FBC Board member Corrado Lillelund Forcellati blogging: A banker surfing the ASEAN waves of business disruption

Asia’s banking industry is leap-frogging the adoption and adaption of fin- and reg-tech solutions, along driving sustainability to secure and diversify capital and goods in ASEAN.

Asian regulators, politicians and banks are today heavily involved in mapping, understanding and trying to forecast the conditions around this transformation. The quest on how to clearly engage, practice and demonstrate the best way to surf the ASEAN waves of business disruption has already begun.

‘Wedge’ in surfing terms is a wave condition in which two waves converge together and merge in from the sides to create a more powerful wave.

I definitely see this happening.

Sustainability innovation and digitalization are converging into a big wave, which in ASEAN will be even more powerful and disruptive than what we’ve seen so far.

The ability to properly ‘take-off’ will be crucial for a successful ride.

As a banker, we mentally prepare and train ourselves to master the challenge of surfing this wave of disruption. We spend a lot of time in our workshop to calibrate and adjust our surf board so as to make it agile and resilient. We engage other surfers to better understand the conditions and risks out there.

We don’t want to be ‘axed’, be wipe-out and injured while attempting. We don’t want to be a ‘Kook’, having an exaggerated idea of our surfing capacity.

What we want is to continuously learn how to ‘trim’ our board so as to travel across this wave of disruption at the speed needed to maintain position while remaining engaged with the community as a whole.

Safe and fun surfing is not only about having the right board. It requires skills and attributes to be continuously built, developed and mastered. It takes balance, flexibility, endurance and passion to succeed.

Aloha

Corrado


 

Corrado Lillelund Forcellati

NORDEA