At e27, we have kickstarted a new articles series called work-life balance to learn more about tech enablers and executives and their lives beyond working hours.

Amit Ghosh is the Chief Information & Services Officer for R3. He leads the global operations organisation responsible for information security, IT infrastructure and operations, customer success, professional services, and technical support. In addition, he also leads its business and growth in Asia Pacific. 

Before R3, he held various senior business development & operations roles at Visa, PayPal, and Hewlett-Packard.

Based in Singapore, he holds an MBA from Chicago Booth and a BTech from IIT-BHU.

He is a regular contributor of articles for e27 (you can read his thought leadership articles here). 

In this candid interview, Ghosh talks about his personal and professional life.

How would you explain what you do to a five-year-old?

As a father of an almost five-year-old, this is an interesting question. My answer would be the following: we build things like you build toys with your legos.

I build something similar to a railway track that can then carry a train with goods from one point to another (this is R3 Corda’s flow frameworks and smart contracts that move data and information).

Sometimes we put different legos in a safe box, give them a good hard shake, and a new toy emerges (analogous to Conclave’s computation in a trusted enclave). Like how you build toys that your friends love, we build things that our friends will love.

What has been the biggest highlight/challenge of your career so far?

The biggest highlight of my career is being part of the blockchain industry – to be building and leading teams at R3.

Blockchain technology has the promise and evidence to be as foundational and indispensable as the internet. It is proving to play a significant role in shaping our company and, in doing so, shaping the industry. This is a genuine opportunity of a lifetime. Our business relies heavily on interpersonal relationships with our colleagues, partners, and clients.

Also Read: Try to look at the world through a beginner’s eyes: Joey Alarilla of Playfix.io

In the last two and a half years, the pandemic has challenged and disrupted our ways of building relationships, working collaboratively, and forging meaningful partnerships with customers. 

In addition, hiring, onboarding, and retaining talent virtually was one of the stiffest leadership challenges I have dealt with in the recent past.

R3 was able to weather the storm because our senior-most leaders spent significant time making thoughtful choices for our employees.

How do you envision the next five years of your career?

I envision spending the next few years driving transformational change in technology infrastructure that underpins the financial markets globally and, equally, in the Asia Pacific. We are already in the process of doing so with financial services customers like DTCC, SDX, BIC (India), and other corporate customers like Ericsson and Vodafone.

However, we are just getting started, and there is a long runway ahead. I intend to work closely with my team to deliver large-scale customer projects and make customers successful. And we cannot do that without the help of R3-ers.

Therefore, I envision my next five years entirely devoting my time and energy to finding new talent whilst continuing to develop and support our current talent as best as possible.

What are some of your favourite work tools?

Slack is an everyday essential for me. The collaborative aspect of Slack acts as the R3 team’s bedrock, and it is our go-to tool for internal communication. This goes without mentioning its user-friendly interface and many functions that can be integrated with the app.

So, I consider Slack my favourite tool, considering it integral to my daily work routine.

Besides Slack, Atlassian’s Confluence is another excellent tool that I use on a day-to-day basis. Made by a software company from Australia, Confluence effectively renders R3’s key insights into internal Wiki pages, which is especially helpful in facilitating clarity of thought.

Being able to pen down our ideas and make sense of our thought processes will lead us in the right direction and eliminate the possibility of information misalignment. This translates to more efficient and effective work for the team.

Good organisation and accountability are traits I highly value, especially as a leader when there are multiple things that I often have to juggle. An app that helps to keep me in check is Notion, a note-taking app that’s essentially a second-brain tool. It’s an all-in-one workspace that systematically consolidates all of my tasks, projects, and notes and serves as my primary storage place.

Its minimalistic visuals provide a seamless user interface with regard to connecting and expanding ideas or even sharing them with my teammates. But most importantly, it provides the quickest access to information whenever and wherever I need it. It’s akin to my brain but expanded.

What’s something about you or your job that would surprise us?

Every single one of us can transform if we have adequate self-awareness and a deep desire to change. My belief in this has strengthened over the last few years as I became self-aware and received coaching to work on areas that were a priority for me.

Also Read: We can no longer adopt a cookie-cutter approach to marketing: Gunalan Ram of CINNOX

Subsequently, when I became a coach, I raised awareness in the person I was coaching, which led to significant changes in their life. When I share my belief openly, most people are surprised by my conviction in this and how important it is to me.

Do you prefer WFH or WFO, or hybrid?

I prefer the hybrid model. I find it amusing, however, that it took a pandemic for us to take hybrid working models seriously and implement them globally. Before the pandemic, we would not even have considered hybrid working to be a possibility.

But I’ve now realised the benefits of working from home and the office.

At home, I can zero in on my work and be hyper-focused instead of being prone to disruptions and distractions that may interrupt my workflow in the office.

Working from the office, however, provides its own set of unique benefits, an important one being human interactions with the team. It’s a prerequisite for leaders to know how to build rapport with their team members, which can be challenging to do via a screen or any virtual platform.

Human connection is best built when you share the same environment as your team – physically interacting with them at work and beyond work settings. Human connections are formed based on experiences, whether getting coffee together in the pantry, bouncing ideas off each other in meeting rooms, or having small talks in the hallways — these are all part of this experience of being at work.

But all in all, it still needs to be a healthy balance between working from home and the office. Only with the hybrid model do you get the best of both worlds.

What would you tell your younger self?

I would tell myself to take more risks and travel a lot more! The courage to try new things and allow me the freedom to do first and think later is something I would love to tell young Amit.

The wisdom, life lessons, and values you gain from taking risks and travelling shape you into the person you are. As the saying goes – we are the sum of our experiences. Without risks, I wouldn’t be where I am or who I am today.

Ideally, I would have liked to challenge the mindset of my younger self, where I used to play safe out of cautiousness and take the leap of faith and believe that everything would naturally fall into place. 

Additionally, travelling or living abroad will allow an individual to understand new perspectives better and take in new cultures – this builds character and shapes one’s outlook.

Can you describe yourself in three words?

Coach. Ambitious. Calm.

What are you most likely to be doing if not working?

It’s one of four things – I’m babysitting my four-year-old, being in nature, practising my coaching skills, or writing.

Also Read: Dream loud, dream big and dream now: Surbhi Agarwal of Yellow.ai

Inspired by R3’s CTO, Richard Gendal Brown, a high quality prolific online writer, I’ve recently been practising and honing my writing skills for no objective other than to sharpen my clarity of thought.

I even started my webpage, where I share my perspectives on topics in the cross-section of talent development and leadership and occasionally share a personal story. This is a recent hobby that I am exploring to reinvigorate my creative side. The challenge to improve my writing energises me very much and knowing that I have a long way to go gives me a lot of joy.

What are you currently reading/listening to/ watching?

My current reads:

• Show Your Work by Austin Kleon
• A Simpler Life: A Guide to Greater Serenity, Ease and Clarity by Alain de Botton
• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When The Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson, Al Switzler, Ron McMillan, and Joseph Kenny

I am interested in human psychology and its role in personal and professional development, fulfilment, and leading a holistic life. I strongly believe in the value of continuous growth as a person, and I constantly want to educate myself on the things that can inspire people, make them happier, and view the world more positively than otherwise.

Being able to internalise contentment, self-satisfaction fully, and inner peace is my ultimate end goal – I would like to learn how to rid myself of material wants and desires and grow through introspection.

I also read to understand better the people around me, which goes a long way for my personal development as a leader, mentor, and coach. It is imperative to find ways to improve myself so that I can better support the growth of the R3 team and be of help to them.

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The holiday season is upon us. We’ve had 10/10, and there’s 11/11, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, 12/12 and Boxing Day Sales still to come. But this year, the online shopping festival season is shaping up to be different from years gone by.

Rising inflation and increasing costs have forced us all to become more price-conscious and selective when it comes to purchasing decisions, even if we think we’re bagging a bargain.

In fact, according to a recent survey by Gartner, 48 per cent of consumers will begin their festive shopping early this year in a bid to beat inflation. While this presents an opportunity for merchants to drive sales during this crucial shopping period, the same report found that consumers are becoming warier of barriers to purchase, meaning that to capture this opportunity, payment service providers (PSPs) must make sure they’re more prepared than ever.

Here are four things that should be on the radar of all payment businesses this shopping season if they’re to help merchants realise success.

Security, security, security

Security is a consistent point of focus in payments, and so it should be. This is even more of an issue during the run-up to the festive season when opportunistic fraud attempts jump about 30 per cent.

Also Read: How e-commerce merchants can capture growth in international markets

As a PSP, if security isn’t top of your agenda yet, it should be. Your security protocols should be set up to maximise detection without declining payments. False positives will not only result in lost sales but a potential drop off in new customers for your merchants because of decreased brand trust.

To prevent any security problems, you should also check your fraud management protocols and make sure they are optimised to run smoothly alongside your merchants’ festive campaigns and promotions.

Drive conversions through data optimisation

Data is key to driving conversions and optimising the customer experience. Today, e-commerce takes place across multiple channels, including Online-to-Offline (O2O), on social media, and even in the metaverse.

Whenever people shop, they make payments, and these payments provide valuable data about consumer preferences. These include how they like to pay, their spending patterns and habits, and preferred payment methods. If you have strong data analytics tools that interpret payment data, you’ll be an even bigger help to your merchants for the festive season and beyond.

Offer the right choice of payment methods

Getting a grip on your data means you can help merchants increase conversions and optimise payments. When it comes to cross-border payments, optimising payment methods is far from a one size fits all approach, particularly in Asia, where the payments landscape is very fragmented.

People won’t hit the buy button if their preferred payment methods aren’t available. And in 2021, local payment methods, digital payment methods used in a particular country or region, accounted for 77 per cent of purchases online.

Make sure that you are providing the right payment methods for the markets you are targeting or work with experts that know your markets and can advise you on which payment methods you need to drive sales for your merchants.

Always have a backup plan

Although the festive shopping season might not be as busy as it was last year, be prepared for unexpected jumps in sales. While many are tightening their belts due to inflation, they are still aware that the online shopping festival season is the time to bag the best deals.

Also Read: The thesis for cross-border e-commerce in Southeast Asia

Even if your payments usually run smoothly, it’s good to have a backup plan in case one or more of your acquirers or processors has any issues. To manage this, have a clear communications plan ready to use with your merchants in case payments are disrupted. Similarly, you should also consider creating internal protocols to manage disruptions.

For example, if your credit card processor has a disruption, do you have a cross-functional crisis management team in place to troubleshoot? Do people in merchant-facing positions like customer support and sales know what to do and how to respond? What’s your plan of action?

Ironing out how you’ll respond to disruption scenarios and creating a clear communications plan helps ensure when they do happen, everything will be kept under control. And if you’re prepared, it’ll go a long way towards letting your merchants know they’re your priority during this important time of year.

So, if you let all the above sink in and make adjustments where necessary, you’ll be well on your way to being prepared and primed for success ahead of 2023’s shopping festival season.

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Global private market exchange ADDX has raised approximately US$20 million in a pre-Series B round of financing led by KB Securities, a subsidiary of South Korea’s largest banking group KB Financial Group.

The round kicked off in May 2022, when ADDX announced a US$58 million raise from the Stock Exchange of Thailand, Hamilton Lane, and UOB.

This brings the total funds raised by ADDX since its inception in 2017 to around US$140 million. The company also counts the Singapore Exchange, Temasek subsidiary Heliconia Capital, Tokai Tokyo Financial Holdings, and the Development Bank of Japan among its investors.

The startup will use the fresh capital to grow ADDX Advantage, a wealth management platform launched earlier this year for private banks, brokerages and family offices. A portion of the funds will go into global expansion.

Also Read: For Web3 to take off, we need to fix the rigidity problem of smart contracts

ADDX allows individual investors access to private market deals that have traditionally been open only to institutional investors, such as sovereign wealth funds and endowment funds. These include private credit and other fixed-income investments, private equity, hedge funds, and private real estate.

The exchange, regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, uses blockchain and smart contract technology to automate manual processes. This reduces the minimum subscription sizes from US$1 million to US$5,000 while allowing secondary trading.

Oi-Yee Choo, CEO of ADDX, said: “The fundamental design of private markets — how and to whom securities are distributed, and whether secondary trading is facilitated — has transformed more over the past two years than it has over the two decades before that. The impact of that change has been positive: access to the means of wealth creation is becoming equal, and capital can flow unimpeded to the most efficient financing projects. In the long run, smooth and seamless capital markets will uplift growth in the real economy, with dividends for both workers and investors.”

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MOGUL.sg, an AI-driven property search portal in Singapore, has raised S$9 (US$6.5) million in its first-ever funding round.

Nech Capital, an alternative investment management company in Singapore, led the round.

With the money, MOGUL.sg is looking to add more features to its website’s 3D map, such as indoor mapping and navigation.

Also Read: What are the key emerging trends and technologies in proptech space?

Launched in 2018, MOGUL.sg aims to make property searches easy with smart keywords, property tagging, and a specially curated agent concierge team to assist homeowners.

It has a library of over 5,000 custom keywords that cater to a refined search that describes the property’s characteristics that the users are searching for. Users can use keywords such as “East-West Line”, “Park”, “Primary School”, and “Balcony” to refine the search results. This enables them to learn about amenities in the neighbourhood and understand what they sign up for before purchasing or renting the property.

Early this year, MOGUL.sg rolled out an interactive 3D map in its property search portal to support searches with an immersive experience to help prospective home buyers visualise the properties and their surrounding areas better. They can see whether the property encounters any view obstructions caused by nearby buildings, check whether the property has an unblocked view of the sea, and even the exact direction of the sun at various times of the day.

“Here at MOGUL.sg, it has always been our aim to improve users’ experience in the property search. We have consistently added features to our website so that users -buyers, sellers, agents, or real estate developers- can improve their productivity with the tools provided,” said Gerald Sim, CEO and Founder of MOGUL.sg.

The firm claims it has over 6,000 registered housing agents using the portal and facilitated over S$50 million of real estate transactions on its website since its launch.

Also Read: Why Singapore becoming a tech hub is a great boost for the proptech sector

Since the start of 2022, MOGUL.sg said it has seen a 20 per cent growth among active and new users.

So far, the startup has collaborated with leading real estate developers, such as Guoco, Keppel Land, Far East, The Four Seasons, and Capital Land, in its property developments.

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Many years ago, in the tech industry, there was this persistent belief that e-commerce would destroy and replace retail in the heart of customers. But fast forward to 2022, despite the prevalence of e-commerce and the challenges that retail continues to face, the two industries continue to co-exist. Instead of competing, they ended up complementing and supporting each other.

According to Looi Qin En, Principal at Saison Capital, at an Echelon 2022 panel discussion on October 28 at Resorts World Sentosa, this would be the direction that Web3 and Web2 companies are taking in the future.

But before they can fully embrace and implement Web3 technologies and business models, there are misconceptions to clear.

“One of the biggest misconceptions we have right now about Web3 is that in building Web3, you can apply the same principles as in Web2. For example, in the matters of how you go to market, how you bring your products, none of the traditional ways of marketing really works,” he said. “There has to be a change in mindset.”

Another common misconception involved what Web3 technologies actually entail. Speaking in the same panel as Looi, Rishi Randhawa, Head of Web3 Innovation at Enjinstarter, pointed out that most of the public today is already familiar with popular Web3-related terms such as NFTs, but that is often the extent of their understanding.

Also Read: Blockchain promises to be as foundational and indispensable as internet: Amit Ghosh of R3

“If I ask the audience, how many of you have heard of NFTs? I’m pretty sure 80-90 per cent of you would put your hands up. But if you ask people you know, how many of you have a wallet? Probably about 10 per cent,” he said.

“There’s a lot more to Web3 than just NFTs. I think every business, every brand will have its own objectives, its own challenges that require them to look at the new set of tools and the new set of ways of working to achieve finance.”

This is something that Xander van der Heijden, CEO at UNL, agreed on. “We’ve come a long way, but many of the Web3 technology and infrastructures today are used for cryptocurrencies when blockchain and distributed ledger can solve real-world problems. But that’s where we need to go.”

Building a Web3-friendly culture

For Web2 companies who are looking to start implementing Web3 technologies and business models, where should they start? According to the panellists, they can begin building a company culture that can help team members shift to a “Web3 mindset” more seamlessly.

As Looi put it, Web3 is about “a change in how we are looking at our community and our audiences.”

For Shaun Heng, Head of Spartan Labs at The Spartan Group, from the organisational perspective, a company can start by setting up a small group of employees who are passionate about the space.

Also Read: Web2 founders, get ready for Web3 before 2025 – Insights from Echelon 2022

“Just having this sense of commonality, stepping up and sharing information is already a good starting point,” he stressed. “You don’t need to revamp your entire business model right away. You don’t need to build everything on the blockchain just because you want to expand to Web3. Start small by having the culture embedded in the organisation itself.”

“Subsequently, you will pick up a new model. Once you get a bit more momentum … the employees are on this journey together. This way, you can take a bit more risk, but you don’t need to start with a goal in mind.”

When it comes to case studies, van der Heijden named Reddit as one example of a Web2 platform that had successfully transition into Web3 —in just four months— with the launch of its NFT marketplace.

“You got to listen to the audience. Speak to that community. Figure out what they could be interested in,” he stressed.

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