Month: March 2019

Moving into the end of Mar already and a quarter of the year is over soon. Sometimes it is good to just reflect on the last 7 days about what I have been doing and see if I could make it better, more productive from a personal growth angle. By recording it down in my blog, it also serves as a periodic diary reminder to me about my thoughts at that time and if I have done them.

I started the week with my monthly trip to Yangon as a financial consultant on the ALCO committee. The end of this week will be the company’s fiscal year-end. I am happy to see that much has happened for them over the last 15 months since I started in Jan 2018. Their loan portfolio has more than tripled in size. Their infrastructure is now more robust and in place to help them grow further. It is a constant work in progress where processes and policies have to be continuously refined as we encounter new milestones.

I was there with my fellow consultant and we had a number of dinners and meaningful discussions on what we want to do next with our lives. Both of us agree that we should aim to do something impactful, like starting a new business. He provided a structured approach to our brainstorming session and suggesting a 4 prong road map.

One, to continue to look for potential investments as passive investors. Two, to look for retail opportunities like F&B ideas to launch and to get our hands wet. Three, to continue to look for new one off deals which may take months to incubate till completion – eg. financing deals between financial institutional lenders and end users like microfinance or SMEs. Lastly, to play a more active role in seeking out more consultancy roles and projects. Given that we travel to Myanmar every month, there should be opportunities for both of us to explore and channel our past experience, to use our expertise as consultants.

We also shared about our past experiences working in Citi and had a good laugh over the crazy stuff we did then over our long careers there, while enjoying our Korean BBQ and alcohol. Those times are never ever coming back again in our current PC compliant world…

Had a nice morning flight back on Wed as it was a Myanmar holiday. Met an old ex-colleague in the plane on the way back. I originally wanted to take public transport back since I had the time and wanted to save some money. But I became lazy and took a cab back instead, as I bought a few bottles of duty-free wines which were heavy to carry around.

The AI in Finance MOCC online course I signed up last month has started this week. Looks promising and I aim to complete it within 3 months. It could be faster if I can, but the wife and I are having a vacation to China in mid-Apr. The more I read about AI, the more I am convinced we are approaching an Ah-Ha moment where the paradigm and seismic shift is going to happen. Those that are caught unprepared will feel lost. I wrote about this in my blog last week.

Thursday was spent on another 5 hours lunch catch up again with 3 other great friends. This was over lotsa good food and booze where a variety of topics were discussed. Politics, social, the meaning of life and thrash talking included.

Met up with another 2 other old friends on Friday. One was an entrepreneur whom I can learn from as he updated us on his China F&B business. He had done many things, like setting up an investment fund, bought Japan property, sold shampoo online and marketed yield enhancement structures that participated in German real estate.

For the next 2 weeks before my China vacation, I need to prepare for my quarterly half marathon run and catch up on my AI studies. There is also a potential business opportunity exploratory meeting set up. This was an intro from my wife. Just also received a letter notifying me of my graduation event for the 12 months Specialist Diploma of Business Analytics I completed last year. This will be held in early May.

 

 

 

I completed my diploma in Business Analytics in Aug last year and will have my graduation event in May. This had started me since late 2017 on a learning journey of understanding what is out there in the world which I am not aware of. https://www.tp.edu.sg/courses/part-time-courses/industry/ict-and-media/specialist-diploma-in-business-analytics

The initial 6 months was tough for me, being one of the oldest students in class and not quite tech-savvy, to grapple with new data mining software and trying to digest technology concepts after being a marketing guy for so long. But it started to open my eyes to how much I did not know – it was a frog-in-the-well-looking-up situation for me. I was amazed at how much interactive analytics we can do now, versus my manual Excel spreadsheet kiddy stuff.

Then my wife and I did an Alibaba business study trip to Hangzhou and it blew my mind away as I realized how technologically backwards we were, compared to the motherland. https://www.sirsdigitalcommerce.com/alibaba-ceo-programme.html

That yearning to seek more information made me do an Introduction to FinTech MOOC course by HKU. I figured out that I needed to fill in the gaps I had on this topic as everything I know about FinTech was a mishmash of titbits of information gathered online. https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-fintech

I now know that FinTech consist of the 4 pillars namely ABCD: AI, Blockchain, Cloud and Data. FinTech is the digitalization of Money while TechFin is the monetization of Data. What stood out for me was AI (Artifical Intelligence) and how little we know about it. We watch Marvel superheroes and Westworld to imagine what AI is like – it is just fantasy and we are still so far from that being a reality. It started my new life long learning quest to know more about this subject.

The HKU course led me to a series of free Microsoft (MS) online courses on Teva. I then subscribed to a number of them which I thought would benefit me. Intro to AI, Deep Learning Explained, Intro to Big Data, Intro to Data Science, Data Science Essentials and Analyzing & Visualizing Data with Excel. https://www.fevaworks.com/maicp/

These courses made me realize that what I was doing for my diploma was actually related to AI! Sorting out massive amounts of data and then using modelling technics to create predictive/cluster/neural models with software like SAS Enterprise Miner. This is the genesis of AI, the building blocks. Having a module on Social Media analytics also helped me appreciate how computers read and recognise/understand human languages.

These MS courses are now preparing me for the online course that I will start next week: AI in Finance.  https://www.cfte.education/aifinance/ This is my continuous AI learning journey and it fascinates me immensely the more I delve into the subject.

Meanwhile, thanks to an old friend, I chanced upon a well known AI expert who had just released a book on AI: Kai-Fu Lee. The author believes that China could overtake America in AI soon. https://aisuperpowers.com/

He had a very interesting life journey that took him to Apple as the top AI language recognition expert in the early 1990s with John Sculley, ending with being the head of Google China.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai-Fu_Lee     He heads a Venture Capital fund since 2009 and had a recent medical scare that changed his views on work-life balance completely. There are a lot of youtube videos which one can watch about his thoughts on AI and philosophy on life. He is a very popular authority in China and speaks from experience and authority.

I am almost done with his latest book and the general themes are: (1) China will overtake America in AI soon, (2) 40% of current jobs will disappear in 10 to 15 years time, thanks to AI.

The Chinese government realized that Data is now the new oil and China can become the new OPEC. Given that privacy was never a big concern for them and that their citizens value convenience more, they set about to announce policies to advance AI as a top priority national project a few years ago.

The new wake-up call to China was ironically AlphaGo, the movie which I had spoken about in my early blog. https://www.alphagomovie.com/  He took some time to explain how AlphaGo came into being with the tech breakthrough of Deep Learning in 2006 by researchers into neural networks. This process mimics the human brain and allows machine learning to reach a new level of expertise not seen before.

AlphaGo’s DeepMind creators, after beating the best human player on the planet in 2017,  went on to develop AlphaGo Zero, which learned to teach itself how to play Go from scratch. https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-learning-scratch/

This reinforced learning eventually resulted in it beating its predecessor 100 to zero games, an unbelievable thrashing of the machine that just conquered the best human mind. As recent as early this year, they have moved on to beat humans in strategy games like Starcraft II. https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612832/deepminds-new-ai-just-beat-top-human-pro-gamers-at-starcraft-ii-for-the-first/

He goes on to describe the stages of AI as Internet AI, Business AI, Perception AI and Autonomous AI and the emergence of O2O (Online to Offline) that changed China within a few years to a totally cashless society with little or no friction for financial transactions.

He cites examples like Uber/Didi that disrupts the industry from the ground up. China the nation that copies from the world previously has turned the notion 180 degrees around – the world now watches in awe as it is able to transform its economy via quantum technologically leaps, skipping many traditional evolutionary steps. Its ecosystems are pulsating and throbbing intensely as China shows to the world how every ounce of efficiency can be squeezed and optimized. Same day delivery? How about 30 minutes now? Honesty and integrity in the eWallet systems? Done. There is no stopping this tech tsunami. While the rest of the world moves on another slower track, China will be powering ahead within its own orbit.

AI systems can now only be a single focused algorithm with a single objective as the end game. They are not smart or creative enough to encompass multiple spectrums/arenas yet. But with this limited ability, they are already able to make minced meat of the narrow objective then they work in. Take driverless cars for example. When it arrives in a few years time, look at the number of humans that will be displaced. Whole industries (truckers, cab/bus/Uber drivers etc) will be made redundant. By then, we may not have the ability nor luxury of time to jump to another higher level skill not threatened by AI. 40% of the job force eliminated is not a fantasy…

 

 

Human mortality is a touchy subject especially when you hit the half-century mark. Thanks to a friend, I developed a morbid fascination of reading the daily newspapers backwards from the sports page and stopping at the obituary columns to scan through all the persons listed there. When a see a familiar face, I will feel sad and share with friends. But I am mainly looking at the average age of death and wondering how many more years I have on planet earth.

A few weeks back, we started to talk about this topic in a business lunch discussion. One of the guys just became a new father at the ripe age of 52. When his daughter graduates, he would have been in his mid-seventies. While we worry about how much time we have left, he went the opposite way and asked the question: “What if we live to 100 instead?”.

If we still have so much time left, what are we going to do from now till then? With medical advances nowadays, issues like dementia are expected to be solved in the next 10 years. We might even find a cure for cancer soon.

If one looks around, we can see many more very active +80 year old senior citizens still having a hunger for life and having more energy than most +50 “youngsters”… In the US House and Senate, you see career politicians going right into their 90s. Most 70-year-olds now seems to be able to lead active lifestyles. My parents are 90 and 85 this year and they are still relatively mobile and continue to take overseas vacations periodically. The latest census for Singapore shows that the average life expectancy is around 83/84. We are already number 3 in the world. In 2000, it was 78. So we have steadily increased over the last 20 years by another 5 years.

While we live life to its fullest, what if we survived to 100? Do we have the funds to outlast our mortality? Hopefully, the kids will be able to support the parents, but that is not a given. The government is trying to implement pension plans called CPF life. But would the monthly amounts receive in 10 years time be sufficient then as inflation kicks in?

One has to actively plan for one’s retirement years as soon as possible. Put assets into 10-year buckets to utilize in different future periods – 55 to 65, 65 to 75, 75 to 85 etc. Some say that you should utilize 4% of your retirement funds per year and with some compounding, it can last for +20 years. If you set aside to use $8k per mth, then you will need just under $100k per year. So $1 million will last you 10 years. Cashing in of some insurance policies in the future will also net you some cash flow and having some passive income from rental income and REIT dividends will provide more cushion.

Money aside, one will also need to keep the mind active and sharp. Constant exercise is good and having a life long learning attitude is healthy. We need to constantly seek new “adventures” and have goals to strive for, in order to make this life interesting and bearable.

 

 

 

I have to say that I did quite a lot of things this week. Getting sick at the later part of the week was a bummer though.

Went to Yangon on Sunday afternoon, ahead of my regular monthly ALCO meetings on Monday morning. Had a great Korean BBQ dinner with a nice bottle of Italian red that evening with my colleague at the mall near our hotel. Monday morning was an intensive 2.5 hours meeting followed by a quick lunch before I had to catch my flight back home.

The following day on Tuesday, a group of us finally made it for our much-discussed day trip to Batam. We had been talking about how cheap it is to visit the place for food and massages. The last time I had been there was almost 10 years ago. One of the guys was a regular there for golf and he was our tour guide for the 4 of us.

We started our marathon massage session in the late morning with a facial and a pedicure. This was followed up with a lunch of roast duck and many dishes before we moved on to a massage establishment for 3 hours of intense relaxation. One hour of foot reflexology was followed by another 2 hours of full body massage. Then we had a bit of mall shopping to buy some food stuff to bring home.

Finally, we sat in a large open food court to enjoy the late afternoon breeze, watching the sun setting and ordering so much seafood dishes that I lost count after a while. The beer, wines and whisky certainly helped to digest the food. We headed for the jetty before 8 pm and managed to make this day trip an eventful 14 hours excursion. The all in cost for everything was less than SGD 150 per person, so it was really value for money.

Maybe it was the travelling, maybe it could be the food. But I started to feel lousy by Wed. Son was also sick and I might have caught some virus too. Had coughing fits, diarrhoea and a sore throat. It was worst at night and the sleep over the next few days was terrible.

Went for a follow-up investment discussion on Thurs afternoon. This was the Aquaponics investment we attended in Aug/Jul 2018. The founders tried to bid for a land earlier this year but were unsuccessful, hence they decided to refocus on acquiring land from a new shareholder instead.

Their presentation this time seems more complete and sharper after we provided our feedback to them in the last 2 meetings. They were seeking more secondary series B funding and wanted to gather our thoughts on the materials and also to see if we are interested to invest. We gave them some pointers from an investor’s perspective and they agree to look into it to further fine-tune their sales pitch.

Overall, a very busy week for me. The body may have been trying to tell me to slow down but I was having so much fun. Have not been sick for a while, due to my regular exercises. So this was a bit of a surprise for me as I feel more lethargic than normal. Could be the medicines that I was taking and that the viral cycle took a while to reach its peak.

Just completed my 6 weeks Intro to FinTech MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) from HKU last week. Though it cost me about $100 to sign up for the self-learning program, I believe that it was worth it. I learnt a few new things which helped to fill in the info gaps I had for FinTech.

I discovered why RegTech was so important and achieved a better understanding of the great India Stack social experiment. It gave everyone a digital identity and I now know why they eliminated large denomination currency notes a few years ago – to digitize money and whip out black money. FinTech can be summarized using ABCD – for AI, Blockchain, Cloud and Data. FinTech is the digitalization of money and TechFin is the monetization of Data.

The next step for my learning curve would be to deep dive into another related area of study. I choose AI (Artificial Intelligence) it is one of the pillars to the new future. Watching the Alpha Go movie https://www.alphagomovie.com/ last year had enlightened me to the rapid development has already happened in this field of research. There are only 20,000 persons in the world that are currently qualified as AI experts. Machines can now train machines to learn. How does that work?

My Business Analytics course last year also exposed me to powerful analytical systems that were easily available (Qlikview, R studio and SAS Enterprise Miner). They could digest and make sense of mountains of data to seek patterns which humans may not be able to make, using algorithms like Neural networks to mimic the human brain.

Currently, I only have basic knowledge of AI and this seems to be an interesting area which I should explore further. So the search began for me to seek new MOOCs that will help me reach this new goal.

Thanks to the HKU course, I came across this link from Microsoft that provided a huge range of free courses, from Data Science to Big Data and AI that was offered in fevaworks    https://www.fevaworks.com/maicp/ They have an introduction to AI module which immediately caught my attention. I signed up for a number of similar courses that I aim to do them in the next few weeks.

There was also another AI MOOC that I discovered which will begin soon – AI in Finance. It is from a local education institution that provides Skillsfuture subsidies for citizens. I have registered for it and they should be starting in mid-Mar.  http://aifinance.sg/

My learning journey is beginning to branch off into new areas of interest and discovery as I seek to keep up with technology. I can see that this is the new road map that would turn what we know of our current world upside down. It would create a brand new way of doing things, a paradigm shift.

How we get there is beyond my intellectual capability, but that should not stop me from trying to participate in this technology trend. I must seek to gather information to help me better understand them. This is my life long learning goal, for now at least.