Maximising innovation in financial services: An interview with Duco CEO Michael Chin

Duco CEO Michael Chin is a TABBForum Top 40 Innovator in financial services for 2024. We sat down with him to discuss why innovation is so important for the industry, how firms can become leaders in innovation and the role Duco plays in helping them succeed. Watch the interview, or scroll down for the transcript.

Tell us about being named a TabbFORUM Top 40 Innovator

Michael Chin: I think of my career as a change maker. From the day that I was a trader many years back, to being an entrepreneur in a fintech company, to having opportunities to join Duco midway through its journey.

Innovation and being a top innovator, I guess I’m being recognised for enabling change – introducing new ideas and new products into the industry but doing it in a way where I’m constantly thinking about, the market, what am I hearing from our customers, and then being able to think about new ideas that help solve the needs of our customers.

What does ‘innovation’ mean to you?

MC: I think we often think of innovation as, okay, it’s just external. It’s what you deliver to the customer and it’s introducing new products and services to a customer and leveraging new technologies to do it better, quicker, more efficiently.

But I also aspire to be innovative internally, how a company itself operates. How do you think about transforming the way people think and ideate and create and collaborate? 

When I think at the heart of really Duco, and how we leverage innovation, it’s because we leverage the diversity across our employees; diversity of thought.

How can financial services firms innovate better?

MC: I think that one thing they have to do is give time for innovation. We’re seeing a lot of our customers and we’re partnering with a lot of them to be part of Innovation Labs really setting the time aside for people to step away from their daily tasks, their routines, and be part of something where you just free your mind to be able to think and collaborate and just throw crazy ideas up there and be able to then take it from there and see if anything really makes sense.

How is Duco helping financial services firms innovate?

MC: We’ve been having a number of these customer roundtables and this customer said, you know what Duco really is doing for the industry, you’re creating the workforce of the future. Because you have a bunch of people within these large capital markets organisations doing very manual tasks day in, day out

And this customer said, you know what, we actually see Duco as an opportunity for us to create more innovation within our workforce because you’re helping to take away those manual tasks and you’re actually allowing people to innovate, to create, to add significantly more value. To take the power of what they really bring in terms of their talents. 

So in many ways our solutions allow people within these large organisations, that normally don’t have really the opportunity to innovate, to innovate more.

And this customer said, you know, what you’re also doing is you’re allowing us to attract better talent within our organisation. So we can say, hey you’re not having to sit here working with spreadsheets day in, day out, reconciling, doing very manual data input. We’re now able to bring people into the organisation that actually have technical expertise. You offer a no-code, low-code platform and therefore people can now interact and they can create on your platform.

So I thought that was very cool; innovation that we’re doing inspires innovation at our customers.

Why is partnership important for delivering innovation?

MC: Here at Duco we’re enabling our customers to become more efficient.

We’re, to take and steal what one of our customers said, we’re creating the workforce of the future. But we can’t do that in isolation. We have to be there alongside our customers, to really understand and to again have engaging conversation.

Because a lot of these things, you might have this idea, but the real ideas come when you’re sitting there side by side and understanding and seeing what their pain points are.

And that’s why we’re finding a lot more opportunities where customers actually want us to be part of their process, their innovation process. So we can’t do that in isolation.

What’s next for Duco?

MC: We are known as a disruptor in the industry, but disruption, you do it, and what you hope is that you created something that then doesn’t need to disrupt anymore. Because people suddenly have the benefit of your solution and they’re leveraging it, they’re getting the value out of it.

But what I see as innovation, and what our next step of innovation, is not to any longer disrupt, but it is how do we, again, become better partners with our customers, help them reap more of the benefits of our solution? How do we deliver to their needs faster?

So what I’m describing here is not disruption, but now it’s the follow through on execution.

TabbFORUM subscribers can read more on why Michael was chosen here.