Talent Accelerator

Since 1962, Cathay Life Insurance has upheld its core values of “integrity, accountability, and innovation“ in providing its customers with diversified insurance services. It started its digital transformation (DX) journey in 2018 by adopting a vision of “insurance + technology, happiness is closer“ to offer its 8 million policyholders an improved insurance service experience. Agile, digital, and diversity (ADD) are the guiding principles of Cathay Life Insurance’s transformation strategy. Under agile, the company introduced agile thinking and methodologies from top to bottom. As for digital, it deepened its digital capabilities by investing in user interface (UI)/user experience (UX), data analysis, and modeling, among others. Finally, for diversity, it built cross-border functions that allowed its employees to explore new technologies and innovations through the Cathay Financial Innovation Lab, work on human–machine collaboration projects, and integrate with talents from different backgrounds. With ADD, the learning atmosphere within the organization has improved, and digital understanding has increased. The average monthly users of the Cathay Learning Network now exceed 450,000, and employees are more accepting of transformational thinking and cross-field work challenges. In terms of attracting and retaining personnel, ADD allows the active introduction of outstanding digital talents through multiple channels, such as HackNTU, Cathay Big Data Competition, and Cathay Agile Program (CAP) internship program. 

United Overseas Bank (UOB), one of the most recognizable financial institutions in Asia, has a global network of more than 500 offices and a 26,000-strong workforce. UOB‘s Enterprise Data and Analytics Transformation strategy is accelerating the adoption and usage of data and analytics to drive its business transformation, ultimately aiming to drive data monetization though better revenues, higher productivity, and lower risk. Its holistic approach, which focuses on enhancing people and data capabilities, processes, and technology, underpins the bank‘s strategy. In 2019, UOB‘s data management office and human resources (HR) function created Better U, a groupwide learning and development program, to help its over 26,000 employees deepen their digital and data skills. Better U is the first in-house–designed digital, data, and soft skills training program to receive accreditation from the Institute of Banking and Finance Singapore. UOB is also a leader in nurturing a future talent pipeline in data analytics through traineeships and scholarships, such as the Master of Science in Accounting (Data and Analytics) scholarship at the Singapore Management University. 

Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank) has always been among the first financial institutions in the Philippines that embraced technological innovations to empower its customers. By holding on to its purpose of co-creating innovations, UnionBank forged a strategy that could accelerate talent at any point of interaction within the organization. This talent acceleration strategy, People Tech, holds “people at the core, technology at the fore.“ People Tech advocates digital delivery to build capabilities and bring them to hyperspeed, allowing accelerated talent development and capability building internally and externally. Through People Tech’s UBP Xcellerator Program, UnionBank employees can learn about emerging technologies and can work on innovative projects in an agile environment. Participants receive firsthand coaching from experts and the opportunity to work on use cases related to the field they intend to learn. Externally, the program also trains individuals through a learning portal in which they can receive structured mentoring via online channels. Around 30% of the program’s top performers are hired by the company, whereas the rest have been recruited by UnionBank’s partners and subsidiaries. To date, the program offers free and paid learning courses and has partnered with schools and organizations in the Philippines and Asia/Pacific, creating a community of emerging Filipino tech talents. 

As a mobile-first, digital bank, CIMB Bank emphasizes cultivating talent to improve competitive advantage. In September 2019, the bank’s Transforming Customer Journeys (TCJ) team rolled out the Individual Development Plan, a process that helps employees with setting goals and building personal plans to improve knowledge and competencies through self-assessments and counter–assessments. Under this plan, each employee creates targeted goals and developmental plans from identified capability needs and skill gaps. Incorporating agile fundamentals, each team member is required to work in real time with the immediate supervisor. At the end of every quarter, employee capabilities are baselined against a role-specific capability maturity matrix, with the overall progress reported to organization leaders. Moreover, talks and workshops, such as the CIMB Catalyst — Digital Talk Series, were organized to share and learn new ways of thinking within the organization. Besides offering formal training, the TCJ promotes employee lifelong learning by introducing brown bag lunches, or “lunchtime learning,“ which runs fortnightly. CIMB Bank‘s heavy investment in talent growth and development has produced engaged, satisfied, and high-performing employees.  

SK Hynix strives to lead the global semiconductor market by securing technology and cost competitiveness through continuous research and development (R&D) and investments. The company aims to find solutions improving collaboration by assessing how employees work through onsite interviews, figuring out their modes of communication when they are without working tools, and securing required technologies for mobile adoption. To accelerate digital transformation
(DX) within the organization, it established CUBE, a real-time interactive collaboration platform that enables communication and collaboration by providing access to wide array of devices and maximizing information distribution
efficiency through an open ecosystem. It connects employees, equipment, data, and IT with each other in real time, provides active notifications, and enables distribution of personal assistants via AI, chatbots, and chat operations for interactive services. CUBE’s deployment allowed the company to automate daily tasks, reduce emails by 63%, and save millions from work automation. Since its creation, CUBE’s utilization rate has also increased by 116%. With the platform, SK Hynix’s
35,000–strong workforce can seamlessly work together in an easy-to-use and secure platform, leading to improved business transparency, enhanced intelligence dissemination, and elevated knowledge capitalization. 

Petrosea is a multidisciplinary contract mining, engineering and construction, and oil and gas services company with a track record of achievement in Indonesia for over 48 years. Petrosea offers complete pit-to-port mining solutions, integrated engineering and construction capabilities, as well as logistics support while demonstrating a commitment to safety, health and environment, quality management, and business integrity. Project Minerva, which stands for “Mining Engineering and Construction Advanced Analytics,“ is one of the most significant initiatives launched by Petrosea as a strategic step to carry out the digital transformation (DX) of its mining operations. Petrosea recognized at the very beginning that employee engagement was critical to the success of the program, which required the implementation of a strong and effective change management strategy across the organization. With an evolving working culture that has become more dynamic and innovative, Petrosea employees were fully engaged with the transformation efforts through technical trainings, leadership and character–building programs, and digital boot camps. Petrosea also launched its electronic Petrosea Academy (e-PetA), an education platform for independent learning. To further embed the transformational mindset across the organization, Petrosea has applied shared key performance indicators (KPIs), such as organization culture and mindset and innovation culture, leading to benefits such as agility, alignment and cross-functional cooperation, clear communications, autonomy and accountability, and bolder goals for the organization. 

Headquartered in Tirupati, India, Amara Raja Group is one of the fastest-growing conglomerates in India, with a revenue exceeding US$1.3 billion. Anchored by a workforce of over 16,000 people throughout seven companies in 15 industries, the conglomerate’s digital journey includes transforming human capital management (HCM) through a unified and integrated human resource management system (HRMS) platform. This solution has automated 85% of human resource (HR) processes throughout Amara Raja Group, including recruitment, employee onboarding, leave and attendance, payroll, learning and development, collaboration work management, and exit management. As part of its HR transformation journey, the company has also implemented Zippi, a secure work management platform driving collaboration and productivity. To increase employee engagement and efficiency, Zippi features functionalities in collaboration, task management, polls, surveys, and file sharing, among others. The platform also supports Jinie, a built-in AI chatbot acting as a virtual HR assistant answering all employee queries and easing the HR team’s burden. Using these conversational interfaces, the company’s HR team quickly disseminated information about process changes the COVID-19 pandemic brought. Through these platforms, Amara Raja Group engaged with all its employees and provide support as needed. 

The Tingyi (Cayman Islands) Holding Corporation (Master Kong) is the largest producer of instant noodles in China and is also engaged in the production and sales of other instant food items and beverages. As of 2019, the Tingyi Group is composed of 371 business offices and 182 warehouses, serving 36,186 dealers and 185,789 direct retailers. As part of its overall strategy, the Tingyi Group has focused on digitally transforming its workforce through the establishment of its human resources shared services center (HR SSC) in 2019. To achieve this, it collaborated with a human capital service provider. Within six months, this initiative has promoted the transformation of HR processes through contactless employee entry, 24 x 7 artificial intelligence (AI) customer service, digital service portal for increased transparency and visibility of HR transactions, robotic process automation (RPA) for enhanced HR workflow efficiency, and HR business intelligence (BI) platforms for improved workforce management. Because of the Tingyi Group’s efforts in revamping its HR function, 72 processes were optimized, an intelligent consulting platform that answers employee queries 24 x 7 was built, and an RPA-powered automatic review of attendance and checking of pre-renumeration data was implemented, among others.

The mission of the New South Wales Police Force (NSWPF), as set out in the Police Act 1990, is to work with the community to reduce violence, crime, and fear. The NSWPF aims to protect the community and property by preventing, detecting, and investigating crime; monitoring and promoting road safety; maintaining social order; and performing and coordinating emergency and rescue operations. The Blue Portal program is the cornerstone of NSWPF’s digital transformation (DX) for both frontline operational and corporate services. The technology solutions delivered have made significant improvements to efficiency, but more importantly, to officer and community safety. With the digitization of workflow and the reduction of manual processes, officers now spend less time administering and coordinating operations and engagement of specialist commands. To date, the program has digitized over 150 processes and has consolidated 200 odd disparate requests. Moreover, digital risk assessments can now be carried out prior to operations and events to ensure due diligence, and officers are best prepared for any circumstance that may arise in the line of duty. The Blue Portal program has resulted to a large shift in the cultural mindset of employees, with further investments and initiatives lined up in the NSWPF DX road map to cater to employee needs. 

Lane Crawford is increasing its commitment to formal internal Learning & Development, particularly around training on data analytics and digital software, which was two of the most requested areas by employees. It has also embarked on a massive internal cultural transformation initiative to actively promote learning and collaboration, as well as setting up the Innovation Team to use “test & learn” and agile methodologies to better engage and motivate employees.

Furthermore, progressive and experimental programmes are being used as ecosystems for sourcing and nurturing external specialist talent – the Creative Callout for emerging designers; and “The Cage”, an accelerator for retail technology start-ups. The intent is to create unique business advantages – ultimately to offer Lane Crawford’s customers access to newness and innovative shopping experiences.

URA has developed a three-year Digitalization Plan to digitalize planning processes, using advanced digital technologies and big data analytics. The plan facilitates integrated planning at the Whole-of-Government level, giving URA better planning insights and driving productivity gains. The Digitalization Plan uses six strategies including Data Digitization; Data Integration; Systems Integration; Work Process Redesign; Visualization and Analytics; and Modelling and Simulation. This includes building digital planning tools, collaboration platforms and analytics skill that transform planning processes.

It involves and empowers staff at all levels to contribute ideas and find solutions. It also allows URA to engage their stakeholders including agencies and customers to share data, and integrate business processes and systems. The three-year plan actively feeds into URA’s organizational development and HR initiatives, ranging from comprehensive planning tools and analytics skills training, and capability building. This equips staff with skills for the new digital economy and allows the organization to be future-ready.

With its goal to become a data-driven organization within a year, AIS established its Analytics Center of Excellence (COE), collaborating with technology partners and universities to develop an intensive training program to groom data engineers, data analysts, and data scientists for employees at the AIS headquarters and its regional offices. Traditional BI tools were replaced by modern analytics software, while the adoption of big data analytics and machine learning was accelerated through workshops and boot camps, which tackled real-life business cases including mobile and fixed broadband churn prediction, upselling and cross-selling different products, and customer acquisition.

AIS now has data scientist teams supporting the core business with advanced machine learning and big data analytics, with an initial 50 users of analytics tools to over 1,000 AIS staff across the company, making the technologies essential in the growth of the AIS business.  

Astro launched its enterprise-wide Digital Culture Accelerator Programme, which is focused on empowering its talent to respond to the changing technology landscape and customer demand. The Programme’s efforts include revamping employer branding identity and recruitment of digital talent, reskilling talent for new ways of working, changing fundamental team structures to deliver trendsetting products and services, and augmenting and growing talent within the broader ecosystem.

Key initiatives include experimentations and building Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) as part of the efforts to embed a digital mindset in ideation and project execution and its Certified Innovator Programme (CIP) and Certified Technology Professional (CTP) programme to develop internal capabilities in product and service innovation, software development, artificial intelligence, data analytics, video delivery, ad technologies, and e-commerce, including adoption of Agile and the Service Teams concept. Since the launch of the Digital Culture Accelerator Programme, over 850 staff have completed its CIP programme and teams can now create, share, and collaborate on projects.

The Hanergy Group, a multinational clean energy company with presence in the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, Asia/Pacific, Africa, and other regions, launched its Worldwide Human Resource Management Integrated Platform to oversee the life-cycle management of the Group’s workforce. The platform promotes the continuous optimization of its business processes, including recruitment, objective and performance management, education and training, and so on.

The platform comprehensively executes strategic talent capital management and deepens collaborative sharing, with analysis for timely decision-making supported by big data analytics (BDA) and cloud computing technologies. Upgrading its human resource business and system has guaranteed stable operations for the Hanergy Group during periods of transition, with three SaaS platforms and three local information systems supporting global data exchange.

Lean Front Office (LFO) mobile app helped reduce the time to market of the organization by approximately 90%. Traditionally, it takes anywhere between three to four months to operationalize a branch. Now its customers can access services by downloading the App from the Play Store. The solution empowers the frontend employees to focus on their core job and utilize their on-field time efficiently. LFO is a complete end to end solution which integrates frontend and back-office seamlessly.

After discovering a growing talent pool on social media, MERALCO launched its chatbot TRACI to support the Talent Resourcing team’s initiative to optimize and streamline the job application process and establish an additional medium for engagement. TRACI enables users view job vacancies and submit applications via Facebook Messenger. TRACI is integrated with Google’s artificial intelligence platform, which serves as the foundation for the chatbot’s Natural Language Processing, allowing MERALCO to provide timely feedback on job inquiries and application status.  

All backend services are hosted and supported on the cloud with a document management system that holds all applicant submissions. Data about job vacancies posted are populated using Robotic Process Automation, which runs daily to support the process. With TRACI, MERALCO leverages digital technology to efficiently communicate to a younger generation of talent, positively impacting brand equity and recruitment capabilities.

Driving innovation and acceleration in the organization are small, agile teams consisting of talent from areas of technology, product, and business development. Tokopedia has fast-tracked worksource transformation by incentivizing efficient use of manpower to increase speed and ownership for the entire project.

By instilling a digital transformation mindset as part of Tokopedia’s mission in product development, Tokopedia successfully launched its Digital Products and Payments Platform within weeks. The demand for digital products and payments Indonesia has led to growth of the Tokopedia team by over 12 times within 30 months of launch.

United Overseas Bank (UOB) uses technology to have a richer understanding of its customers’ preferences and to make their banking experience simple, safer and reliable. It also harnesses emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance its operational performance. The Bank also continually develops its AI and Machine Learning capabilities to meet the various needs of its businesses.

UOB has worked with its Hadoop to develop a big data solution that would enable various functions in the Bank to have quick access to relevant and quality data for analyses. These functions, such as compliance and retail banking, are then able to draw on the insights generated to optimize their business processes and to design distinctive customer experiences.

SOHO China, China’s largest prime office real-estate developer, has implemented an HR Cloud Services System in Greater China’s businesses, which consolidates business process and shared service centers, as well as a unified organization structure management. The project has achieved internationalized and standardized payroll and attendance processes and realized digital transformation in HR management. SOHO China has successfully mass integrated multiple business resources, promoted talent resource transformation in management progress, and increased business operation efficiency.