Yeo Teck Guan

Yeo Teck Guan is a Singapore native. Prior to joining Singapore Pools in 2012, he held several executive roles in his home town before leaving for Shanghai to become the Country Manager for Ness Technologies in 2007. A year later, he moved to the role of IT Director for APAC at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, where he worked on increasing the cooperative relationship between IT and business departments. 

Yeo was a veteran of technology transformation initiatives by the time he returned to Singapore in 2012. He joined Singapore Pools as the company’s CIO, stepping up into his current role as Chief Business Technology Officer in May of 2018. 

In his role, Yeo is the guiding hand behind Singapore Pools’ journey towards becoming a more agile, digitalised, customer-centric organisation for the post-COVID world. 

“My responsibility is to provide the company's vision regarding technology, especially towards digital strategy, as well as provide leadership for all the organisation's ICT strategy, operations, and in any other way that this department supports Singapore Pools' goals,” he explains. 

When he arrived at Singapore Pools in 2012, the company’s IT department was undertaking between one and two “megaprojects” (projects with a budget of S$1mn or more) each year. Yeo’s focus has been on changing that state of affairs. “When I started, the CEO set me the task of using my knowledge and leadership experience to drive real change in the way that Singapore Pools uses digital technology,” he recalls. “Instead of one to two projects a year, as of 2012, we started doing nine to 10 projects every 12 months, which has quickly moved the company through a significant digital transformation.” 

Yeo explains that, in order for Singapore Pools to truly transform, the role and attitude of IT needs to change. “We can’t just have the traditional relationship of ‘someone asks for A, the IT department delivers A; someone asks for B, we deliver B.’ We need to empower our whole company,” he says. “We are focusing a lot of training on helping our staff use artificial intelligence (AI), which will be a huge transformation within the organisation, not just a new technology.” 

Singapore Pools has engaged key partner Hitachi Vantara to provide AI tools and training that allow the company’s employees to build, slice and dice their own reports to gain deeper insights into the company’s operations. Yeo adds that, “They also have very strong DevOps, which is helping us automate our testing. Because we're running a lot of mobile apps and services, we're also leveraging a lot of automation in order to support our digital infrastructure, which is going to give us the agility and reduced time to market we need in order to better meet our needs, and Hitachi Vantara is a key partner with us on that.” 

Outside of his role at Singapore Pools, Yeo has spent the past two years serving on the board of the SPD, a non-profit organisation dedicated to building an inclusive Singapore, using technology to help the differently-able live dignified, comfortable lives. 

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