June 6, 2023

Making an impact with a career in innovation

By: Alvin Chia - Head of Digital Assets Innovation for Asia Pacific, Northern Trust

I joined Northern Trust in 2022 and am responsible for developing market-leading innovations that are aligned to Northern Trust’s digital asset strategy. My team manages Northern Trust’s interactions with fintech, industry bodies, regulators, and government to positively influence market change in line with the organization's strategic direction.

Prior to my time at Northern Trust, I spent the past 10+ years in a variety of innovation-related roles. Most recently as the Expert Senior Manager of Innovation at Bain and Company, where I helped senior leaders from Fortune 500 companies achieve their strategic ambition.

Prior to Bain, I served as the Vice President of Innovation at DBS Bank where I had the chance to co-created numerous flagship digital products and services for the bank across Asia.

Outside of work, I have authored a book in 2018 on how banks adopted innovation frameworks and taught as an adjunct faculty across numerous universities in Singapore. I am an alum of the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and is currently completing a doctoral degree in digital innovation at NUS.

Over the course of my career, I have seen first-hand how innovation and digitization could help drive meaningful changes in large organizations like Northern Trust. I hope that these experiences will help fellow employees and clients adopt and embrace the value of digital assets.

Reflecting on my time at Northern Trust

The past 8 months have been nothing short of an amazing experience. I had the chance to work alongside a talented global team that cuts across both digital and traditional assets. The regional leadership team in Asia Pacific has also been supportive of the projects that we are embarking on to future-proof the organization.

The supportive environment had allowed me to hit the ground running. Within the first three months, I had my first proposal out and have since initiated a deep tech research program to help Northern Trust develop future capability in blockchain.

From a macro environment perspective, the past 8 months must have been one of the most tumultuous periods in the past decade with a prolonged ‘crypto winter’, rising inflation rate and slowing growth.

Despite the challenging environment, the consultations around digital assets have not stalled. We have responded to the regulator’s call for feedback, and eagerly watch how the digital currency pilots will impact the market.

Looking back, I appreciate how I was able to experience all these firsthand, in a relative position of strength to analyze and understand where the market is heading. I have also benefitted immensely and learnt how Northern Trust navigated challenging times with the playbook that it has developed and iterated over 130 years of continuous operations. It has accelerated my growth and gave me confidence that we will succeed together as an organization.

Building communities inside & outside of Northern Trust

While digital assets remain a new asset class, we at Northern Trust believe that it will account for up to 10% of the assets we hold under custody by 2030.

To realize that vision, we need to guide the organization towards a greater awareness of digital assets and build critical capabilities that will be important in the mid to long term.

To drive changes internally, we have started a series of educational engagements (titled “digital assets horizons”) to help employees regionally acquire foundational understanding of digital assets. Beyond that, we will continue to engage our fellow partners in applied use cases and scenarios to help them understand how embracing digital assets will be value added to what they do today.

A critical part of our remit is to build an ecosystem of trusted relationships outside of Northern Trust and within the fintech, financial market infrastructure and regulatory communities. Forging a strong and close-knit relationship with these communities would be important as they each form an important part of the value chain.

Drawing inspiration from fintech and events

Of the external communities, fintech is one that we have been spending significant energy on as they can often bring “out of the box” thinking to a traditional industry. We think about fintech in a broad way, from a one-man team to a large technology company who are already revenue generating. We are constantly on the lookout for the next big idea that would disrupt our industry.

As part of my role, I’m lucky to be able to attend many of the best industry conferences and events to meet some of these up-and-coming fintech companies and entrepreneurs. We have a well-established process that would then allow us to discuss if we should partner, invest, or acquire them if they are aligned to our ethos, vision, and strategy.

I recently spoke at the Digital Asset Week 2023 as a panelist to discuss the future of institutional DeFi (Decentralized Finance). We explored potential use cases and went in-depth into some of the barriers and trends we observed from within the industry. While my fellow panelists each came from slightly different perspectives, conversations like these help us articulate our perspective to a broad audience on a topic that few understand.

Off the back of the panel, I had the chance to speak to multiple fintech companies who are working in DeFi, and we exchanged pointers and discussed potential projects that we could collaborate. While we might not always agree on the path forward, having such exchanges has benefitted all those who attended and advanced our agenda of articulating our future vision.

What is next?

While digital assets are still really in its infancy, we are starting to see strong use cases emerge from the mix. One example is the custody of digital bonds. We are currently in discussion with several top investment banks and believe that demand will only continue to grow.

And for me, I am only at the beginning of my journey at Northern Trust with plenty of work ahead of me! Keep watching this space as I am certain you will hear more initiatives from the Digital Assets and Financial Markets group.

My Fast Facts

Time at Northern Trust: 8 months

Hometown: Singapore

What are you reading/watching/listening to: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

Alvin Chia is SVP, Head of Digital Assets Innovation for Asia Pacific at Northern Trust.

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