YCM Celebrates 10th Anniversary

Young Corporate Malaysians (YCM) proudly held their 10th edition of their annual summit themed ‘Distributed Economy’ at the Aloft Hotel situated in Kuala Lumpur Sentral last Saturday. The one day event took place from 9:00 a.m. and featured a line-up of high level corporate officers and CEOs including MDEC’s Dato’ Yasmin Mahmood, CIMB Group CEO Tengku Dato’ Zafrul Aziz and World Bank’s Country Manager for Malaysia, Firas Raad among many others.

The 2018 edition of the summit was concerned with a distributed economy which aims at sustainable industrial development with teamwork and synergy being the foundation of this idea. According to the summit’s official website a distributed economy “doesn’t rely on a central system to boost productivity. Rather, it opens the doors for all entities within the network regardless of size or location, to innovation and growth.”

The summit kicked off with a keynote speech by MDEC’s CEO Dato’ Yasmin Mahmood entitled ‘Race against the Machine. Dato’ Yasmin, who is no stranger to the YCM Summit, having spoken at the same summit eight years ago was proud to see the heights reached by YCM through their existence. She began her address focusing on the advancement of artificial intelligence, its future, consequences and what it means to today’s workforce.

With the rapid changing technology in today’s world, Dato’ Yasmin believes that the new workforce will have to equip themselves with the relevant skills to succeed and she even went as far as to say that coding and programming are nearly as important as reading and writing. Dato’ Yasmin, who was listed in the top 100 most influential people in digital government by Apolitical earlier this year highlighted the importance of having problem solving skills and creative thinking skills in order to succeed in today’s working environment.

The stage was later taken over by. Firas Raad, newly appointed Country Manager for Malaysia at the World Bank where the Jordanian national spoke about the ‘Evolution of Economies’ which highlighted the internet as a key to the future “Achieving ubiquitous, fast and inexpensive internet connectivity is the key to the future… The future is unpredictable; we can predict it by creating it.” Said the Country Manager.

The first of two panel discussions of the day began right after Mr. Firas’ presentation that was moderated by Marina Che Mokhtar, Executive Director, Economics and Policy Practice at PwC Malaysia and included Wong Wai Ken, Country Manager for Malaysia at StashAway, Shakira Teh Sharifuddin, Economist at the World Bank, Jacob Isaac, Managing Director of Nnew Technologies at Fusionex International and Nicholas Khaw, Development Economist at Khazanah.

Following the panel discussion, company delegates and participants alike had a lunch break before the summit’s agenda resumed with a talk by Amjad Rabi, an Economics lecturer at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. The flash talk entitled ‘An economy that works for everyone’ which discussed the role of the government in ensuring the financial wellbeing of the public and where the local government stands in relation to this.

Adil Haris of Blockchain Malaysia then took the stage to introduce Blockchain to the audience and highlight the potential of the technology, describing it as ‘cutting edge’. Four basic elements of Blockchain were mentioned by the Blockchain consultant that are cryptography, consensus algorithms, peer to peer networks and incentive models. The second panel discussion of the day followed suit featuring Melvin Poh of the Asian Entrepreneur, Adrian Yap of MoneyMatch, Lennise Ng of Dropee, Vikram Singh of Vikram Singh Associates and Wan Dazriq of MaGIC.

The one day summit was capped off with Tengku Dato’ Zafrul Aziz of CIMB delivering his keynote speech ‘What’s Next for Young Professionals: Tech. Talent. Tomorrow.’ As the title suggests, the future of today’s working force was discussed with Tengku Dato’ Zafrul explaining how “Change is the only constant” and hoow today’s world is advancing, the pace of change is moving much faster than it used to.

The emergence of Financial Technology (Fintech) in Malaysia was also a point of discussion as the CIMB CEO discussed the challenges it poses to traditional banking and how banks cope with the new technology.

Lavania Vijayakumar, YCM Summit Director expressed her excitement on how the event turned out and had this to say,

“I think overall we absolutely loved how it turned out, I think the panellists and the speakers were absolutely amazing. When we started we expected to educate people about the distributed economy and establish the grounds of how it differs from the current economic model.”

GRADUAN is proud to be a career partner for YCM Summit 2018 and can’t wait to be there again next year!