and typical spend level. The algorithm will then automatically issue a voucher appropriate for the individual customer, provided within a tailored response. We recently released our new branding with a new website and mobile app and we have plans to tailor customer experiences using data to recommend choices and restaurants, which will ultimately increase the order conversion rate. The new app features more content and visual appeal to showcase our partners’ food.
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What are the key levers for success you anticipate as we approach 2018?
I am often asked how we differentiate ourselves in such a competitive market. We don’t do so in terms of a business model, as all players in this market offer the same service, but we have some unique services and offerings. We offer a high inventory of relevant choices for our customers and good delivery service. These are our focuses for 2018, strengthening our excellence in these areas and building on these high standards for the future. The choices of restaurants and customer demographics differ across the different zones in Singapore, which gives us a varying inventory to manage. For delivery, the indicators are delivery time and percentage of delays, both of which we measure and monitor closely in the logistics of our 2,500-strong fleet and the quality of the customer experience. The key to success is not simply focusing on these basics but doing so as efficiently as possible. The food delivery market provides stable patterns in terms of peak order times throughout the days, weeks and months, allowing for logistical planning and absorption of sudden spikes in demand. Less established competitors will face higher costs as they’re pricing aggressively and not yet optimising for efficiencies. Flooding streets with
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In Focus: Luc Andreani, Managing Director, foodpanda
The key to success is not simply focusing on these basics but doing so as efficiently as possible. more riders may achieve quick results in customer service, but it’s certainly not optimal for long-term cost management. Price differentiation in minimum order values is a point of competition within the market. This is a trade-off between growth and profitability, as individual, low-price orders will be a loss for companies to fulfil. It is important to cover operational costs and remain sustainable. Our ultimate goal is to offer the same wide inventory of choice across the island for zero delivery fees and with high-quality service, by achieving sufficient efficiencies to support this for our customers.
Our members are operating increasingly within the gig economy. How has this new workplace culture helped you to achieve your company goals? All of our riders are freelance, so we are deep in the gig economy! We choose to operate this way as it allows flexibility for both our company and riders. There’s demand in our market from the riders — to allow them to work for other companies and giving them the freedom of choice. Salaries are not compared in the typical format within our industry, but in some cases by the volume of orders or price per order. The advantage for foodpanda is in absorbing order demand levels. We have a pool of active riders who are then ranked according to past efficiency, length of service, and compliance. We forecast order levels days ahead in trenches of time and create shifts which are optimised for supply and demand. These shifts are then opened to riders to accept for work, with the highest-ranked riders seeing more available and lucrative shifts than those of the lowerranked riders. This system allows us to have the best and most efficient riders ready to service peak order times and open up additional slots as spikes appear in demand.
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Regardless of operational excellence, you are ultimately reliant upon the inventory partners (restaurants) to deliver quality food in a timely manner. How do you manage this relationship effectively? We are in a triangle in our marketplace — customers, riders and partners, where all are reliant upon each other.
For partners, the driver is to show them incremental growth as a result of the collaboration with foodpanda. We must continually improve search responses to enable smaller partners to increase visibility and achieve a good distribution of orders across the providers. Although we allow for premium placements in search results, we will never allow this to override the experience to ensure variety for customers and fairness for all partners. It’s also important to ensure that partners do not see the growth provided by utilising our platforms as orders taken away from walk-in customers, which is a common concern before partners begin using an aggregator such as foodpanda. We carefully monitor pricing and margins to ensure that we are not viewed as a more expensive option to dining out. Instead of trying to compete with the
We forecast order levels days ahead in trenches of time and create shifts which are optimised for supply and demand. lower price outlets, we aim to integrate them onto our platform for the wider benefits to all.
What do you see as the future of e-commerce in the short and longer term?
For foodpanda, the next few years are about excellence in CX and delivery as we have discussed. It’s critical to remember the fundamentals of choice and good customer service.
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We are not a start-up anymore — we are a substantial-sized SME, which brings new levels of service quality expectations that we are determined to meet and exceed.
In Focus: Luc Andreani, Managing Director, foodpanda
We are exploring further use of data and automation in customer retargeting and dispatch of orders, as well as looking into the use of chatbots for basic customer service questions, though we would only implement such technology if it meant improvement to the customer experience — a further step forward. We are in early research conversations with the Singaporean government about major industry disruptors such as the use
About the Company foodpanda is dedicated to bringing food lovers around the world their favourite meals from curated local restaurants. Since its creation, the on-demand food delivery service has grown to more than 14,000 partner restaurants in more than 30 cities across nine Asian countries globally. foodpanda is active in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Pakistan, Taiwan, Philippines, Bangladesh and Brunei. It belongs to Delivery Hero, worldwide leader of the food delivery industry. For more information, visit www.foodpanda.sg
of drones. Such a step change could lead to extensions of the inventory choice across the different zones in Singapore. These technological conversations are interesting explorations for foodpanda but our priority will always be the user experience and inventory choice for our customers. We are not a start-up anymore — we are a substantial-sized SME, which brings new levels of service quality expectations that we are determined to meet and exceed.
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The Importance of a Collaborative and Endto-end System for Client Lifecycle Management By Amanda Hale, Consultant Analyst, base60 Consulting With an increased focus on capital, client profitability and new regulations, banks are breaking down internal silos to get a more holistic view of their client relationships. In this article, Amanda discusses the regulatory and economic drivers for Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions and the importance of a collaborative approach in implementing the CLM strategy.
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istorically, CLM has suffered from a lack of investment with fragmented legacy systems often depending upon manual processes. There are inconsistencies across business lines, locations and entities. This often means that the clients’ information isn’t in one place, therefore a lack of overall visibility of the client. There are many parts to the client journey: prospecting, onboarding, collecting intelligence on the client so that they can be offered new products, pinpointing the most profitable clients worthy of personalised attention, and even offboarding those that are not profitable at all. Inadequate CLM is often made worse by fragmented workflows and tools, multiple touchpoints for clients and inconsistent data views across disparate systems.
Compliance Issues are Key
Better visibility of clients from effective CLM gives firms more revenue opportunities and enables regular checks on their requirements, such as timely preparation of tax and credit forms, but it is also vital for operational risk management and compliance. Transgressing compliance regulations
Feature: The Importance of a Collaborative and End-to-end System for Client Lifecycle Management
can result in huge fines: earlier this year Deutsche Bank AG was fined £163 million by the Financial Conduct Authority for failing to maintain an adequate anti-money laundering control framework during the years 2012 to 2015. It had failed to properly oversee the formation of new customer relationships and the booking of global business in the UK, exposing itself to the risks of financial crime.
fines, financial institutions are ramping up internal checks and data controls by reengineering and implementing workflows. The onboarding process is far more extensive and now entails collecting supporting documentation from corporate clients on the nature of their business, ownership details, jurisdiction of operations, source of funding and the purpose of their accounts.
CLM Needs to Meet Competing Demands
Better Data Analytics Give Deeper Understanding of Client Needs
Improving CLM has become a priority for many financial institutions and it is now enjoying major investment and multi-year work programmes. One of the main challenges is to devise an effective operating model that will satisfy the often-competing demands of regulatory compliance and operational risk management, in addition to client centricity and profitability.
Regulatory Change Impacts the Client Lifecycle and Data Management Compliance thresholds are frequently increased with recent examples being Dodds-Frank, FATCA, CRS, EMIR, MiFID II and BCBS 239. To avoid significant
Clients expect value and convenience, and these demands are influencing the loyalty and long-term profitability of a client relationship. Client onboarding has become a competitive differentiator – firms need to adopt a client-centric approach and streamline their onboarding process to optimise the client experience. Failure to do so risks losing business and opportunities to competitors who have made the necessary investment to rectify CLM deficiencies.
Fintech Providers are the Solution for Many Financial Institutions
Legacy infrastructures need to continually evolve to keep pace with current
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technologies. New fintech providers can help to drive further efficiencies by streamlining and coordinating end-to-end CLM processes on a single platform. These services are being continually developed to configure with existing workflows and regulatory rules to ensure Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance. Automation increases efficiency by eliminating high volume, simple onboarding and KYC tasks.
Cleaner Client Data Will Drive Profitability
Many financial institutions lack a standard governance framework and operating model and this can result in inconsistent client data hierarchies being used by different functions across the firm. A single accurate view of the client is critical to understand client behaviour and actions, their cost and profitability, their impact of the new capital requirements under the BCBC IOSCO uncleared margin rules, and the continued downward pressure on costs. Having more consistent and accurate data across the entire client lifecycle and throughout the client relationship enables smarter decisions around client servicing, profitability and offboarding.
The Competing Needs of the Enterprise
When evaluating and refining CLM strategies, firms need to address the expectations and requirements of all parties; the client, the business, compliance as well as operations and technology. The client expects account opening and maintenance to be transparent, timely and hassle-free. They also want streamlined standardised interactions with minimal touchpoints and a single point of contact. Businesses need a single view of the client to identify cross and upselling opportunities and to understand client profitability so that greater emphasis
and service can be devoted to the more profitable clients.
to provide market intelligence to monitor progress and identify risk.
Compliance regulations require rigorous checks and controls as well as operational risk management. The compliance teams need predictive tools to ensure compliance timeliness and flexibility to adapt to changing regulatory requirements. Upcoming regulations require better KYC and onboarding systems.
CLM — The Collaborative Approach
Operations and technology need consistent global processes and toolsets to streamline workflows and reduce manual input, and
CLM is a top priority for business, compliance, operations and technology management. We believe that the key to a successful and profitable CLM strategy is to adopt a holistic approach that involves all the stakeholders’ needs and competing expectations. Implementing the CLM strategy needs to be a collaborative and inclusive exercise that puts client centricity and compliance at the core of every initiative.
About the Author Amanda Hale is a Financial Markets Consultant at base60 Consulting with experience working as a project manager and business analyst on business strategy engagements for investment banks and market infrastructure providers. Most recently, Amanda worked with an investment bank to perform a global review of their Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) operating model and design a globally consistent CLM operating model vision and associated delivery framework. About the Company JDX is an independent consulting company, created in 2012, with more than 500 employees globally, inspired by entrepreneurship and underpinned by our unique culture. JDX provides its clients with flexible, bespoke resourcing solutions in the areas of operational and regulatory remediation. The JDX Strategy is to do the right thing by clients with energy, enthusiasm, integrity and knowledge. In 2015 the JDX Group expanded its offering by launching JDX FinTech, JDX for Insurance, JDX Connect and base60. With this expansion, JDX is now able to provide the full suite of consulting services and is a compelling alternative to traditional consulting and resourcing providers. Visit www.jdxconsulting.com for more information.
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Measuring Success, One KPI at a Time By Brice Bay, CEO, EnVeritas Group New marketing platforms and new experts are continually emerging. In this dynamic environment, it’s easy to lose sight of what works. So how do you convert marketing into leads and then into clients? Simple. You transform one-size-fits-all content into an integrated marketing campaign.
Begin with the End
An integrated campaign should be the epitome of a perpetual motion machine. Consisting of multiple components, successful campaigns are an ever-evolving effort built on a robust iteration process. It begins with a goal: more qualified leads. But that’s not enough. You have to define “how many leads count as more?” No matter how optimistic the number, unless the goal is clearly defined with a number, you’ll never be able to prove the campaign’s success. Being vague leads only to ineffective results.
Step by Step
Once the goal’s target number is set, the next step is to develop a strategy to reach the goal. Your strategy should be based on the answers to these questions: • Who is your audience? • Where is your audience looking for information and solutions? • What are their pain points? • How can you demonstrate the superiority of your product/solution to their needs? • What extra value do you bring to the table? Effective marketing campaigns help consumers find solutions to problems. To find more qualified leads, you need to provide the right content at just the right moment to your target audience in the format they want it. Digital consumers are smart; they engage in personal research and ask peers for recommendations in order to find useful, trustworthy and reliable information. Experts agree nearly 76% of consumers reach a purchasing decision before they visit your website. To convert these researchers into leads, your content needs to be in place when they search for it. EnVeritas Group (EVG) thinks of this as on-demand content. Traditional advertising and outbound sales are less effective than social selling and inbound marketing. Meeting the audience where they gather and providing ondemand content as they search for it gives brands the ability to join the conversation instead of being left out of it.
Study after study reflects the power of reaching a global audience in this way, whether you’re interacting with them on WeChat or posting on Facebook.
Every Piece is Linked
Beyond ensuring you have customised content for potential consumers at each stage of their decision journey, smart marketers recognise the power of pay-perclick (PPC) keyword campaigns as well as optimising content for organic search. It has long been understood that getting the right content in front of the right audience at the right time is critical. But EVG believes it’s just as important to get the right content onto the right platform for the right audience. Content needs to be custom-tailored for each step of the decision journey. Savvy strategists understand what an audience needs at the start of their search, after they learn about their options and the final factors affecting their decision; effective content is customised to address each stage. One of our APAC hotel clients did just this, by measuring conversion rates (hotel bookings) for the region’s hotels by language, on a weekly basis for six months before deciding which pages would receive additional resources, with professionally − written and optimised content. This foundational step was a key part of their overall plan, a plan based on a global strategy involving hotel websites, supplemental pages and blog articles. Carefully − calibrated city and country landing pages received fresh, SEO-friendly content to drive traffic and bookings on the individual hotel websites. Another example comes from one of our healthcare clients. They wanted to drive more traffic to a landing page about a proprietary surgical procedure for prostate cancer. EVG designed carousel ads for a micro-targeted campaign on Facebook. The ads targeted men in a designated city and surrounding area, aged 40 and older and with certain interests and behaviours. In the first month of the campaign, the ad reached 40,684 Facebook users. The ad’s click-through-rate (CTR) was 2.99%, compared to a healthcare industry average CTR of 0.83%. This meant that 1,798
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readers had clicked on the ad to visit the client’s website. This campaign’s key success metrics were ad reach, clickthrough-rate and age of users clicking on the ad. The next step was to improve content on the landing page to increase the amount of time spent on the page, lower the bounce rate and boost the number of pages visited during a session. This iterative approach was based on analysis of the first month’s user interactions with the website.
A Never-ending Process
Once a campaign is set in motion, careful monitoring of the specified metrics provides valuable information on what’s working and what can be improved. It
Feature: Measuring Success, One KPI at a Time
also gives you hard data on ROI, a must for those concerned with the bottom line. Rewriting a website can be costly, but if your content (or website) isn’t showing up in organic search results, how can you expect your audience to find it? Reviewing your website analytics on a monthly basis is imperative in order to see trends and temporary spikes or drops and to understand how real people use the site. Social media is a must, and many brands have found entirely new audiences through innovative and fresh approaches to building a community on a social platform. Sharing visual content on Instagram, videos on YouTube and
140-character tweets on Twitter is great, but who’s watching, listening and retweeting? Is your effort being rewarded? Analytics provide concrete evidence to both fine-tune a campaign and report ROI.
Change for the Good
Content marketing is no longer a matter of simply pushing out ads. Successful marketing draws qualified leads and helps you find the right audience searching for your assistance to solve a problem. The advantage of an integrated marketing strategy is how quickly agile teams can respond, adapt and improve in a neverending process to reach their goals and set new ones.
About the Author The CEO and founder of EnVeritas Group, Brice Bay is an entrepreneur whose passion for travel, business and smart content lies at the heart of EnVeritas Group. His driven vision of trust and truth as the bedrock of successful content marketing has led EVG to become an industry leader for high-end multilingual content, inspiring longterm partnerships with large global brands. Brice has a knack for card tricks, is a master of smoking food and loves nothing more than a mountain ride on his motorbike. On his travels he has clocked up more than 50 countries, and has only two continents, Antarctica and South America, yet to discover. About the Company EVG is a little global giant with headquarters in the US, the UK and Singapore. Their strategists, content experts and linguists work in more than 70 countries and 350 cities, covering 35 languages. They create content by locals for locals, and offer large-scale, multilingual content solutions at a speed that sets them apart. EVG produces customised, on-brand digital content to help you grow your business. Visit www.enveritasgroup.com to find out more.
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Why the Gig Economy is a Huge Opportunity By Steve Settle, Managing Director – Asia, the CFO Centre Despite what you may have heard, working on a contingent or freelance basis has many advantages that are just not available to fulltime employees. Steve highlights the advantages and disadvantages of freelance work and assures us that leaving employment and working freelance isn’t as terrifying as you’d think.
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t’s easy to get despondent about your future job and financial security these days with doomsday predictions of the impact that artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, machine learning, robotics and nanotechnology will have on the world of work. In 2013, two Oxford University researchers sounded the alarm for the future of work, predicting that 47% of US employment was in the high-risk category for being automated within two decades. That
Feature: Why the Gig Economy is a Huge Opportunity
included jobs in transportation, logistics, office and administrative support, and the service sector. Since then, barely a month goes by without an expert issuing a dire forecast about how the work we do now will soon be carried out by machines or robots, making us redundant long before we reach the statutory retirement age. This fear of automation is nothing new of course. In the 17th century, for example,
England’s Queen Elizabeth I refused to grant Reverend William Lee a patent for his revolutionary knitting machine for fear it would destroy the traditional hand-knitting industry. Despite this, Lee’s machine would go on to improve rather than decimate the knitting industry. Parts of his design are still used in machines today. The invention of the telephone also terrified some people. In Sweden, for instance, preachers were convinced it was the instrument of the Devil and others
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feared telephone lines were conduits for evil spirits. These stories just illustrate the point that our fears of innovation and change have always been with us. It’s up to us whether we see them as a threat or an opportunity. And let’s face it — it’s easier to accept innovation and change with opportunities than try to resist them. Trying to fight them is like standing on a beach and attempting to stop the waves coming in. Unless we
want to give up work altogether and live ‘off-grid’ in grim survival-mode, the best thing we can do is prepare for and take advantage of whatever innovation and change comes along. Take, for instance, the ‘on-demand workforce’ or ‘gig economy’, in which the labour market is characterised by a plethora of short-term contracts or freelance projects rather than permanent jobs. It’s already a reality for many: a McKinsey Global Institute 2016 study found that 20% to
30% of the labour force in both the US and the EU are independent workers who are self-employed or do temporary work. It will also become a reality for so many more in the next few years, according to a 2015 study by the financial management software company Intuit. To some, the prospect of leaving employment and working on one freelance project after another for a stream of different employers is terrifying. “Where’s the financial security?” they ask.
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Feature: Why the Gig Economy is a Huge Opportunity we subsequently provide, not by a job position or title. You might think there’s no financial security working in this way but having five or six clients means that if for any reason we lose one, we still have the remainder and, importantly, the skills with which to find new ones. There’s no doubt that this way of working takes some getting used to. It can be challenging in the beginning, especially when it comes to attracting and retaining clients. It’s not something we historically have experience of.
But to others like our team at the CFO Centre, working in a gig economy is the closest we will come to total freedom. We contingent workers see ourselves as being liberated from the constraints of paid employment. We are free to pick and choose our ‘gigs’ or assignments. As with most things, there are benefits and drawbacks. Fortunately, the benefits of working on a contingent basis tend to outweigh the drawbacks. Granted, we can no longer depend on the security of a monthly salary and the usual benefits of employment — the paid annual leave and sickness pay, bonuses, medical insurance, and other perks like company cars — are a thing of the past. So too is the protection of our workers’ rights by unions. We now pay for the career training we undertake to keep up with developments in our fields, rather than having it come
out of the HR budget. And to some extent, we don’t have the pleasure of working with the same team of colleagues for prolonged periods like we once did. But on the plus side, we enjoy a sense of autonomy that full-time employees will never have. We decide when we work, how long we work and for whom. Our lifestyles are more flexible than they ever were as full-time employees. Suddenly, there’s more time to spend with family and even to follow a great passion, like travel, golf or photography. We don’t have to commute to the same office day in, day out. We can hold meetings in a Starbucks joint, or we can sit on our couches at home and speak with clients wherever they are located in the world. The financial rewards we receive are dictated by the amount of effort we put into securing and retaining contracts with individuals and companies and the value
One of my overseas colleagues at the CFO Centre, for example, mentioned his biggest challenge early on as a part-time CFO was learning to adapt from working as a Finance Director in a multinational to working in a consultative, strategic role for SME clients. He realised after losing one or two contracts that his ‘full-on’ big corporate style was perceived as being too dictatorial by the owners of the mediumsized family-owned businesses. Like so many of us working on a contingent basis, he had to adapt very quickly to survive. He learnt to offer advice and work in a more relaxed style rather than issue directives. Since accepting that things move slower in small organisations, he’s built up a portfolio of loyal clients and gets huge job satisfaction and fulfilment, building his confidence in helping many more companies to succeed. There’s no patience for fear when change comes knocking. Innovation in technology might be increasing, along with the fear of job redundancy, but we should be everchanging too. We embrace change, turn it into our advantage and make the most of it.
About the Author Steve Settle was born in the UK and has a Master's Degree in Engineering Science from St. Johns College, Cambridge and an MBA from Macquarie University in New South Wales, Australia. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia. In addition to being the Managing Director of CFO Centre, he is authorised by the Monetary Authority of Singapore to provide financial advisory services and former President of The British Club. About the Company The original concept for the CFO Centre was to provide the skill sets of experienced Chief Financial Officers of large corporations to the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector, allowing smaller organisations to benefit from the expertise of a highly experienced Chief Financial Officer without incurring the expense of hiring someone full-time. The part-time CFO concept caught on quickly and the business has grown rapidly on a national scale. Over the last 15 years the CFO Centre Group has become the largest and most respected provider of part-time Chief Financial Officer services in the world. The CFO Centre is now the Global No.1 provider of part-time FD and CFO services.
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Why Emotion Matters in Marketing By Phil Townend, Chief Commercial Officer, Unruly APAC How does emotion come into play in marketing? How does it contribute to creating awareness for your brand, and consequently increase sales? Phil discusses good storytelling, evoking a strong emotional response and the lasting impact that follows.
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Feature: Why Emotion Matters in Marketing
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motion matters in marketing. Emotion creates values, sets preferences, inspires action and drives sales. These are maxims we live by at Unruly. We understand how important emotions are to effective storytelling and creating word of mouth. We also know that content that elicits a strong emotional response — positive or negative — is twice as likely to be shared and drive brand loyalty and purchase intent than content that elicits weak responses. Emotion is the key to a great story. It creates true engagement with your audience, taking viewers on a journey and making them feel not just happy or sad, but inspired, nostalgic, amazed or warm and fuzzy. But why should telling a good story, and evoking a strong emotional response, matter to advertisers? At the end of the day, they’re not Hollywood movie studios in the business of making great content for the sake of great content — they need to sell products. It turns out, the two go hand in hand. Numerous studies have shown that creating emotional engagement with your audience leads to an uplift in just about
every brand metric that advertisers care about. Emotional campaigns are more likely to generate sales — leading to increases in revenue, profit and share gain (Pringle & Field, Brand Immortality: How Brands Can Live Long and Prosper, 2008). Additionally, videos that elicit strong emotions are twice more likely to be shared than those which elicit a weak emotional response (Dr Karen Nelson-Field, Viral Marketing: The Science of Sharing, 2013). Before the digital revolution, the quality of your content mattered less — if you bought enough airtime, your campaign would perform. With the odd notable exception (think Guinness’ white horses), advertising was primarily functional in nature — serving mostly to inform consumers about your product or service features, and shouting louder than the competition. But the conversation has moved on. Today, consumers don’t look to TV or print ads for information, they look to the internet. And they don’t wait to be served advertisements about a product they’re interested in — they expect that information to be there as and when they want it. Branded content needs to serve a different purpose.
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Add to that the hugely cluttered nature of today’s digital landscape, we are constantly bombarded with content - some of it great, some of it not so great − and there are only so many hours in the day. The amount of content available online now far exceeds our ability to consume it. So how do you get your content seen? It’s not enough to force people to watch a preroll or interrupt their online experience. In fact, this often does more harm than good. Unruly’s Future Video Survey found that 65% of Australian consumers were put off by a brand when forced to watch a pre-roll ad. Rather, advertisers need to up their game and create an emotional connection with their audiences. But why does emotive content create such a connection with consumers? Well, apart from striking a chord with your audience, eliciting a strong emotional response triggers memory formation. There is a
Feature: Why Emotion Matters in Marketing
well-documented link between memory and emotion. How many of you can remember the last banner ad you saw, or how about your all-time favourite banner ad — the one you tell your friends about at parties? Contrast that with really great storytelling through emotive video — I bet almost everyone over a certain age can remember Evian’s golden oldie — Roller Babies — now over a decade old, or JCVD’s Epic Splits for Volvo Trucks or P&G’s Like A Girl campaign. As humans, we have a limited capacity for processing information and emotion plays a key role in deciding which information is processed and retained. Several studies have demonstrated that if you present someone with emotionally arousing stimuli, it triggers the brain to encode new memories. When attention is limited, as is the case online, emotional items are
more likely to be processed — the brain prioritises the processing of emotional information over neutral information. Take for example the weapon focus effect, whereby witnesses to a crime remember the gun or knife in great detail but cannot remember other details such as the perpetrator’s clothing or vehicle. In fact, you don’t have to witness a crime to experience this selectivity — it occurs all the time. How many of you remember the first time you did laundry? Now, how about your first kiss? Creating an emotional engagement with your audience means they are more likely to remember your content, more likely to remember your product and more likely to remember your brand. What Binet and Field found in 2013, holds even more true today: “In the long run, emotion is where the really big profits lie.”
About the Author Phil Townend joined Unruly in 2010 as its fifth employee. As EMEA MD, Phil grew the European business to six offices before leaving for Singapore to launch Unruly APAC in April 2014. Unruly now has offices in Singapore, Japan, Australia and South Korea with another four to follow. Before joining Unruly, Phil held various roles within agencies, broadcasters and ad technology start-ups. Phil is currently co-Chair of the Singapore/ South East Asia IAB Content Committee and passionately believes that great content and noninvasive, permission-based ad delivery will be key to preserving the future of the ‘free internet’. About the Company Unruly gets videos seen, shared and loved across the open web for brands that want to move people, not just reach people. By bringing emotional intelligence to digital advertising, they help 91% of Ad Age 100 brands inform and inspire 1.44bn people around the world, using polite outstream formats on sites that people love. Unruly was founded in 2006 and acquired by News Corp in 2015. With 300 Unrulies across 20 locations worldwide, their superpower is emotional intelligence and their secret weapon is passionate people on a mission to #DeliverWow. Discover more about Unruly at www.unruly.co
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Aren’t we all Evidencebased Anyway? By Jonny Gifford, Senior Advisor, Organisational Behaviour at CIPD In a ‘post-truth’ era, where we face an overload of opinion, much of it from unreliable sources, it is hard to know what to trust. The principles of ‘evidence-based practice’ help us make better decisions by cutting through unreliable sources and getting to the best outcomes. Unfortunately, while it is well established in some professions — most notably healthcare — evidence-based practice is not common in people management.
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usiness leaders and people managers are constantly making decisions for their organisations, with some of the most important decisions relating to the people within the business. Underlying these decisions are assumptions about causal relationships: if I do x, it will achieve y. For example, if we award performancerelated pay, it will increase motivation and work effort, or if managers give feedback on performance, employees will improve. But there’s a problem. We all like to see ourselves as rational beings, making decisions once we’ve carefully weighed up the options, but psychology and behavioural economics have consistently shown that usually, this is simply not the case. Our brains are hardwired to make fast associations, leading us to make decisions based on what intuitively feels right. Daniel Kahneman, the first psychologist to win the Nobel Prize for economics, calls this System 1 thinking. This fast, intuitive way of thinking is an essential aspect of how our brains work, from deciding what clothes to wear,
Feature: Aren’t we all Evidence-based Anyway?
to our route to work, to where to eat dinner — we are creatures of both habit and impulse. If we didn’t make decisions based on what feels intuitively right, we would become overloaded with stimuli and struggle to make it through the day. But behavioural science shows that we also think in this way for bigger decisions such as who we hire for a job, or which approaches we use to manage a team.
irresistible purely because it’s the latest thing presented with rhetoric that fits the zeitgeist2. Everyone’s doing it, there are case studies about it, it feels right, and therefore it must be right. Right? Not necessarily. To take one example, the practice of forced ranking, getting rid of the poorest-performing 10% of employees, was in vogue for many years before being discredited as an effective tool for driving performance3.
The unfortunate reality is that, thanks to our incredibly flexible and fast minds, we tend to bypass rational assessment of evidence and jump to conclusions. There is good research1 to show that we even retro-fit our interpretation of the evidence to suit the decision we’ve already made in our minds. For example, in recruitment, we hire people who look and sound like us, and then convince ourselves it was because they had the best experience. Our gut feelings often rule and it introduces huge capacity for bias.
So what is evidence-based practice4? To an extent, we all use evidence. At different times, any manager or business leader will inform decisions by drawing on different sources. The Centre for Evidence Based Management (CEBMA) cites four sources of evidence5 that we should use when engaging in evidence-based practice including; practitioners’ own expertise, stakeholder concerns, organisational data (for example on employee opinion, people management or performance) and insight from the scientific literature including books and articles. These are all valuable sources of information to the evidencebased practitioner.
It also means we are prone to fads. The latest management thinking appears
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An individual’s expertise is something that we all need to hone and develop, in the case of the people professional through continuing professional development (CPD)6. As a professional body, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is focused on ensuring the HR and L&D profession has the knowledge and skills it will need to be future-fit through a programme of work called Profession for the Future7. When it comes to stakeholders' concerns and organisational data, we are becoming more proficient in accessing and understanding these sources of information. Technology can help us understand the values and concerns of the varied stakeholders in our businesses, be they our customers, our shareholders, our workers or the general public. However, understanding the needs of multiple stakeholders requires the use of ethics in our decision-making8 in an effort to create shared value for people, the business and shareholders. Perhaps the most challenging source of information for business leaders and people professionals is the area of scientific literature. In particular, we often don’t gauge the quality or strength of the research evidence we are looking at. But there is a wellestablished hierarchy of scientific evidence9 and it is important we take note of this. Taking this hierarchy
seriously requires focused effort, gauging the quality of the evidence being presented. This is not an intuitive or fast process but it ultimately does help us make better decisions. A related challenge is that we tend to cherry-pick evidence that supports our point of view. We all love it when we find a piece of research that confirms what we long suspected. How could we not? It means our world view has solid evidence to back it up! But barring the ridiculous, the chances are that whatever your opinion is, you’ll be able to find research to back up your pet theory. To find out if a management approach is really worth using, we need to look at the wider body of evidence — for example, through systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Being evidence—based means being anti-fad and willing to face uncomfortable truths. When we are making major decisions, we should balance expertise and opinion with an honest, critical and systematic look at the best available evidence. Above all, evidence matters because it increases the chance of success. If we are going to make reliable decisions in people management, we need to use our professional experience and the views of key stakeholders alongside a solid assessment of the best available scientific evidence and the best available data in our organisations. We’d expect it of our doctor, why shouldn’t we expect it of our business leaders?
CIPD. “A head for hiring: the behavioural science of recruitment”; https://www. cipd.co.uk/knowledge/culture/behaviour/ recruitment-report
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organization. “Management Fads and Fashions”; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ pdf/10.1177/135050840181001
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CIPD. “Could do better? What works in performance management”; https://www. cipd.co.uk/knowledge/fundamentals/people/ performance/what-works-in-performancemanagement-report
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CIPD. “In search of the best available evidence”; https://www.cipd.asia/knowledge/ reports/evidence-based-practice
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Centre for Evidence Based Management (CEBMA). “Evidence-Based Practice: The Basic Principles”; https://www.cebma.org/wpcontent/uploads/Evidence-Based-Practice-TheBasic-Principles-vs-Dec-2015.pdf
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CIPD. “Continuing professional development”; https://www.cipd.asia/learndevelop-connect/cpd
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CIPD. “Profession for the Future”; https:// www.cipd.asia/knowledge/future-profession
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CIPD. “Perspectives on ethical workplace decision-making”; https://www.cipd.asia/ knowledge/reports/ethical-workplace-decisions
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Centre for Evidence Based Management (CEBMA). “What are the levels of evidence?”; https://www.cebma.org/faq/what-are-thelevels-of-evidence/
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About the Author Jonny Gifford is the CIPD’s Senior Research Adviser for Organisational Behaviour. He’s had a varied career in researching employment and people management issues, working at the Institute for Employment Studies and Roffey Park Institute before joining the CIPD in 2012. A central focus in his work is applying behavioural science insights to core aspects of people management. Recently he has led programmes of work doing this in the areas of recruitment, reward and performance management. Jonny is also committed to helping HR practitioners make better use of evidence to make better decisions. He runs the CIPD Applied Research Conference, which exists to strengthen links between academic research and HR practice. About the Company The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is the voice of a worldwide community of around 140,000 members committed to championing better work and working lives. Through their expertise and research, they provide a valuable point of view on the rapidly changing world of work. Their current strategy is focused on ensuring that the HR and L&D professionals of the future can fulfil their true potential to champion better work and working lives. To learn more about the CIPD’s latest thinking on world of work and people management issues, please visit www.cipd.asia/knowledge. To explore how they can support organisations and professionals across the region, please visit www.cipd.asia
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Feature
Buying a Car in Singapore By Benoit Ratigan, Consultant, Cars and Yachts Singapore is the most expensive country in the world to own a car and this is thanks to its Certificate of Entitlement (COE). Finding ways to reduce these costs can make parting with your money that little bit more enjoyable.
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Feature: Buying a Car in Singapore
ingapore is the most expensive country in the world to own a car and this is thanks to its Certificate of Entitlement (COE), which is a system based on a quota of licences issued by the Land Transport Authority (LTA). Successful winning bids in an open bid uniform price auction grant the legal right of the holder to register, own and use a vehicle on Singapore roads for a period of up to 10 years. The cost of a COE is re-evaluated every two weeks and when demand is high, can exceed the actual value of the car body.
covered by the lemon law which all preowned car dealers in Singapore have to cover as standard.
When purchasing a new car from a Parallel Importer, it is well worth noting the following:
Here are some of the main differences between Parallel Importers (PI) and Car Dealers:
1. Warranty
When looking at purchasing a car, whether new or pre-owned, a few options are available to you. You can approach a Parallel Importer, otherwise known as buying a PI car. The other option is to go through a single brand authorised dealer. And last of all, privately. Purchased privately, your pre-owned vehicle may be slightly cheaper than done through a dealer. However, should anything be structurally wrong with it, you will not be
- Single brand dealerships can only sell one brand and cannot import nor can they stock Parallel Imports.
- PI cars are generally around 10% to 15% cheaper than cars from a single brand dealership, which has higher overheads such as larger showrooms in exclusive locations, higher costs of advertising and staffing, as well as pricier warranties and servicing programmes.
- Parallel Importers work with more than one brand and can also bring in one-off special orders that may not be readily available in Singapore at the time. Requests are made directly to the manufacturers and specific add-on options can be included.
Make sure that you have a warranty that is covered by a reputable insurance company and workshop. Most of these are done through third-party warranty programmes — included in the purchase price of cars typically — which will keep you well protected in the eventuality that either the parallel importer or the workshop should cease its operations.
2. COE
These are allocated through a bidding system and some dealers will offer alternatives to limit your exposure to price fluctuations. You may wish to consider a guaranteed COE without top-ups, also known as “one bid guaranteed”, which locks the price of the COE in. Another approach would be to choose a four-bid guaranteed option, which exposes you to more risk. And even if the car value is a little cheaper at the start, any
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increase in COE value will need to be covered by the purchaser. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a pre-owned car with a few years left on the COE, you may be entitled to some monetary value when you scrap the car at the end of its first 10 years — called the PARF value. Scrapping a car here in Singapore feeds the international pre-owned car export market, and is not what one usually associates with when thinking of scrapping a vehicle anywhere else in the world. These vehicles for the most part are in very good condition, and some people choose
to extend the COE for an additional 10 years, which can also be done with a preowned vehicle. Otherwise, this is a cheaper alternative, as one can renew their COE for a period of five years at which point the vehicle will have to be scrapped.
3. Trade In
When upgrading a used car to a brandnew car, you will generally get a better deal when selling the old one privately first. For a small fee, some pre-owned car dealers may offer to work with you on a consignment basis, allowing you to showcase your car in one of their showrooms for a set period of time.
Whilst being advertised online throughout various trade platforms, your car will receive added exposure to the dealer’s clientele and members of the public walking by. You may also wish to get your car valued as this amount could be used to offset the price of a new car or be sold to the dealership directly — dependent on condition, age and model.
4. Hidden Charges
It is important to confirm with the dealer that you are working with, that no additional hidden charges will apply even after the contract has been signed, as this can sometimes happen.
About the Author With a background in logistics and shipping, Benoit Ratigan worked as a yacht broker prior to setting up his own business consultancy (IC2Group Pte Ltd) focusing on developing new business for his clients. He is currently engaged with Cars and Yachts as a yacht consultant and manages all matters related to yacht owning and the yachting lifestyle. About the Company Cars and Yachts Pte Ltd is a Parallel Importer and specialises in the Sale and Purchase of new and used cars as well as brokerage yachts. They believe in breaking down the misconceptions people have when dealing with car sales companies and yacht brokerages. For further information, please visit www. carsyachts.com.sg or get in touch with us at visitus@carsyachts.com.sg | +65 6509 8118.
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Britain in Southeast Asia News
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BiSEA News BiSEA Conference in Singapore 28 September 2017 The Britain in Southeast Asia (BiSEA) Conference was held on 28th September at the British High Commissioner’s Residence in Singapore. The conference primarily tackled the state of British Chambers of Commerce in the region and plans in the upcoming financial years, among others. In attendance were Presidents, Chairmen, Executive Directors and OPD staff from the chambers in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
BritCham Philippines, in cooperation with the Philippine Communications Operations Office, Makati Business Club, Management Association of the Philippines, and the Philippine British Business Council, led a DuterteNomics Forum on August 10th, which focused on President Duterte’s economic and development blueprint for the Philippines. More than 300 guests were in attendance, fostering a more liberalised and businessfriendly environment in support of the government’s 10-point plan. The Chamber continues to engage with local businesses, business groups, and key players from the public sector to strengthen UK-Philippine trade relations. For more information on upcoming events and business opportunities, please email cdlsantos@britcham.org.ph, call +63 2 556 5232 or visit the website www.britcham.org.ph/uksmesphilippines/
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Malaysia celebrated its 60th year of independence from British colonisation and today trade relations between our two nations have never been stronger. Looking forward to the maiden royal visit of Prince Charles and Camilla in December, we reflect on last quarter's developments which include the launch of BMCC Johor, our first outstation office established with the University of Reading. Former British High Commissioner to Malaysia, Boyd McCleary CMG CVO has become the BMCC's Representative in the UK, an initiative to bolster the presence of the BMCC in the UK by appointing senior UK officials with historical ties to the Chamber. For more information visit www.bmcc.org.my
BCCT welcomed a group of young professionals at Oriental Residence Bangkok. Great ideas were shared in the brainstorming session followed by a networking night. The attendees had opportunities to give their views on the difficulties faced by young professionals living and working in Thailand. They also suggested types of events that would be beneficial in the future, which will help BCCT to cater the Young Professional’s programme to their needs.
David Ng, Deputy Chairman of the BMCC with Professor Tony Downes, Provost & Chief Executive Officer of the University of Reading Malaysia upon the signing of the MOU at the launch of BMCC Johor
BCCT Director, Kate Manning (right) and Mentorship group discussion leader, Kate Jackson (left)
The BCCT Membership is an excellent opportunity to develop your business in Thailand. BritCham Singapore members are welcome to join the BCCT as overseas members at half the normal in-country fee. For details regarding membership and the marketing opportunities, please contact Jina at jintana@bccthai.com
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At the Chamber: Business Group News
Welcome to the new Leadership, Talent and Professional Development Business Group Chairperson: Chris Reed — Founder & Global CEO, Black Marketing
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he Chamber has listened to you our members, and taking your valuable feedback, made a decision to form the Leadership, Talent and Professional Development Business Group. This is in order to provide more support for our members’ journey — from starting out as a graduate, all the way to reaching the C-Suite and the various stages in between. Talent and professional development is a strong theme across all sectors and companies represented within our member network. This new group will cover learning and development, recruitment, talent retention, professional development, professional services, employer-employee engagement and many other aspects involved in making work a better, more rewarding experience. Our existing Professional Services, Leadership in Asia and Young British Chamber Business Groups will be amalgamated into the Leadership, Talent and Professional Development Business Group, with the new group being led initially by myself and supported by the current leadership of the original groups. I have successfully led both the Marketing & Creative and ICT business groups. I am also involved in various sub-committees for the Chamber and an elected Board Member. We are also delighted to announce that Young Professionals will now be integrated across all of our Business Groups, with a representative from this sub-section of the member network joining each Business Group. This will allow us to support our younger members across multiple sectors and interest areas in Singapore, and encourage the personal
development of our members starting out in their professional path. We will continue to offer events for Young Professionals, supported by our long-term sponsor EY. If you are keen to get involved or understand more about any of the areas of leadership, talent and professional development, I encourage you to share your thoughts on what the new group should cover in the coming year.
The Leadership, Talent and Professional Development Business Group will meet initially on a monthly basis to discuss these topics and to plan a calendar of events for the wider Chamber membership and interested guests. I encourage you, our member companies, to consider joining this Committee. If you would like to join the new group, please reach out to me at chris@blackmarketing.com, or contact the Chamber team.
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At the Chamber: Business Group News
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Navigating Change with Energy in Transition Chairperson: Tim Rockell — Director, Global Energy Institute, KPMG
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he Energy & Utilities Business Group has had an active year in 2017, and we are about to embark on planning our 2018 programme. A number of our Business Group and Chamber member companies participate in the Singapore International Energy Week (SIEW) conference. In the past two years, we have broadly scoped our events around the SIEW theme to aid our planning. The 2016–17 programme started with a review of the energy transition and what this means for us involved in the sector here in Singapore. We followed up with an event on digitalisation in the energy sector with panellists from BP, DNV.GL, Microsoft and Shell. A new enhancement to our events this year is a series of videos made on the day by speakers and delegates which are shared on social media — you can view them on BritCham Singapore’s social media accounts and YouTube channel. Financing projects is a key consideration as South East Asia ramps up upon a huge electrification capacity development. The industry competes with other developmental and infrastructure needs. We were delighted to attract a number of representatives from different segments of the finance sector for a round table session in the middle of the year.
panellists from Energy CC, Engie, SembCorp and Twinza for a discussion on changing business strategies and transforming operations in the energy transition. We covered a lot of ground from upstream companies operating in a low oil-price environment to power access and build-out in ASEAN. One interesting build from our digitalisation session was whether customers gaining access to power for the first time would ever see a paper bill or visit a bank to make payment. Leapfrogtechnology could make the entire customer experience available via smartphone.
In the last quarter of 2017, we were honoured to welcome senior executive
We are planning a review of SIEW 2017 as our first event of 2018. The theme
this year is ‘Rethinking Energy and Navigating Change’. The energy sector has seen industry cross-overs particularly in the areas of technology, power and transport, hence why our events now typically include nonenergy representatives. For 2018 through to 2019, we will host our usual panel format enhanced by video clips. We will be working closely with BritCham member companies and organisations, such as the Singapore branch of the UK’s Energy Institute; to drill down deeper into these topics, having more time than a traditional panel discussion and networking event allows.
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At the Chamber: Business Services News
Supporting British Companies doing Business in Singapore Recent Events Case Study: Thermal Compaction Group (TCG) Our Business Services’ Technology lead connected Thermal Compaction Group’s (TCG) team — led by Mr Tim Hourahine — to major hospitals in Singapore to introduce the Sterimelt machine. This world-first technology recycles clinical sterilisation wraps, which are typically incinerated in Singapore, to plastic blocks which can then be returned into the manufacturing supply chain. The local hospitals are extremely interested in working with TCG and are looking forward to implement the technology in their hospitals once it is approved by the local authorities. During their visit in Singapore, they also concluded an Asia Pacific distribution agreement at Eden Hall, in the presence of Acting Deputy High Commissioner, Mr Jonathan Darby. Find out more about TCG at www.tcg.ltd
Case Study: Morley College London Our Business Services’ Education lead assisted Mr Marco Macchitella, Deputy Principle of Morley College London — one of the UK’s leading centres for adult education. Morley College London was founded in 1889 and are specialists in Arts, Culture and Applied Sciences. They have a diverse range of programmes which include Art & Design, Music & Performing Arts and Language & Humanities. The college comprises of 13,000 enrolled students with 30,000 courses in the UK. “Nico contacted and arranged a series of meetings with potential business partners and accompanied me to all the meetings during my stay. The organisation, information received prior to my arrival and the support provided by Nico was excellent. The overall experience was very valuable and it is likely to lead to further developments in the future.” - Mr Marco Macchitella, Deputy Principle of Morley College London
Thermal Compaction Group (TCG) concluding an Asia Pacific distribution agreement at Eden Hall, in the presence of Acting Deputy High Commissioner, Mr Jonathan Darby
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"Legal Services are GREAT” Campaign Launch takes place in Singapore Business Services at BritCham was delighted to assist the Ministry of Justice in organising the launch of the “Legal Services are GREAT” International campaign at Eden Hall on 5th October 2017. 150 guests attended the successful launch event hosted by Lord Keen of Elie QC, HM Advocate General for Scotland and the Ministry of Justice spokesperson for the House of Lords.
Export Opportunities We help UK companies find and apply for Export Opportunities from businesses looking for products or services in Singapore. BritCham Singapore is committed to source and publish Export Opportunities on a regular basis across most sectors. Eligibility To qualify for Business Services, a business must:
“I wanted to write and thank you and your team for the huge amount of professional support they have given us for the launch of our #LegalServicesAreGREAT campaign at Eden Hall. The UK’s legal services sector is one of our greatest exports and has been supporting trade and commerce around the world for generations. Your expertise allowed us to run the kind of high-impact event we were looking for to launch this latest strand of the Government’s successful ‘GREAT’ campaign. If your colleagues want to find out more, it’s all at great.gov.uk/legal. Thank you!” – Emily Tofield, Director of Communications and Information Services, Ministry of Justice
• Have an active UK trading address • Be able to demonstrate that any support they receive from the Chamber would help them deliver economic benefit to the UK through this trading address Contact our Team Have a question? Please contact Carole our Business Services Manager. Carole@britcham.org.sg
The British Chamber of Commerce Singapore is the appointed delivery partner for DIT (Department for International Trade) in Singapore. Our Business Services team offers market entry support services to British companies looking to do business and grow business in Singapore.
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At the Chamber: New Members
Corporate
BritCham New Members
CPM Asia Sales & Marketing Martin Ryan
SVA (Singapore) Pte Ltd Kit Dawnay
K&L Gates LLP Nicholas Hanna
Virgin Active Singapore Pte Ltd Damien Posterino
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Corporate SME
Overseas Corporate
AsiaWorks Television Pte Ltd Andrew Clark
UNLOQ Systems LTD Mircea Patachi
Langley Alloys (SE Asia) Pte Ltd Martin Johnstone
Odyssey Partners Global Pte Ltd Andrew Bygrave Sasha's Fine Foods Pte Ltd Sasha Conlan
systemsGo Carl Griffith
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At the Chamber: Sterling News
On 25th October 2017, ANZ announced the rollout of its specially designed accessibility features to all retail and commercial Visa debit cards to make everyday banking easier for customers with a disability. All ANZ’s Visa debit cards will now have tactile indicators, larger fonts and high visibility leading edges to help customers identify their cards and which way to insert their card into ATM and EFTPOS terminals. The new cards also work with all of ANZ’s mobile payment options, including Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay and Fitbit Pay. They also feature Visa PayWave so customers can ‘tap and pay’ wherever contactless payments are accepted, including at ANZ’s contactless ATMs. ANZ worked with Vision Australia to run focus groups with people who have different levels of vision impairment to test the accessibility features before developing the cards. Read more about it at www.media.anz.com
BT has become the first telecommunications provider to sign a data exchange agreement with INTERPOL. The accord, signed at the INTERPOL Global Complex for Innovation (IGCI) in Singapore, provides a framework for threat information exchange focusing on data relating to criminal trends in cyber-space, emerging and known cyber-threats and malicious attacks. The mutual data sharing agreement will foster even greater co-operation between the two parties as they continue their fight to protect families, consumers, businesses and governments against the rising tide of cyber-crime. BT’s threat intelligence experts will provide the IGCI with their knowledge and unique insight into the evolving global threat landscape, helping INTERPOL in its efforts to identify and take action against cyber-criminals operating around the world. Read more about it at www.globalservices.bt.com/seas/en/news
JDX Consulting, the global financial services consulting firm, has announced the addition of a senior executive to its global leadership team. JDX has appointed Keith Rake to lead and drive the firm’s expansion across Europe and Asia Pacific. A specialist in the management of strategic change, Keith has successfully delivered large business integrations, in addition to several ground-breaking outsourcing/offshoring initiatives. Keith Rake joins as Managing Director and Head of Europe and Asia Pacific. Keith is an experienced global COO/CIO who has previously operated at Exco and Managing Director level at BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank. His earlier career was spent at Price Waterhouse Coopers where he also held a range of senior management secondments. Visit www.jdxconsulting.com for more information.
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Newcastle University has officially opened its purpose-built Research and Innovation Centre (NewRIIS). NewRIIS was formally opened by the British High Commissioner, His Excellency Scott Wightman, on Thursday 2nd November 2017. Located at the Devan Nair Institute for Employment and Employability in Jurong East, NewRIIS houses state-of-the-art research facilities, a visualisation suite, classrooms, open plan research areas and seminar facilities. The cutting-edge facilities have been specifically designed to enable research collaboration and knowledge exchange between worldrenowned researchers and academics in alignment with Singapore’s strategic needs. NewRIIS delivers a range of events and activities including postgraduate and CPD training programmes, masterclasses and workshops on a variety of subjects. Areas of particular focus for NewRIIS include: Energy and Sustainability; Smart Grids, Process Safety, Marine Technology; Data Visualisation and others. Events and programmes hosted by NewRIIS will attract high-calibre guests from numerous sectors including industry leaders, prominent academics, global researchers and individuals looking to learn new skills and to find natural partnerships. Anybody with an interest in collaborating, or visiting the facilities, is invited to contact the NewRIIS team at: newriis.research@newcastle.ac.uk.
The Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc announces that its subsidiaries have entered into an agreement to dispose of RBS' entire shareholdings in Euroclear plc to IntercontinentalExchange Holdings. The transaction involved the sale of 148,349 ordinary shares in Euroclear plc for a total cash consideration of €275 million. KPMG Corporate Finance acted as financial advisers to RBS and Simmons & Simmons acted as legal advisers to RBS on this transaction. The sale proceeds will be used for general corporate purposes. The transaction is part of the continued reduction of assets in RBS and is in line with the bank's plan to strengthen its capital position. Visit www.rbs.com/rbs/news.html for more information.
The Rolls-Royce Trent 7000, the latest member of the Trent family of engines, had successfully powered the new Airbus A330neo into the skies for its first test flight on 19th October 2017. The aircraft took off from the Airbus facility in Toulouse, France, that morning, marking the beginning of a flight test programme. The Trent 7000, the exclusive engine for the A330neo and the seventh in the Trent series, brings together experience from the Trent 700 — the engine of choice for the current A330, architecture from the Trent 1000 TEN — the latest version of the Trent 1000 engine, and latest technology from the Trent XWB — the world’s most efficient large civil engine. The 68–72,000lb thrust Trent 7000 delivers a step change in performance and economics compared to that engine. It improves specific fuel consumption by 10% and has twice the bypass ratio. Read more about it at www.rolls-royce.com/media/press-releases.aspx
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At the Chamber: Sterling News The Fry Group won the Best Adviser category for its Singapore business at the International Adviser Best Practice Awards, where they were recognised financial advisers that are, or have made, the transitions towards best practice. At the International Investment Awards, The Fry Group won across several categories: Best Practice in Offshore for its Singapore and Hong Kong businesses, and Personality of Year, which was awarded to Sheila Dickinson, Senior Wealth Adviser in the Hong Kong office. David Pugh, Director, The Fry Group Singapore, commented, “We’re thrilled to be recognised by two leading Awards programmes for our industry. Building on last year’s successes, these accolades demonstrate the best practices we endorse and the quality of people that work for us. They are evidence of the progress we have made as a business and the service we offer, and are testament to the quality, diligence and determination of our teams in both Singapore and Hong Kong.” Visit www.thefrygroup.sg/news for more information.
City Developments Limited (CDL) emerged as highest scoring Singapore real estate company for its climate change response this year, moving up from ‘Awareness’ and joining the ranks of ‘Leadership’ amongst three other companies in the Hong Kong and Southeast Asian region. CDL’s score of A- awarded by CDP, the non-profit environmental disclosure platform, reflects the company’s thorough understanding of the risks and opportunities of climate change, its positive management actions and efforts towards climate change mitigation, and adoption of sustainability best practices and strategies to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. Building on that, under its new CDL Future Value 2030 Sustainability Blueprint introduced in May 2017, CDL made the bold move to further raise its carbon emissions reduction target from 25% to 38% by 2030, from 2007 levels. The enhanced target adopts the Sectoral Decarbonisation Approach, a sector-based target-setting methodology. Read more at http://ir.cdl.com.sg.
Deloitte announces record aggregate member firm revenue of US$38.8 billion for the fiscal year ended 31 May 2017 (FY2017), marking their eighth consecutive year of solid growth. The figure represents a 7.1% revenue increase in local currency terms or a US$2 billion revenue increase and 8.3% two-year CAGR. Among the industries driving Deloitte’s growth in FY2017 were Technology, Media & Telecommunications and Consumer & Industrial Products; each grew revenue over 9% on a local currency basis. Over the last two years, revenue growth has averaged 8.3% in local currency terms, and there have been nearly 70,000 new hires. Punit Renjen, Deloitte Global CEO said, “In creating an inclusive, collaborative, purpose-led culture, we inspire our people to make an impact that matters for each other, our highly diverse and sophisticated client base, and society.” In 2017, the Deloitte network continued to be recognised as a top employer globally through awards such as LinkedIn’s Top Employers, The Times Top 50 Employers for Women, and Universum’s ‘World’s Most Attractive Employer’ award among others.
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At the Chamber: Corporate News
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Allied Pickfords, a SIRVA brand, announced it has been honoured with the International Moving Company of the Year accolade for the fifth consecutive time in the Expatriate Management and Mobility Awards (EMMA), organised by the Forum for Expatriate Management (FEM). Allied Pickfords was praised by the judging panel for client responsiveness, highlighting the expansive global network and extensive range of end-to-end mobility services as part of the SIRVA family. “Across all areas, this company has clearly differentiated themselves across the roster,” read the judging comments. “The breadth of coverage and scope of services offered truly supports diverse needs of clients.” The recognition comes as Allied Pickfords is expanding its footprint in the region, including a new Philippines office in November 2016. The EMMAs are the global mobility industry’s premier awards, celebrating excellence in mobility worldwide and signifying continued improvement and innovation in the delivery of relocation services. For more information, please visit www.alliedpickfords.com
The CIPD continues to play an essential role in the advancement of the HR and L&D professions across Asia from our offices in Singapore. New initiatives recently launched include a range of training courses and qualifications which are available for professionals at all levels. The session, which took place on 6th–10th November at The Hilton in Singapore, was a five-day intensive qualification in Organisation Design & Development which delivered in-depth insight into how organisation design impacts both day-to-day and longterm activities. To find out more, please visit www.fastrack.cipd.asia
Global Life Science Supply Chain Solutions Company Marken Ltd announced in October the acquisition of Touchdown International Ltd, a privately held specialty logistics company in Taiwan. Touchdown is 100% dedicated to the life sciences industry and complements Marken’s strategy to continue expanding in the Asia Pacific region. The new legal entity will be named Marken Taiwan Ltd. with its headquarters in Taipei. Mike Wu, the founder and CEO of Touchdown, will remain with Marken as the new General Manager in Taiwan. Michael Culme-Seymour, VP APAC for Marken stated, “Asia continues to be a vital part of Marken’s strategic growth plans. With the acquisition of Touchdown, we now have a solid footprint in Taiwan, whose pharma market is expected to grow to $84 billion by 2020. We can now serve our clients in Taiwan with the depth and breadth of our global services.” Read more at www.marken.com/news
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At the Chamber: Corporate News
On 12th October, ACCA welcomed the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, Andrew Jones MP to the Adelphi for an international trade and investment discussion co-hosted with the Enterprise Forum. The event was well attended with representatives of 15 embassies and high commissions in attendance including from China, Japan, France, Sweden, Serbia and Russia alongside leading UK and international business representatives and ACCA members. CEO Helen Brand championed ACCA’s global role and reinforced the three T’s of Trade, Talent and Technology which was subsequently repeated by the Minister. After welcoming attendees and sharing ACCA member insights on the transformative role of technology in global business practice, Mr Jones spoke on the government’s determination to remain a top destination for overseas investors, with an open, liberal economy and business-friendly regulation that welcomes businesses looking to both invest in the UK and export from the UK. Read more at www.blogs.accaglobal.com
Robert Walters Group has been named a Top 3 Most Socially Engaged Recruiter on LinkedIn for the third year running. The accolade is awarded to recruitment companies who have built strong social engagement strategies and is based on interactions with LinkedIn’s 500 million members. More specifically, the ranking takes into account social reach, employee engagement, talent brand and content marketing power compared to competitor recruitment firms with over 500 employees. Caroline Watkin, Group Communications Director said: "Thank you to our clients, candidates and network for helping us achieve another milestone. This is also a reflection of the hard work and dedication of our people across Robert Walters, Resource Solutions and Walters People, and a recognition of our social recruiting abilities.” Visit www.robertwalters.com/ news.html for more details.
Unique metals for your demanding applications. With nearly 80 years of experience, Langley Alloys provides products that deliver functional performance in the harshest of conditions. Unique alloys, such as Ferralium®, Hiduron®, Hidurel® and Fermonic® combine highstrength and high-performance to solve your design challenges. Their sites carry an extensive stock of bar, plate, pipe and fittings, with onsite cutting facilities to meet your needs wherever you’re located. For more information, please contact them at +65 6254 1139 or SEAsia@langleyalloys.com
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Marlborough College Malaysia pupil, Abraham Eng (15) has become the youngest ever marksman to win a medal at the recent SEA Games in Kuala Lumpur. Abraham, who begins studying for his IGCSEs at Marlborough College Malaysia this term, achieved his silver medal in the double men's trap event, competing against world-class adult shots and making history as the youngest shooting medallist in the 29 years of the SEA Games. Abraham will be competing in the forthcoming Commonwealth Games and his ambition is to win Olympic Gold. As Abraham turns to his academic studies, the Master of Marlborough College Malaysia, Alan Stevens, assured him that he would still be able to hone his marksmanship skills for future competitions, saying, "Abraham's success is a superb achievement and he has worked extremely hard to gain this accolade. At MCM we recognise the importance of a broad education with character-shaping, enriching experiences and we encourage Abraham to continue to explore his great potential."
On 13 October, Elanders Group completed the acquisition of an 80% stake in Asiapack Limited, a Hong Kong-based provider of value-added contract packaging services. Pickering Pacific advised the shareholder of Asiapack Limited on this transaction. According to Elanders Group, “The acquisition is a complement to Elanders’ existing operations in Asia, Mentor Media, and will provide new customer segments as well as broaden the product and service portfolio. Asiapack will become part of the business area Supply Chain Solutions and is expected to contribute positively to earnings per share starting from 1st January 2018, as well as improve the business area’s operating margin.”
Omar Shahzad, Meinhardt Group Chief Executive Officer, was the moderator for a plenary on “Building Next-Gen Smart Infrastructure in Asia” at the seventh Asia-Singapore Infrastructure Roundtable organised by International Enterprise (IE) Singapore on 26th September 2017. The plenary discussed the definition of sustainable smart infrastructure, Singapore’s role as the region’s infrastructure hub and also addressed the opportunities, challenges and upcoming trends in infrastructure and development in Asia. The event was attended by policy makers, infrastructure companies to financiers. The roundtable saw takeaways including the emergence of smart cities as solutions to urban problems, and key considerations during transportation projects, such as financing and proper structuring to ensure bankability and technological breakthroughs. To read in fuller detail, visit www.meinhardt.com.sg/news
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At the Chamber: Members’ Offers
To find out more about our members’ offers, visit our website under Membership -> Members Offers.
ALBA 1836 PTE. LTD
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BSI Group Singapore Pte Ltd
10% discount on ISO certification, training services and purchase of standards
Developing Global Leaders Asia Pte. Ltd
Grand Hyatt Singapore
5% off Women in Leadership Programs Developing Global Leaders Asia
Mezza9 relaunches with exclusive 15% discount on food items
Contemporary Italian
Discount On Weekday Business Lunch, à la carte Lunch/Dinner Menu and more
Italian Restaurant
Allied Pickfords (S) Pte Ltd
Bupa Global
Emirates
Harry's Holding Pte Ltd
Anagram Group
City Developments Limited
EnVeritas Group
Hotel G Singapore
Black Marketing - enabling LinkedIn for you
City Developments Limited
EVA Group
Hotel G Singapore
Black Marketing - enabling LinkedIn for you
CMC Partnership (UK) Ltd
Expat Living
IDM Training Pte.Ltd
British Airways
Courts (Singapore) Pte Ltd
Garner International (S) Pte Ltd
IOM (Institute of Occupational Medicine) Singapore
2 hours free Handyman Service
1 Hour Training Session at $990 and 10% off all 1-day training workshops
Free One Hour Consultation on How You Can Use LinkedIn To Achieve Your Business Goals + Free Book
Free One Hour Personal Branding Consultation + Free Personal Branding Book
10% off airfare for British Airways
10% off Medical Insurance Plan
Enjoy a 6-week Complimentary Trial Membership at Tower Club
10% discount on facilities and services
Discount on Change Management training & certification
5% off electrical & 10% off furniture on presentation of your BritCham Membership Card
Enjoy up to 10% off Emirates fares
10% off* Digital Content Marketing Services
5% discount on training
50% off Expat Living Subscription (usual price $78)
FREE: Two Hour’s Consultation with Garner International Executive Search & Recruitment Services
15% off at Harry’s on presentation of your BritCham Membership Card
Get 10% discount at Ginett Restaurant & Wine Bar on presentation of your BritCham Membership Card
Get 10% discount at 25 Degrees Burgers & Liquor bar on presentation of your BritCham Membership Card
50% Off Access To Online GDPR Qualification
NEBOSH International General Certificate (IGC) course on 20% off
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JW Marriott Hotel Singapore South Beach
Pacific Prime Insurance Brokers Singapore Pte. Ltd
JW Marriott Hotel Singapore South Beach
PestBusters Pte Ltd
Special offer at Beach Road Kitchen on presentation of your BritCham Membership Card
Special offer at Media Bar on presentation of your BritCham Membership Card
Free Market Review & 5% Discount on Insurance Coverage*
Complimentary Professional Pest Consultation
Sasha's Fine Foods Pte Ltd
10% Off Any Order at Sasha Fine Foods
The British Club
The British Club Exclusive Membership Offer from BritCham Members
The Fry Group Shangri-La Hotel Limited
10% off UK Tax Return Service
Shangri-La Business Travel Programme for BritCham Members
The Institute of Marine Engineering Science & Technology Mega Adventure
20% Off Team Building Programs
PizzaExpress Singapore PTE. Limited 25% off at Pizza Express on presentation of your BritCham Membership Card
Singapore Cricket Club
Up to 75% off Sustainable Maritime Operations degrees
Up to $1000 credit for F&B for BritCham members
Total Health Chiropractic Pte Ltd 50% off first visit at Total Health Chiropractic
MSIG Insurance (Singapore) Pte. Ltd
15% off MSIG’s Prestige Healthcare
Progress - U PTE Ltd
5% off International Corporate Coaching Program
Singapore Management University 5% discount on SMU Executive Development Programme
Transform Your Conversations 10% discount on all 1 Day and 2 Day Performance Management Programmes
MSIG Insurance (Singapore) Pte. Ltd
30% off MSIG’s TravelEasy Insurance
Regus
15% Discount for all Britcham Members on all products
Sonru Asia Pacific Pte Ltd 10% off Annual Subscription for Corporate Members
Ultimate Performance (UPFitness Pte LTD)
10% off personal training packages with Ultimate Performance
Otonomos BCC Pte. Ltd Enjoy 10% off at Otonomos
Regus
Special Membership Offer for BritCham Members
Survival Chic
Special Membership Offer for BritCham Members
Virgin Active Singapore Pte Ltd Enjoy Corporate Membership Rates with Virgin Active
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At the Chamber: Annual Events
Back to Work Networking 2017 24 August 2017
BritCham organised our annual back to work networking evening exclusively for members and their friend or colleague, as we retreated from the hustle and bustle of the CBD to the Treetops Terrace at the British Club. Our members and guests had the opportunity to connect, catch up with friends, expand their network of contacts and strengthen existing business relationships. Perched on the hilltops of Bukit Tinggi, everyone enjoyed networking amidst luscious greenery, whilst enjoying free-flow drinks, canapĂŠs, cool rooftop breezes and views.
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At the Chamber: Business Group News
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Flying Start F1 Networking Evening 14 September 2017
Dr Adam Hill - Chief Medical Officer, McLaren Applied Technologies
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Against the backdrop of the 2017 Formula One Singapore Grand Prix, we organised our annual networking evening to get everyone warmed up for the race weekend. Dr Adam Hill of McLaren Applied Technologies shared his insights on how F1 technology impacts our everyday lives and how the engineers work to make the Grand Prix a success. Members and guests enjoyed dazzling views of Singapore as they networked amongst new friends and old, and enjoyed the atmosphere, buzz and excitement of the upcoming Grand Prix weekend.
Sponsored by:
Building Networks Connecting Business Creating Opportunities
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At the Chamber: Breakfast Club Events
Brexit: The Next Chapter 20 September 2017 There has been a great deal of comment and dare we say speculation on the next chapter of Brexit. As an instalment in this financial services Brexit series, we aimed to provide a lucid perspective for businesses and individuals on the UK economy and the legal process.
> Michael Starmer-Smith - Head of Corporate Banking UK & Ireland, Deutsche Bank Paul Landless - Partner, Clifford Chance, Singapore John Laws - Managing Director, Head of Regulatory and Government Relations, Asia Pacific, Barclays Tamara Henderson - Senior Economist, Bloomberg
New Energy Realities — Changing Strategy and Operating Models 22 September 2017 At this seminar, we looked at how companies are changing their operating models to adapt to a new energy world — a carbon constrained world with lower commodity prices. We also looked at skillsets required to compete for the future energy role, the impact of COP 21/22 and adopting alternative operating models for price efficiencies.
> Etienne Romsom – President, EnergyCC Csilla Kohalmi-Monfils - Head of Strategy, New Business and Communications CSR, ENGIE Asia-Pacific Huw Evans – Chief Executive, Twinza Oil Limited Nomi Ahmad - Senior Vice President, Group Business Development & Commercial, Sembcorp Industries Ltd
Sponsored by:
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At the Chamber: Evening Events
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Zip-Wining — An Evening of Networking & Exhilaration 7 September 2017 Members and guests joined us for an evening of networking and refreshments on Sentosa — with a difference! Everyone arrived at Sand Bar for registration and welcome soft drinks before we were transported to the MegaZip at Mega Adventure. We enjoyed the island views, sunset and cool evening breeze as we ziplined down before we continued the evening with networking and free-flow beer, wines and soft drinks.
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Leadership Debate 19 September 2017 Members and guests joined us in an in-depth debate to tackle current leadership issues such as trust perspective, multiculturalism and the prevailing challenge of effective communication in this fourth industrial revolution age. Current leadership competencies were challenged with research, and participants were to think about changes in leadership approach and upcoming roles.
> Sean Boyle, BEM - General Manager, The British Club Ray Bigger - Managing Director, Think8 Michelle Simmons - General Manager, Southeast Asia New Markets, Microsoft Asia Pacific Jeremy Blain - Managing Partner, Cegos Group Lauren Bradbury - Director, People Advisory Services, EY
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Building Networks Connecting Business Creating Opportunities
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At the Chamber: Evening Events
Robo vs. Human in Financial Advisory: What you need to know 25 September 2017 The Women in Business and Financial Services committees were delighted to host an evening panel discussion on financial advisory. The discussion touched on the merits and limitations of both roboadvisory’s digital delivery and traditional human advisors such as bankers and asset managers. The speakers also explored the notions of trust and investment performance in today’s environment.
> Adrian Chng - Co-founder, Chairman & CEO, Fintonia Group Ben Cherrington - Partnerships Development Director, M&G Investments Michele Ferrario - Co-Founder and CEO, Stashaway Gina Heng - Founding Partner, LATTICE80
Raising Awareness of Mental Health Issues in the Workplace 4 October 2017 This panel event involved various industrywide bodies, discussing a range of mental health topics relevant to the working environment. The panel underscored a culture where people prize and develop their psychological and emotional health, so employers understand the link between employee well-being and organisational performance.
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Colin Payne - HR Director, Swire Pacific Offshore Charis Chua - Manager, Mental Health Service, NCSS Honghao Phua - Business Development Manager, Centre for Effective Living Elaine Chai - Occupational Therapist, Integrated Employment Services, Singapore Anglican Community Services Hayden Majajas - Head of Diversity & Inclusion APAC, Bloomberg
Sponsored by:
Building Networks Connecting Business Creating Opportunities
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At the Chamber: Special Events
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Positioning the UK Economy for Success ft. The Rt Hon Sajid Javid MP 23 August 2017
The Rt Hon Sajid Javid MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government
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The Rt Hon Sajid Javid MP took time out during a brief return to Singapore on behalf of the UK Government to discuss what success looks like for the UK and Singapore at an event hosted by BritCham. Addressing the ongoing EU Exit discussions, the Secretary of State was keen to reiterate the strength of the UK’s position and point to Singapore’s successes in areas such as housing, infrastructure, trade and the thriving business community, particularly for start-ups.
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Cambodia Country Briefing 3 October 2017 In the past 15 years, we have seen Cambodia’s economy triple in size and poverty reduced by half. During this presentation, we discussed the potential for future growth and access to the market; looking at recent booms in among others: the construction, education, IT and technology sectors. The second part of the presentation focused on breaking down the sectors and taking a look at education opportunities in Private General Education, ELT, TVET, Aid-funded business, STEM and more.
Sponsored by:
Building Networks Connecting Business Creating Opportunities
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At the Chamber: Special Events
China's Belt & Road Initiative — Repaving the Ancient Silk Routes 6 October 2017 The Silk Road Economic Belt by land, the Maritime Silk Road by sea. China's Belt and Road (B&R) development strategy initiative is ambitious, vast in scope, and steeped in history. Its impact could run for decades, possibly centuries. PwC had completed an extensive report on this initiative, and their presentation covered the scope and goals of the Belt & Road Initiative, opportunities for foreign companies to participate and Specific B&R considerations. The Transport, Logistics and Supply Chain Business Group were delighted to host this PwC presentation.
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Mark Rathbone, Partner, Asia Pacific Capital Projects & Infrastructure Leader, PwC
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The BritCham Fair 12 October 2017 Representatives from our Business Group Committees showcased how the Chamber works to remain relevant across multiple topics by discussing the latest trends and challenges, planning events and contributing content for our wider membership. Attendees had the opportunity to share ideas on event topics the Chamber should cover in 2018. They also talked to our Committee Chairs and Board Members to help drive our agenda forward. Our Business Services team was on hand to showcase how we consistently provide support to UK companies looking to setup in Singapore and how they can help companies already established here.
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At the Chamber: Leader in Business Lunch Events
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Leaders in Business Lunch: The Future Of Global Trade with Dr Lena Wilson CBE 9 October 2017 Navigating an uncertain global business environment throughout the 2020s will require business leaders to have strategic foresight, new capabilities and agile responses. At this event, Dr Lena Wilson CBE provided an analysis of Scottish Enterprise’s evidence-based research, uncovered insights about the future of global trade and the emerging drivers of change. From digital and technological innovation, to rapidly changing business models and pressures on global resources, we looked at how organisations should respond to growing competition and the dynamics of speed, scale and trust.
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Dr Lena Wilson CBE - CEO, Scottish Enterprise
Leaders in Business Lunch: Leading in the Age of Uncertainty with Ann Francke 26 October 2017
Ann Francke - CEO, Chartered Management Institute
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This lunch discussion was focused on how today’s leaders are shaped in an ever-changing world. Ann Francke, CEO of Chartered Management Institute shared her insights on leadership and how managers can cope, adapt and respond to these changes. With extensive experience in leading organisations, promoting best practices and improving management standards, Ann shared suggestions on how to boost productivity and results, giving companies solid foundations for growth.
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BUILDING NETWORKS CONNECTING BUSINESSES CREATING OPPORTUNITIES
THIS IS WHAT WE DO BEST. The Chamber plays a strong role within the community in Singapore, providing valuable links for our members, whilst maintaining a focus on delivering quality support to our growing membership base. We currently represent almost 400 companies across all industry sectors. The network of executives representing their companies grew substantially over the past years to now over 3000 a dynamic development that is continuing in 2017. Our Membership is open to all nationalities. Join us today! Visit www.britcham.org.sg