CXOInsights by CXOCIETY

According to a Gartner report, consumer spending on wearable technology will double by 2021.  So what lies ahead for wearable technologies? What are the near-term and mid-term opportunities in hearables?  Kow Ping, executive director and co-founder at Well Being Digital, a Hong Kong tech company focused squarely on the hearables marketplace shares his views on bearable trends in 2020 and beyond. 1...

Walter Chan, Managing Director and Head of User Research of Field Resources Consultant, shares his opinion on whether virtual insurers in Hong Kong can replicate the success of their counterparts in China.

Walter Chan, Managing Director and Head of User Research of Field Resources Consultant, shares his opinion on the role of the insurance regulator in growing the virtual insurance market in Hong Kong.

Following the release of a survey on the virtual banking scene in Hong Kong, Walter Chan, Managing Director and Head of User Research of Field Resources Consultant (Hong Kong) Limited, shares the results of the survey and his opinion on the prospects for the burgeoning industry in the city. He covers the following questions: Hong Kong has an extensive and established network of retail, commercial...

As 2021 approaches, many companies have begun preparing for new technology investments. According to analysts, financial planning and analysis solutions (FP&A) will make up a significant portion of that investment. In addition, as companies emerge from the pandemic, there will be an accelerated need for solutions that allow for increased agility and faster decision making. In today’s PodChats...

Survival for some organisations has hinged on how well they optimise use of capital. What is unique about the COVID-19 crisis is that digital transformation initiatives received a renewed sense of urgency putting even greater pressure on the CFO to understand what investments can deliver the most return to the company’s tactical and strategic goals. In this episode of PodChats for FutureCFO, we sp...

One of the characteristics of the workplace of 2020 has been the lack of people in the office. COVID-19 saw a significant proportion of businesses adopt remote work in support of efforts to contain the pandemic. Malls, shops and retail stores also saw dramatic closures in some markets crippling tenants who continue to pay for spaces they can’t use because of pandemic containment mandates. Is there...

E-commerce is both exciting and scary. It continues to negatively impact brick-and-mortar businesses that refuse to acknowledge the value proposition of a borderless commerce model. With forecasts for growth of US$4.9 trillion in 2021, it promises to continue to be an exciting place to be in. In particular, Asia has become the world’s largest e-commerce marketplace accounting for 59.7% of online r...

The July 2020 issue of the World Bank’s Financial Sector’s Cybersecurity: a Regulatory Digest noted that responding to cyber incidents goes beyond an engineering problem and that any business continuity decision cannot be delegated to IT specialists. FutureCIO spoke to Kumar Ritesh, chairman and CEO of Cyfirma, to discuss among other things the operational risks of cyber threats to Asia’s financia...

Depending on who you talk to, ransomware seemed to be the popular topic of discussion among security vendors. Emsisoft estimates that ransomware attackers collectively took in USD25 billion in 2019. A Barracuda Networks report in 2020 indicated that 51% of organisations in Asia-Pacific have already had at least one data breach or cybersecurity incident since shifting to a remote working model. Che...

For years, information security vendors and experts have been touting the importance of securing the perimeter, with strategies like defence-in-depth as one of several approaches to take as organisations embrace a connected economy. Over the years, technologies and approaches have come up to the challenge of securing the enterprise. The variety of choice and technologies have left some stupefied. ...

With software as with buying a truck, there are many variables to consider when deciding to build or buy. What is observable these days is that more organisations are prioritising on time-to-market because time is money, meaning the longer it takes to move the application from development to production, the more money the company is losing. Is there a middle ground to all of this?  In today’s PodC...

An integration platform is a set of automation tools for connecting applications deployed in different environments. It is not farfetched to imagine that as we move deeper into best-of-breed and multi-cloud, the technologies available to organisations as well as the environments from which to fulfil business needs to grow in complexity.  To complicate this is COVID-19 which threw a spanner on how...

In the future of work, CIOs will need to consider how technology can sustain a distributed workforce model that reaches beyond the restrictions of a traditional office environment and may be dispersed across geographies. In today’s podchat for FutureCIO, we have with us Chandra Sinnathamby, Head of Adobe Document Cloud, Asia Pacific, to discuss the results of the recently released Forrester report...

Covid-19 revealed just how badly enterprises in Asia are when it comes to security. According to CrowdStrike the highest ransomware payments recorded to date came from Asia. FutureCIO spoke to Mr Sherif El Nabawi, Vice President, Engineering, Asia-Pacific and Japan, CrowdStrike to better understand the state of the security landscape as more and more enterprises go digital-native.

It is the role of the insurance industry to take on the volatility that clients and corporates are unwilling to take. As a rule, the value of insurance rises during times of crises. Consumers tend to buy more insurance when things are bad? COVID-19 went against this norm mainly because insurers were not ready for the crisis. Travis Callahan, co-founder and president of Ignatica, talks to FutureCIO...

As we’ve seen, many governments across Asia are turning to data to help manage the impact of COVID-19, from contact tracing to managing safe distancing. With more countries looking to reopen their borders and ramp up economic activity, the need for fast, accurate analytics is critical for delivering timely, and reliable insights to inform policymaking.  But beyond the pandemic, the role of data an...

Indonesia’s Bank Mandiri is taking a data-driven approach towards protecting its customer base, growing as a business, and proving itself a valuable partner to the government in times of need – as in the COVID-19 case. In this episode of PodChats for FutureCIO, we spoke to Billie Setiawan, head of Enterprise Data Management, Data Analytics Lead; and Grace Winnee, Vice President, Enterprise Data Ma...

Steven Sim, vice president of ISACA’s Singapore Chapter and Kenny Yeo, Associate Director and Head of Asia Pacific Cyber Security Practice, ICT, Frost & Sullivan, joined FutureCIO for a review of the recently completed joint survey on the State of Cybersecurity in Singapore.

Within the finance function, departments like accounts payables got a renewed sense of urgency to transform following recognition that the pandemic crisis we are experiencing this year may not be a one-off occurrence and there is a need, and an opportunity, to introduce reforms to the way things are done to ensure that future crises will not have as disruptive an impact on overall operations as th...

DevSecOps attempts to bring security into the DevOps methodology by integrating security testing into the continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. As a practice, DevSecOps is still very nascent in development teams. According to the WhiteHat Security report, 2019 Application Security Statistics Report , an average of more than 50% of apps are always vulnerable for organisations th...

IDC says rationalization of legacy IT, both applications and infrastructure, is a critical prerequisite for successful IT transformation.  In this PodChats for FutureCIO, Rijo George Thomas, senior analyst, IDC Asia-Pacific, talks about the application modernisation landscape, including the drivers and inhibitors..

Artificial Intelligence has been the stuff of science fiction for years. With recent advances in machine learning, natural language processing and problem-solving, have these technologies sufficiently matured to warrant concerns among consumers and governments?  In this episode,  Wai Keat Cheang, partner and head of consulting for EY Singapore, discusses the adoption trends around AI and approache...

Depending on who you talk to there is an associated cost with keeping the lights on as some in the IT industry would call it. In a period when hiring and retaining skilled resources to do routine maintenance work is less and less attractive to management, new innovations in technology and practices may help “keep the lights on” while redirecting the IT team to do higher-value work. Of course, ther...

In an Institute of Management Accountants survey of more than 700 companies worldwide, it was discovered that the most successful organizations use financial planning and analysis (FP&A) to drive results, not just predict them. In this episode of PodChats for FutureCFO, David Upton , Jedox 's Director of Strategic Partnerships and Alliances APAC, on how FP&A professionals in Asia-Paci...