Author: CheckW

The world has gone to another Defcon level this week as we see an unhinged Trump going crazier like a cornered animal lashing out before it is squashed.

It is now getting unbelievable that the most powerful person in the world is flip-flopping all the time. Things coming out of his mouth are getting more ridiculous by the day. Calling himself the chosen one, spraying anti-semitic and racist themes seems to be his norm nowadays. Faced with opponents like China and the House who refused to blink against the onslaught of a bully’s challenges, Trump is running out of options to use. He probably had not met such opposite parties in his business world before as he would use the courts to outlast the other side till they compromise and settle.

The tariff war with China is now one year old and escalating further. China is playing the long game now. One cannot negotiate with a bully who changes his mind constantly and has an “I win, you lose” attitude to everything in his life. China is betting that there will be a change in leadership before the trade war can be resolved. No point talking to an idiot. It’s better to work with someone else who is a “stable genius”.

The House is also adding pressure, with the progress in the investigations after Mueller’s testimony a few weeks back. Slowly but surely, secrets that he has been trying to hide are leaking out. His shady business dealings with the Russians will eventually come out. Refusing to allow anyone to testify using White House executive privilege card is starting to crack as the courts determine that it is unconstitutional.

He has alienated all non-white Americans with his racism and cruel rules to separate migrant children from their parents for months. GOP members that want tax cuts had turned a blind eye to the rest of his excesses. They now cannot ignore the tsunami of change against him now from the rest of the population. One cannot claim to be a decent human and yet support his inhuman actions.

As an outsider, I can see that he is getting more unhinged as he switches attack targets daily to divert attention away from the main issues plaguing him. Now that he is heading to the G7 meeting this weekend, the other countries have already pre-empted his instability by announcing that they will NOT have a press release after this meeting. They know that nothing will be agreed upon and there is a high probability that he will blow this meetup up into a political mess.

I am curious as to the helplessness of the US political system at the moment. They have so many discussions on how to defeat him in the polls but it is more than a year away. I don’t think they have much time left to stop this unstable genius from blowing up the country and the rest of the world with it.

One day is too many already. The political system has never encountered such an issue before. It was assumed that the presidential screening process would have weeded out such a candidate. But the forefathers could never have forecasted external influences from Russia and the power of social media.

What happens from here will become a history textbook case study for many years to come. Meanwhile, the world seems to be falling off a cliff as other countries mimic America and go full-on confrontational, take no prisoners attitude towards all negotiations.

I will be having a busy two weeks ahead from tomorrow. My monthly trip to Yangon will be longer and then I will head to Seoul next Sat for a Skillsfuture Blockchain course till 06 Sep. Let’s hope that the world continues to keep itself in one piece during this time…

 

 

 

 

We have been observing the protests in Hong Kong for many weeks as it evolves further into anarchy. With every subsequent protest, things are getting from bad to worse. Both sides have refused to blink or come to the negotiation table at all.

Let me provide an outsider’s viewpoint on this first, then I will try to put myself in their shoes to try to understand their side of the story. While I may be biased, I will nevertheless try to lay out the facts for discussion.

In a recent study, it was found that most of the protestors were young Millenials. Most are protecting for the first time. The movement has grown in size as more students come into the picture. This seems to be a well-organized operation as they use social media and Telegram in particular to mobilize the troops. The yellow hard hat/mask and a black T-shirt is the common identifier for them. One wonders who is supplying this equipment as they cost a few hundred HKD each. The core team seems to have shadowy sources currently providing them with financial support.

The protests are getting more violent and rowdy but thankfully, there are no fatalities yet. The aim so far has been to disrupt and then disperse. The damage to the financial centre status of HK is becoming severe and the business slowdown is hitting the tourism industry hard.

What do they want? They want China to give them full democracy and the opportunity to elect HK officials. Yet they are not willing to come to the negotiating table to discuss.

Are their demands reasonable? The British who have ruled HK for over 156 years have never given them democracy. HK was the prize for them after the opium wars. When they handed HK back to China in 1997, they tried to negotiate a treaty on the behalf of the HK people, promising future democracy which China had never agreed to. A 50 years period of one country, 2 systems rule was agreed upon and now 22 years have passed as we reach the midpoint.

The younger generation, feeling a sense of hopelessness, now wants to aggressively push the democracy agenda. China will never allow this to happen as the consequence of this will have a ripple effect on its 1 billion population and the Taiwan issue. It is too idealistic to want full-on democracy if your country has never had it before in its history of existence. Neither will your new parent allow it, because it will not.

Where does this leave us? The protestors have to dig deep into themselves and understand what they are fighting for. Is it for the future of HK? Is it to fight the inequality the common people are experiencing, versus the rich elite? Is it to have more public housing? With a more realistic set of demands, they should engage the HK government to negotiate. One should take baby steps and learn to crawl before you run.

Until this happens, HK is spiralling into a deep hole where there will be no winners. The confrontation will just get more violent. Eventually, deaths will occur and China will say “enough is enough” and bring in the big guns.

While I sympathize with the HK youth on their sense of hopelessness, they have to take control of the situation. Unknown forces are manoeuvring them to their own selfish goals. HK has now become a safe haven of criminals around the world as it is virtually impossible to extradite anyone from HK to another country to face criminal punishment. There are areas in HK that the locals have told me that we should not go at night for personal safety reasons. The law the Carrie Lam wanted to push through was to address this. They even had a set of rules to prevent it from being abused. Yet it was rejected as the protestors believe that there is always a possibility that an innocent person can land back in China.

By the way, China doesn’t need this law. They have already been “persuading” individuals to return back to China to face corruption charges for years. People have suddenly disappeared from around the world and reappeared in China “singing” confessions. So why is there resistance to the new law? It is for the safety of all citizens and could have been further tightened to ensure that it will not be abused. Yet it was firmly rejected by the protestors without exploring possible options to further tighten it.

I fear for HK as a country. Its success for the last 40 years was solely due to that fact that it became a gateway to and from China. As Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world, it needed a conduit. HK fitted that bill and had enjoyed the prosperity ever since, as a global financial centre for anyone that wanted access to the China motherland. It was a necessary evil for communist China then. Since then, HK has lost its prominence as China develops. Cities like Shanghai are slowly taking over HK’s role. This protest anarchy saga has just accelerated its decline.

 

 

 

 

I started the week with another Skillsfuture related course over 2 full days. It was organized by the university club (NUSS) which we are a member of. It was highly subsidized and cost only $60 for those above 40 years of age. The name of the course was “Reading, Understanding and Analyzing Financial Statements for SENIORS” 🙂

While I have had a number of similar courses in my career, with one on financial modelling during my Fullerton days, I always felt that there were gaps in my knowledge. Most of what I picked up during work was on a piecemeal basis. This area has also advanced over time and it is good to have a refresher training to update myself on the latest practices.

It was a full class of 20 participants from various industries. Most were recent retirees wanting to learn new skills. There was a medical doctor, a lady doing her PhD, even a Fintech founder! There was also an HR person that asked a lot of questions. A young man who just managed to finish junior college managed to sneak into this course for seniors…

The trainer was a very experienced accountant who sits on the board of a number of companies as a director of the board. He speaks from a position of authority, having been a market practitioner for a number of years. With such a boring topic, he managed to make the 2 days very lively with multiple real-life examples. He basically deconstructed the subject and provided the class with enough simplicity, as most of us did not have an accountancy background.

We went through the fundamentals of financial statement analysis on day 1 and then dive into annual reports review the following day. He was on the board of directors for a number of REITs listed in SGX and shared about his experiences over the years. I discovered through his LinkedIn profile that he was 2 years my senior in high school.

Overall, a very enlightening short course which zeroed into a few main themes. Firstly, companies always want to look good in the financial reports, hence one needs to dig deeper to find out more. It helps to keep past annual reports to cross-check against what was said/promised previously by the senior management team. It is also important to review the Auditor’s report for signs of disagreements.

Secondly, cashflow is king. The Income and Balance Sheet statements come with a lot of assumptions. One, therefore, has to take them with a pinch of salt. On the other hand, the cash flow statement is factual and it determines the health of the company, whether it has liquidity issues and how it compares to the net revenue being declared. If the cash flow is much lower than the net revenue, then it is a big red flag.

Thirdly, he encouraged all of us to attend AGMs. He believes that it is the most important aspect of kicking the tyres of a company. By preparing for the meeting and listening from the horses’ mouths, an investor should be able to better evaluate a company.

The trainer seems to be a very sceptical accountant, having known first hand all the tricks that a firm can play, even though there are more rules to follow now when preparing an annual financial report. Everyone, myself included, should have a structured process to analyze any investments before putting our money into it. This refresher training is a timely reminder to myself as an investor to not be complacent and to treat each investment with a thorough and careful eye for financial details.

 

 

 

The equity markets have started to look a bit crazy nowadays, going higher even when the immediate future looks uncertain. Trump’s tariff wars with everyone does not help the situation either. A few weeks back, I had decided to trim my equity portfolio and take some money off the table to book some nice profits. I was not convinced that the rally would last much longer as fundamentals deteriorate. Hard Brexit is just 3 months away and the USD yield curve remains inverted.

The next question will be where should I park these extra funds now? Besides opportunistic trades in FX and commodities, most asset classes look a bit frothy now. A month back, I had chanced upon a newspaper article on angel investing and a few Asian companies were highlighted. I started to read more about these professional angel investing firms to see how I can participate in this sector.

“An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an affluent individual who provides capital for a business startup, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity.”

I do not consider myself to be someone who has much knowledge of startups or even how to evaluate one. So how can I get into this asset class in bite sizes which I can stomach but yet be assured that most of the professional screening process is done by experts? Along the process, I would like to pick up new skills as I learn from them.

One such firm caught my attention. AngelCentral https://www.angelcentral.co/  was one of the names mentioned in the article. It was founded by a husband and wife team who had cashed out of their successful startup JobsCentral a few years ago and wanted to start something meaningful and revenue-generating while giving back to society via their past experience.

Given their background, they had started this firm as they see a gap to bridge. Startups need critical coaching and mentoring in their initial years to survive before the first series A funding cycle begins. Small investors like myself may be interested in this space but don’t really know where to start.  I always thought that the entry criteria was much higher, having just participated in one similar pitch (vegan burger) that was asking for USD 250,000 per person.  Surprisingly, AngelCentral offers investors bite sizes of anywhere between SGD 10 to 25K as a minimum.

A friend and I signed up for the community membership as it was free.  It allowed us to participate in regular events and startup pitches. We attended our first pitch event to listen to 2 candidates AnyWhere and Tourego on a Friday afternoon. Their office was at BASH, the incubator startup place at Fusionpolis which was started by the government. We saw a number of like-minded investors like ourselves there, asking the founders various business-minded questions.

My first impression: ANgelCentral looks like a legitimate setup which had put in a lot of thought process into the business venture. They even had regular training sessions for investors, to handhold them as they discover more about this new asset class.

The 2nd pitch from Tourego was something that interested me. They were proposing a seamless process for tourists to claim their VAT/GST refunds upon leaving the country. They were in a niche area that was ripe for technology disruption and the current market size was large with few competitors. While the revenue forecast was a bit overly aggressive, they could become an attractive acquisition for the big boys like Alibaba if they can pull it off. The barriers to entry were also very high as they require licenses from the targeted countries in order to implement their business model.

I Whatsapp the AngelCentral founder who was the lead syndicate coordinator for this name, to gather more details. He has been following Tourego for a few years and for this tranche, he has personally invested SGD 100k. To date, he already has about SGD 1 mio of commitments.

At this point, I decided to get my toes wet and go deeper into this. Via their online website, I committed to investing the minimum sum of SGD 25K. Before that, I had to sign up for the next stage of membership (Angel) which cost SGD 500/year. A few days later, I was given the link to access the Data Room to review more materials about the investment.

The company had spent the past 2 years getting ready to go fully live by the end of this year. They had gotten licenses from the import countries like France, Japan, China and S’pore. These will be the critical countries for the tax refund enterprise. They had also done their audit reports for 2017/18 and verified their IT processes. The data had has given me more comfort that they are a bonafide startup with skin in the game. The master term sheet has just been signed and funding of the investment will happen in a few weeks time.

As an asset class for a portfolio, it has been recommended that we should not place more than 10% into angel investing as this is a very high risk proposition. For every 10 investments, it is highly possible that all may fail. One friend says that this is like paying a premium for an option. You never know what you will get in the end and you may lose all your premium eventually.

I take this as a learning curve for me. Like cryptocurrencies and investments in general, you need to dip your feet in, in order to fully understand the sector. No point studying it for years (I watched Bitcoin for more than 2 years before getting in much later in Sep 2017) and being NATO (No Action, Talk Only). I am prepared to lose the investment, but not before I try my best to prevent that from happening. By having experts to screen the investment and guide virgin investors like me along, I believe the chances of success are much improved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This has been a fascinating week of discovery for me in the world of AI development.

It was my usual business trip to Yangon for my financial consultancy work after a 2 days period of brainstorming last week in S’pore. We had finally set up a digital transformation road map and game plan for our microfinance company for the next 12 months. In order to service 500,000 clients in 5 years from the current 30,000+, we need to have a quantum leap in innovation. The 8 pillars of innovation action plan we had mapped out – they all point to fintech developments that involve some element of AI evolution. I will elaborate on 2 of them below.

The first is about new chatbots. For most websites, we already have a chatbot button at the corner of the screen for user interaction and assistance. A majority of these are already automated with machines that handle up to 80% of the inbound traffic while the balance of the 20% are referred to actual human call centre personnel if the machine is unable to service further. In the old system, we have to program all the possible questions and answers into the database for the system to figure out the best response to each and every enquiry from a human user.

In the latest re-iteration of a chatbot, AI is added into the equation. What if we can set up a chatbot that is evergreen, learns on the job and stays relevant indefinitely as it builds up knowledge over time? This is possible now. AI helps the system to learn and then it uses statistical probability calculations to figure out the best reply. With NLP (Natural Language Processing) capability, the machine will be able to fully understand all requests and make an educated guess on the likely answer. Over time, it will get better at what it is tasked to do, as it collects more data and learns on the job.

The advantages of using an AI chatbot can also be channelled into many other areas within the company. What if we use this for internal purposes? Employee questions can be addressed and HR is able to outsource this function. For Marketing, they can use this to train new employees or do periodic training certification of staff members.

We are currently talking to a Canadian based company that has been doing this for a number of firms in North America. The initial discussions sound promising. We should be able to do more very soon. They have shared with us that the end to end process can take as little as 3 months, from the initialization of the project to going live.

The next pillar of innovation was on the development of a dynamic credit scoring model. Currently, we have a rules-based credit evaluation system, where only internally collected data from loan officers are inputted into the system. We have to constantly adjust the system as and when defaults increase. Even then, due to the size of the data, adjustments are still patchworks without any degree of certainty.

What if we can gather unlimited amounts of external data into this credit evaluation process, to find out what works and be able to fine-tune it at the push of a button? We can pull in data like geo-tagging of google map information on land size and acreage, weather reports – both current and historical. We can even gather social media data to determine if the repayment probability of a person is high…

AI excels in machine learning and with more data, the better it becomes. With unstructured data, it can detect trends that are invisible to human eyes. Using re-enforce and deep learning concepts, the AI will be able to run the process millions of times to optimize end results.

For our company, this will mean that we can approve more potential loans and lower/maintain the probability of default rates.  We can then predict with a high level of confidence that these approved loans are safe, due to the analysis of internal and external big data gathered.

We had a conference call with a fintech company from South America on Wed evening that had such a credit scoring model. They had been successfully using AI to derive credit scores on a number of agriculture microfinance companies.

As they walked us through their deck, I realized that some of the terms they used were exactly the ones I had learned from my business analytics course! In one of our projects, we were taught the CRISP-DM (Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining) :

Using the SAS Enterprise software, we used a structured process to come up with the best model for implementation. Most of the work was in getting the data ready (steps 2 – Data understanding and 3 – Data preparation). Then one will tell the software to use the various models available (decision trees, clustering, neural networks etc.) to crunch the data. Finally, we evaluate all of them to determine the one with the best fit and highest score. This will be the one to implement.

In my project, I had 5 data fields which I used to construct a model that was for the approval of a short term loan. I only had about 3,000+ data in each field but the AI could have easily absorbed a million data points. Once implemented, we could periodically rerun the whole process again with more data or additional fields. Unlike the traditional process which can become outdated over time, this AI-based process has a longer shelf life.

We are now embarking on a live Fintech experiment and journey to transform a traditional business that is so ripe for digital transformation. If we can pull it off, we will set new standards for the rest of the industry to follow. It will enrich the end-users and benefit our bottom line as we optimized all areas using limited resources.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Warning: Long blog ahead…

I am pleasantly pleased with myself for finally managing to complete 2 tasks this week. They may not look like much to an outsider, but personally, it had enabled me to connect the dots in more granular detail with regards to my AI learning journey. It has also helped me understand where we are now and what lies ahead.

Firstly, I completed the AI in Finance MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) which I signed up for in Mar. https://cfte.education/aifinance/ It consisted of 18 modules and took me about 3 months to complete. It re-enforced AI concepts which I had studied about previously. It also helped me to conceptualize the AI big picture, on the direction it is likely to move in the immediate future.

While the course was also a good introduction to AI, the market professionals presented a roadmap as to where they believe the areas of finance will most likely see the greatest impact. The underlying theme is clear. Current AI is narrowly focused – it does very well when directed to a specific purpose. This is due to its ability to review unlimited unstructured data, to be able to detect trends that no humans can.

We had supervised learning where AI is given a set of data and told of what the final outputs must be. What is more interesting is unsupervised learning, where through deep learning techniques, the program seeks to find meaning and trends by itself. For example, the machine learning program can be given millions of images to review and over time, it could correctly identify pictures of cats and dogs on its own. Effectively, it learns on its own.

With reinforced learning, we can move to the next level. This is now possible as technology has finally caught up. The programmer basically provides the AI machine with positive and negative rewards (incentives and disincentives) to drive its behaviour in order to optimize its performance. The AI is free to make its decisions towards a final goal. Over time, it will become better as it gathers useful experience going through the processes again and again.

The Alpha Go phenomenon https://www.alphagomovie.com/ that happened in 2016 was created by Google DeepMind based on this concept. It started to analyze Go games played by humans and slowly, it developed strategies which no human in history had ever thought of. It went on to beat the top human player in the world and started a mad development scrabble for AI everywhere. The successor to it was Alpha Go Zero, which took the giant leap of learning by itself without any human inputs. It beat Alpha Go by a resounding 100 to 0 games.

Since then, China had committed a national policy to AI. Gamers have also moved on to more complicated games to challenge AI. Earlier this year, a Starcraft AI managed to outsmart humans. Just yesterday, it was announced that an AI had beaten the best humans in Poker! https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/11/20690078/ai-poker-pluribus-facebook-cmu-texas-hold-em-six-player-no-limit

The other thing that I completed this week pertains to something I did as a teenager many years ago. I started to read science fiction books as the topic interested me then. The name Isaac Asimov constantly pops up as the finest author of such books that tries to predict the future. I began to read as many of his books I can get my hands on. During the 1980s, the only way to do so was to find them in 2nd hand bookshops or in public libraries. After trying to finish the “Foundation” series, my interest waned as the concepts became too abstract to me. I had moved on to other genres by then.

With my current interest in AI, his book “I, Robot” came into my mind again. It was a collection of short stories he compiled when he was in his thirties, way back in 1950. I was curious to understand how a futurist could be describing robots more than 70 years ago. This was way before they had basic functioning computers and this man was already projecting 100 years into the 21st century and letting his imagination run wild. I wanted to connect with him again after so many years, to hear about his words of wisdom on AI.

In this book, he elaborated on the development of robots through the years via the Robopsychologist called Dr Susan Calvin over 9 short stories. Robots had positronic brains that had the 3 robotic rules hard-coded into it. (1) Robots cannot harm humans, (2) Robots must obey humans except when it conflicts with the First Law, and (3) Robots must protect its own existence as long as it does not conflict with the First or Second Law. I was always very impressed that the Laws were so elegantly well thought out and to be able to encompass everything in a nutshell.

In the final 2 chapters, the robots finally caught up with humans. Eventually, humans relied on the machines to run everything. Humanoids became world co-ordinators and they become indistinguishable from humans. The fear of machines taking over had diminished over time. The timeline of the book was between 1980 to 2060, which is where we are today in 2019, the halfway mark.

As I mentioned earlier, the AI as we know today is what we call narrow intelligence. It does well in a narrow frame of reference and does not cross into multiple fields of human domains. It does a particular task extremely well and the more data you feed it, the better it becomes.

It is not that difficult to program AI solutions given the powerful software that is easily available nowadays. During my 1-year Business Analytics evening classes, we had projects used software like SAS Enterprise Miner that were crunching hundreds and thousands of data points in seconds, using various statistical formulas to optimize end results based on the steps we had directed the program to execute. Little did I know then that this was part of machine learning and it was part of my AI learning journey.

The current futurists predict that General AI will only be possible in 30+ years time, where narrow AIs combine together in a meaningful way to become what Isaac Asimov was talking about in his book. Androids and Humanoids will only be possible then.

AI has been the buzz word for the last 3 years and the advancements already achieved has been incredible. We are only at the start of an amazing journey that will continue to surprise all of us for years to come. AI Ethics and fine-tuning of unwanted consequences are some of the things we will still need to address. But what we will take for granted in the near future will seem to be impossible now. The future is so bright, I’ve got to wear shades!

 

 

 

 

 

This has been a happy week of get-togethers with old and new friends for me, to celebrate past and new experiences as we laugh and reflect over things we had done.

The party started on Tuesday. A generous ex-colleague had been sponsoring an annual get together of Treasury colleagues who have worked in the American bank over a 30+ years period.

Thanks to technological tools like WhatsApp, we have been able to connect with many others via the grapevine approach. Instead of just one administrator to the chat group, everyone has administrator rights to add new participants. The maximum is 299 and we actually hit that number 2 years back! One can join or leave whenever you want too.

To spice up the nostalgia this time, we encouraged everyone to post photos or videos of our time in Citibank. The Treasury team had started in the late 1980s till today, so there are 3 distinct periods of time where people came and left : (1) before 2000 (UK ERM, AFC, Russian meltdown), 2000 to 2008 (Y2K, Tech bubble, 9/11, GFC) and from 2009 till today (Global easing, banking downsizing, Trump).

After 2 days of sharing, we had 80+ RSVPs and it felt like this will be a record reunion. Tuesday evening came and we have people streaming into the big hall in a private club that was booked for the event. With a buffet and free flow of beer and wines, it quickly became a big and boisterous class reunion of sorts.

There were so many people I knew and have not caught up with in years. I just moved around and said hi to everyone, taking pictures to post in the chat and reminiscing about things we had done in the past – some crazy and politically incorrect stuff which would have been shocking in today’s PC world.

We probably had at least about 100 persons that night. The total number of years of work experience that we accumulated within the room that evening was easily 1,000 human years. Throw a stone in the room and you would likely hit someone who had spent more than 30 years in Citibank. The record was 43 years. Imagine starting your career with the first job and working till you retire in the same company! It is really unheard of nowadays as millennials believe that you have to constantly move on to gain experience.

Personally, I was in the bank for 19 years that covered 3 departments within Treasury. The life long friends and incredible business network that I acquired had enabled me to accomplish goals will would be unimaginable elsewhere. I struggled to assimilate in my last 2 jobs after Citi. Before I could establish a new network, circumstances had pushed me out of the toxic environments. This had made me realise how valuable a network I had lost when I left Citi.

A gathering of ex-colleagues and old friends with a free flow of sponsored booze really drove up the nostalgia meter for all of us. We reconnected, talk about the crazy shit we did and the impossible situations we experienced in the midst of the various financial crisis over the years.

At times, we really thought that we had reached the end of the financial world but surprisingly, the world would spring back to life again. The stress we went through made us much stronger in the end. Been there, done it. We became jaded, having seen it all. Yet nowadays, the new world does not seem to value work experience anymore as the machines and AI seek to replace the slower humans.

That evening, we collected yet another memory of another happy and successful annual reunion, hoping to have many more in the future. It amazes me that I had worked for almost 29 years now as I face the tail end of my career. I am indeed proud to have been a part of this ecosystem of people who had contributed to my rich work experience.

For the rest of the week, Thursday was another 2 celebrations of sorts. Lunch with a group of buddies – our regular get together for a 4 hours lunch. No matter what, we always have things to discuss and share as the flow of the wine and whisky happens. The get-togethers recharge all of us.

In the same evening, I had another event with new friends we had gotten to know during the recent China tour we went in Apr. My wife and I met like-minded people in our age group who enjoys their drinks. One of them decided to organize a meeting this evening and I suggested a drinking hole within walking distance from my home. It was a nice catch up with live band performances.

At this point in our life, it is always good that we continue to expand our circle of friends. We need to make an effort to meet new people to enrich our second half. There is an easy tendency for one to withdraw into a hermit lifestyle and stay in a cocoon. We have to resist that. At the same time, we must treasure the life long friends we had made by constantly reaching out to them on a regular basis. With the arrival of social media, this has made the job easier.