OCBC’s Mayda Lim in building the next pipeline of tech, banking talent

Lim weaves the need to support women bankers with the wider talent shortage in the industry.

In 2021, Mayda Lim took the next step in her banking and IT career: after a four-year stint working in China for a prominent Australian bank, she returned to Singapore to spearhead the development of OCBC's engineering team across Asia Pacific.

“When I first joined the bank, my first assignment was to grow our in-house software development team,” Lim, who is OCBC's Head of Software Development Centre in the Group Operations & Technology division, told Asian Banking & Finance in an exclusive interview. “We want to transform from buying the product to building the product ourselves.”

Just over two years later, Mayda has successfully scaled OCBC’s engineering team, quadrupling the number of experts in the team by hiring more than 600 software engineers.

Looking at her time before joining OCBC, it’s easy to see why Lim was chosen to complete this task: she had previously served as head of technology for ANZ’s China technology campus, where she directed the offshore software development centre with staff composed of 300 people. In her brief stint with ANZ Singapore before this, she drove the development of 8 prototypes and launched a start-up company focusing on blockchain in trade finance.

Before becoming a banker, though, Lim had always traced her roots to tech and engineering, starting her career working for a logistics company and later with Thomson Reuters.

“I never started my career thinking about entering the banking industry–not really,” Lim recalls of her over two-decade career. “But from the beginning, I knew that I wanted to go into tech, or anything related to it. I see tech like the core department of many sectors. It's a vertical role. You can plug into any of the industries.”

In the future, Lim shared excitement in the up-and-coming developments around quantum computing, which she believes is where the future lies– both in tech and in banking.

“From our bank [OCBC’s] perspective, we have determined that we need to train our people to at least have awareness about quantum computing. It’s the same thing a few years back with blockchain,” Lim said, saying that OCBC has “always been first” to reposition itself to explore new technologies, and thus is now exploring training curriculum for quantum computing.

“To be future ready, training should not be limited to tech employees. Instead, it should be open to the whole bank, like our Data Program or the cybersecurity program,” she added.

Apart from tech, there’s one other topic close to Lim’s heart: empowering up-and-coming talents, and of course women, in succeeding in the banking and IT industry– a sentiment shared by OCBC.

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Talent gap
A woman leader being chosen to lead a bank’s tech team may still raise some eyebrows in Asia, where only 1 in 4 senior management roles in businesses are filled by women– although the number is significantly higher in Singapore. Data from Grant Thornton Singapore found that 39% or over 1 in 3 of senior management positions in the Lion City are occupied by a woman. As for women in tech, in Singapore at least the gap is closing, with 4 in every 10 tech majors being a woman.

For Lim, however– and for OCBC, the first major bank in Southeast Asia helmed by a woman– the bigger issue lies in the lack of talent in the pipeline and the immense competition in Singapore for the limited pool of workers.

Lim noted that the lack of representation for women both in the banking and in the tech industry isn’t necessarily due to conscious bias against hiring women, but rather a result of the overall shortage of talent in the pipeline.

“If we have to trace back, it goes back to the situations when we were in school. How many of our girls chose to study STEM subjects? If the upstream supply is few, then the downstream industry will get impacted, including finance,” she noted.

As an example, under one of the internship and talent initiatives of OCBC, Lim shared that it is sometimes difficult to maintain a 50% ratio of male and female talents because there weren't enough women in the course– an example of what she calls “unconscious bias”.

This situation is further exacerbated by immense competition amongst companies to get the right talent. In Singapore, banks like OCBC have to compete with tech giants like Google, TikTok, and Facebook, amongst others, to hire the right talent.

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OCBC’s data division is one example where the gap between men and women is small: at least 40% of the bank’s employees in the data divisions, and who run data analysis, are women. This is a result of women being expected to study statistics, not engineering in the past. These the statistics departments then transformed over the time, and now have become the data departments.

Empowering programs
To address these issues– both of talent and women in leadership– OCBC has adopted several mentoring programs and measures to build up their future pipeline.

“In our bank, we do see that we have a big population of women at mid-level management . And in order for them to elevate to the next level, we have a program we call MentorMe. The MentorMe program helps to elevate the junior or mid-level women to step up into the leadership role,” Lim shared.

The program sees leaders in the bank mentor a group of candidates, no matter the gender, and serves as leadership grooming.

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Lim, for her part pioneered a 1-year internship program in the Singapore banking industry to build a pipeline of young talents. This project involves giving Polytechnic students working experience beyond the experience of a traditional internship.

Three years on, the program– which started with more than 20 interns for the one-year internship– now onboard close to 50 per year. In the next batch, OCBC is targeting to take 80 to 100 interns.