Tricor Group

Tim Leung is the Group CTO at Tricor Group, a global company that offers integrated business, corporate, and investor services. As Group CTO, Tim leads Tricor's technology strategy and is responsible for developing and implementing innovative solutions to improve the company's services and operations. Before joining Tricor, Tim held senior technology leadership roles at leading companies, including CLSA, UBS, and Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited. He has extensive experience in technology transformations, team-building, and digital innovation.

What are some of the trends around Microsoft products in the market today?

The trends that we see in terms of Microsoft product is more about the Azure cloud adoption today . We are also using more and more of cloud services and infrastructure from Microsoft which includes CRM and Azure cloud hosting, to support business applications. 

Typically if it is third party software that we procure and put onto cloud, we use Azure as an app, as a VM hosting. when it comes to kind of Facebook applications that we build on Azure as a cloud native application, micro service design. Moreover we are building a lot more kind of capabilities in-house, especially on have the pasture landing zone and security design in terms of software architects which are equipped with designing found native containerized applications.  

What are some of the challenges impacting the IT industry?

In terms of cloud, for companies that like us that operate in multi-jurisdiction for a lot of business and compliance requirements sometimes we would need to have data residency requirement, which mandates our data to be hosted in country. 

  ​For our kind of financial or a professional service industry a CTO or a technology department should really emphasize on not just the infrastructure, but understanding of the business and the a methodological way of doing change management and technology  

When you operate in many countries, sometimes you operate more in more countries than the cloud hosting provider, in this case, microsoft has. So there's some countries that there's no local hosting that, that microsoft provides, for example. And and that would be similar for other hosting providers. So, so that means you would run into a situation where you, you are forced to use different solution, maybe even go to different vendor depending on what countries you're operating in, and then still have a layer on top of it, try to make them operate the same way. so this create some complexity sometimes and the kind of alerting and availability of cloud provider i think still needs to improve a little bit. You know, because sometimes when service is disrupted, cause cloud provider has availability issue, there's really nothing that you can do.

What technology or any products that you are optimistic about for future?

AI is the most important technology that will be the game changer for our kind of industry, our kind of business., automation with the help of some image recognition and some, probably even some format of you know, nlp. Those, those are very key to the kind of operations that we use human traditionally to do. However, AI requires human training to, to increase precision. It requires changing data to make to, to fine tune the model. matters in how our business process and technology work together to adapt the pipeline that allows us to continue to fine tune the AI model for it to be super effective. But it, it is not easy. It, it kind of like combines many different disciplines together, but I, I think that is really the the major breakthrough that that can be have in in our work.

What would be your piece of advice for budding professionals in the field?

For our kind of financial or a professional service industry a CTO or a technology department should really emphasize on not just the infrastructure, but understanding of the business and the methodological way of doing change management and technology. many times it is seen that there is kind of like expectation on technology that's not fulfilled or, there's maybe frustration in technology workers their own work because of certain misunderstanding with business comes from the fact that it's not because the technology is not good, the infrastructure is not good or may be It comes from the fact that there is no inadequate linkage and between the business users or the business strategies and the technology development. So in technology companies, like software companies, internet service companies, there should be a discipline of product managers which job is to define what to build, what to invest in, in technology.