These engineers are the driving force behind Temasek’s digital transformation

Temasek is a complex corporation. The Singapore-headquartered investment firm has 11 global offices and an international investment portfolio that was valued at US$235 billion in March last year.

Among its various business units is a fledgling digital technology department called Root Access. Established in 2018, the team comprises engineers and technologists who aim to improve how Temasek operates as a firm by leveraging emerging technology.

The Root Access team / Photo credit: Mook Chaichirawiwat / Temasek

Making an impact

Working as a Root Access engineer can be a rewarding experience. Root Access software engineer Sharlene Wong shares that her role gives her the opportunity to build products, while also allowing her to directly witness their impact on users. One notable project she’s working on is an AI-powered product that’s saving the firm’s investment analysts a colossal amount of manual work.

“Before you start investing, you need to size up a company financially. It all begins with [identifying] which industry this company belongs to so you can stack it against other companies in that industry,” she explains.

Previously, sieving out inappropriately classified companies from about 300 different industries would take about 38 man days. Now, with the program Wong and her team developed, the same job can be done across 2,200 different industries in “a matter of minutes,” she says.

“Because of AI, we’re saving our fellow colleagues a lot of man days,” Wong adds. “We also get to classify more companies into a more diverse range of industries, which changes how people look at investments.”

Photo credit: Nordwood Themes / Unsplash

Root Access has also launched a mobile app to make the process for investment approvals faster. Software engineer Alvin Teh, who led the project, says that although the tech behind the app “is not that fancy,” it still “broke new ground” for the firm’s employees.

He explains that the old system “didn’t have the best interface” and took about 30 seconds to load just a single page on mobile.

Aiming to revamp the process, Teh spearheaded a redesign and implemented improvements to the system, building a user-centric mobile app. On top of a sleeker interface and quicker load times, the app now employs a new authentication architecture so that users can easily use fingerprint or facial ID authentication for secure access.

Advocates for innovation

Temasek as an organization is still “traditional” in some aspects, but Teh says Root Access is looking to change that by advocating the adoption of modern working processes like Agile.

“Our work is produced using Agile, and we make Agile training and exposure available to everyone in the firm,” he shares. He adds that the success of the mobile app, which was one of the first products that was developed in Agile, showed the rest of Temasek that the process works and produces high quality digital products.

Root Access engineers Sharlene Wong (left) and Alvin Teh / Photo credit: Temasek

“A lot of the organization was new to Agile, and everyone was skeptical,” says Teh. “But after they saw what we could deliver, they wanted to learn more about it.”

The team has also taken to imparting programming and data science skills to their “non-technical colleagues,” even organizing internal hackathons where they can put these skills to the test. The goal, Teh explains, is to foster a “technology self-service mindset.”

“We want them to be able to solve their own problems rather than the traditional approach where everyone just goes to IT and asks for help,” he says. “They might not be building big systems, but at least they can start building their own tech solutions.”

Plans for expansion

To meet the increasing demand for tech solutions from the rest of the firm, Root Access plans to hire more digital tech talent. In the future, the products Root Access builds could be used beyond the borders of the organization, by Temasek’s portfolio businesses and the open source community.

“The tech we build here is just for Temasek for now, but there’s a vision to build a product ecosystem,” Wong explains. “And our portfolio is not small. So, when we build something for Temasek, we could expand our products one day for tons of other stakeholders, businesses, and their end users.”

Achieving that requires more than just a bigger team. Teh says that potential hires will also need to fit Root Access’ work culture.

“Regardless of whether they’re an engineer, a product manager, or whatever, we’re looking for people who want to and will push the boundaries of tech,” he says. “We want people who are passionate about the things they are doing and are able to collaborate to deliver value for the business.”

Converted from Singapore dollars. Rate: US$1 = S$0.76

Root Access is Temasek’s digital technology team. Its goal is to enable a culture of scalable innovation in the investment firm by developing intelligent digital solutions for business users.

To learn more about how you can join the Root Access team, visit its blog.