MIN Xiaoqi
Innovation for T&M, Investment & Trading Tech Intern
DBS Innovation for Treasury & Markets Team
(January 2021 – June 2021)
I can still vividly remember the excitement when I received the interview invitation for the internship role in DBS Innovation for Treasury and Markets team. DBS has been one of my dream companies and I have always been looking for opportunities to be part of it. I spent many efforts during the preparation stage for this internship application, from practicing for online assessments to researching on treasury and markets and blockchain related topics. I definitely did not want to lose this chance as it is so close to my dream come true. I had a good conversation with my manager during the video interview and demonstrated my passion for this role. Fortunately, I received an offer and my internship journey in DBS begun.
DBS Treasury and Markets (T&M) is one of the leaders in treasury operations. It has a wide range of businesses ranging from foreign exchange and derivative, money market and securities trading to corporate and institutional banking groups. The T&M business is supported by the Investment & Trading Technology (ITT) group, which manages all the front-end business applications and technology needs. My internship team - the Innovation for T&M team, partners closely with both business and technology, acting as a bridge between the two to help further cultivate the innovation culture, run proof of concepts on emerging technologies like AI and Blockchain, and engage with FinTech startups.
On my first day of internship, I was warmly welcomed by my team and had a smooth onboarding experience. I was grateful that I could spend half a year to work with and learn from my manager and senior as they have profound knowledge of the financial industry, fintech and blockchain.
Our team organised a series of workshops that helps business to pick up simple automation skills so that non-technical people can easily pick up and understand the capabilities of new tools. I was responsible for conducting one of the workshops that is related to a workflow automation tool. I have to self-learn the software and created video content guides for business users. The workshop had achieved over 50 sign-ups and more than 100 attendees. It had successfully gathered interest from the audiences and many of them feedbacked that it helped reduce their manual and repetitive daily work. The challenge of this project is that as the software is a new learning area for me which includes coding and learning of the new interface, it was difficult at first to learn the different functions and know what applies to the business. For the workshop, it was my first time performing public speaking to over 50 people from different ranks, ranging from associates to senior vice presidents. All these experiences had helped me to be able to work independently under pressure with organised work. I am more confident in public speaking. It had trained me to be more patient after being the “help desk” of the software.
Another task was to engage across different departments within T&M, to promote and run various innovation initiatives by looking at areas of improvement and develop solutions. The team had a project that aims to provide collaborative stopgap solutions to address T&M Operations pain points. Businesses and operations can submit ideas or problem statements for volunteer developers to solve. I used workflow automation tool to solve 3 manual tasks that business problem owners would like to automate. This contributed to both cost and time saving for the business operations team. The challenging part was that the features that problem owners want to include in the solutions are something new to me, and the requirement for solutions are sometimes not an available function. Hence, I need to learn by myself and find workarounds to deliver an optimised solution to them. Also, frequent communication is needed with the problem owner to ensure the features are met and the solution is stabilised, there were floods of requests from problem owners, and I had to work under pressure. Through this task, I did not only learn technical skills on the new software and developed my expertise in knowing the different functions and building different workflows, but it also helped me with my problem-solving skills as I had to solve the various errors that occurred in the flows, trained me on perseverance, and improving my communication skills through teamwork as I had to clearly present my proposed solutions and the limitations to the problem owner.
Market research work was given to me as well, topics cover current start-ups on blockchain ecosystems and consortiums that can directly impact the future collaborations in line with the banks’ direction towards building a more fintech focus business strategy; and market news about cryptocurrency, basics of how crypto and blockchain works as well as how crypto is traded.
This internship had broadened my knowledge and experience outside the classroom in MITB. Initially I was expecting I could apply some of the python skills during the internship. Although I was mainly working on automation software that does not directly uses python, I was able to relate the knowledge from python module learnt in MITB, it has made my learning and understanding of how the software work easier and smoother because coding knowledge is linked. Moreover, the research that I have done is relatable to my Fintech track in MITB. It provided me with a knowledge base in advance and would aid me in the future Fintech related courses that I will take in MITB.
The internship journey and my team had been great during the six months. I had learning, working experiences and made many valuable friendships. I am very grateful for DBS Innovation for Treasury and Markets team and MITB for this internship opportunity. It has been an unforgettable and terrific experience for me.
