The past 7 days had been a very interesting week for me. It was a rejuvenating beginning of business enlightenment, followed by a close fellowship of good friends.
I have been a financial consultant to an overseas microfinance company for the past 1.5 years. The company had achieved results that went beyond our wildest forecasts over the previous 12 months. Their loan books had expanded by a factor of 3 times and the number of active clients grown from 7k to 32,000+. There is still a lot of demand out there and it was agreed that we are now ready for a strategic digital transformation if we are to achieve a quantum leap in the next 5 years.
The CEO decided and planned a 2 days brainstorming session with his COO and 3 of us external consultants in S’pore this week. We had lots of ideas but no overall strategy yet. Over the past 6 months, there were a lot of fintech firms which had approached the company with different ideas on how we can advance. They all looked promising but we really did not know how they all fit into a coherent strategic scheme of what we want to achieve.
Digital transformation is confusing and exciting. It is hard to implement but yet we know that it has to be done asap. Our big-picture goal was to service at least 500,000 active customers in 5 years time. A brick and mortar strategy is not enough, hence we need to think out of the box and digital transformation is key.
The country of Myanmar is ripe for this. It opened up to the world only 7 years ago, having closed up for 50+ years. Everyone now has a smartphone. If you ask anyone if they have internet access, they will tell you that they have Facebook accounts. The country is primed to digital transformation via cashless mobile eWallets. With cloud computing and 4G speeds, development can be turbocharged.
Over the 2 days, we developed the 8 pillars of digital transformation which we required and put action plans around each initiative. We will involve our senior management team in project groups to execute these strategic objectives. The excitement at the end of the 2 days of brainstorming was contagious to everyone.
We now have a coherent plan to implement in order to bring the company to the next stage of its quantum evolution. Hopefully, the impact will also help bring a nation of farmers out of the vicious poverty cycle and into the 21st century. Profitability is good, but witnessing the financial success of rural families is even more rewarding. With financial support to address cashflow bottlenecks, farmers are able to address and remove uncertainties from their agriculture equation. It is time to execute our digital transformation plan now.
The following 2 days from midweek were long 6-hour lunches I had with a bunch of good friends. This was courtesy of the only one working amongst us. He is a successful banker who has always been generous to the rest of us. We had a lot of food via the new hotel loyalty program he had just signed up. I am grateful to have quality time with this group of friends whom I have known for 20+ years.
It has also been a rewarding Myanmar journey for me over the last 18 months, thanks to an ex-colleague that had brought me into his company. It is the crystalizing of my second half career road map, to give back to society as I have been lucky to have had a good banking career. I count my blessings for what I have been given.
Whenever one door closes, many others will open. I have to actively seek those new doors and be mindful of not withdrawing into myself and closing my mind to new experiences. The world is just too big out there to not explore.
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