I am always tempted to ask my interviewees whether Asia or Hong Kong is a slower adopter of IT.
By
21 Aug 2008
“The IT environment in investment banking is very different in the US to that in Asia. As a result, it is very different working in a foreign bank compared to a local or Chinese investment bank”, said Alex Liu, executive director, IT division at the Bank of China International (BOCI).
This is what Liu told me in a recent interview. He said that four months ago, he joined BOCI and found that working in IT with a foreign bank or a global company in Asia involves “very (much) implementation and co-ordination type of work”.
He shared his experience with working at a foreign investment bank that operates similar to Morgan Stanley. He said, “With most global companies like that foreign investment banks, the development work was done in Europe or the US. And all the implementation was driven in Asia.”
When Liu’s previous IT department was to implement an application, they would “do a local deployment and implementation”. As a result, “a lot of IT staff are technologists in Asia, are more responsible for the implementation and co-ordination. They hardly ever really develop applications”, he said.
Not slow adopters but market reactors
With the government label ‘IT hub in Asia’ hanging over Hong Kong, and working for an IT management magazine, I am always tempted to ask my interviewees, especially if they are CIOs, whether Asia, or Hong Kong, are generally slower adopters of IT.
“I wouldn’t say slow adopters,” Liu quickly said, “Probably, overall IT is moving a little bit slower. Their [Asian banks’] forecast doesn’t compare to global investment banks. But, having said that, they are more reactive to the market.”
Citing his experience at the BOCI, he explained, “We have a local base, and we don’t have to worry about the global systems in the US or the UK. So our focus is on Hong Kong. Sometimes, we’ll move ahead faster than the other global investment banks, because this is our focus.”
“But compared to others, like Morgan Stanley, their IT system is very much driven by global applications, so sometimes they’re a little bit slower, because they have to wait for someone to develop a system for them.
Three-month IT queue
“Unlike here. When we work with programmes, we decide on our own, we are flexible in that sense. We have the authorities or the decision-makers here locally. We can decide that this is the way to go, whether we have problems or issues or obstacles that we’ll have to overcome. We’ll just go ahead and do it.
“In other companies, sometimes, in my past five years here, with other firms, we used a global system, and we can’t change it, because you have to ask New York which is in charge of development. So you have to submit your request, wait in the line, and go through a series of conference calls, until they understand your needs in Hong Kong, you are speaking on behalf of your business here.
“They’ll then say, you’ll get your next release or update three months later, or six months later. That’s the difficulty. But in Asia, working in a local based, or Chinese-based company, we pretty much move much faster. We probably react much better to changes in the market, and to different requirements”, Liu said.
Many thanks to Alex for his experience sharing. To answer the above question in bigger perspective, I invite all of you to read our upcoming September issue MIS 100 – Top 100 IT Users in Asia, which features a total of 17 banking and finance institutions, from which I’m sure both our CIO readers and fellow editorial writers will gain further insights into the regional FSI scene. Meanwhile, if you are a banking professional, please feel free to leave us comments below and share your thoughts with us.
Carol Ko is the Deputy Editor of MIS Asia and is chiefly responsible for covering stories of CIOs and senior IT managers in North Asia. She obtained her journalism training at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Prior to joining Fairfax Business Media, she was working as a freelance writer covering local arts and culture.
