GBG Strengthens APAC Leadership in Singapore to Accelerate Growth in SEA

SINGAPORE – Media OutReach – 14 July 2021 – GBG (AIM:GBG), the global expert in digital identity, helping businesses prevent fraud and meet complex compliance requirements, has announced the appointment of Bernardi Susastyo as General Manager of Asia, Shekhar Bhagat as Head of Alliances of Asia Pacific (APAC) and Ng Han Liong as Head of Presales of Southeast Asia (SEA) to drive GBG’s growth and innovation capabilities across the region.

Last month, GBG announced record financial performance, profits & customer satisfaction, registering a year-on-year constant currency organic revenue growth of 12.1 per cent between FY2020 and FY2021. To further bolster this growth momentum, the new senior hires will lead and drive penetration in key markets across APAC. In addition to these senior hires, the company is continuing to invest in talents and is recruiting more than 100 roles globally, out of which 42 per cent will be within the APAC region.

The pandemic has accelerated digitalisation in this region, which resulted in a hyper growth in the digital population; in Southeast Asia alone, more than 40 million users came online in 2020. With today’s digital-first economy, financial institutions (FIs) need more robust measures to bridge the increasing volume and complexities of online fraud, financial crime and cyberthreats. To deepen GBG’s engagement with senior decision makers and further enrich fraud and compliance management, the company has made the following senior appointments based out of Singapore:

• Bernardi Susastyo joins as General Manager of Asia. Bernardi brings with him close to three decades of industry experience and has held various senior leadership positions at Advance.AI, Experian, and SAS. With his extensive knowledge of the SEA financial services industry, Bernardi will be responsible for bolstering GBG’s foothold and establishing market leadership especially in the SEA region.
• Shekhar Bhagat joins as Head of Alliances of APAC. Shekhar will be responsible for establishing technology and data partnerships, as well as a network of channel partners to support local sales activation across APAC. Today, GBG’s Intelligence Center ingests datasets from both APAC and global technology and data partners to offer nine built-in capabilities that enriches fraud detection using data such as IP, device, email, endpoint threat, location, mobile, and social media. By bringing more APAC technology and data partners onboard, GBG aims to add more regional datasets to provide customers with even stronger dynamic data intelligence to enrich fraud detection and prevention. Shekhar joins from Experian, where he was Director of Partnership for SEA.
• Ng Han Liong joins as Head of Presales of SEA. Han Liong is an experienced regional solution leader and compliance specialist, having spent the last 10 years in Oracle, Thomson Reuters, and IBM working with the financial services sector. He will facilitate market penetration efforts and sales readiness to expand our reach into Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines further. With the addition of this role, GBG is committed to continue engaging with customers in a consultative style � providing more holistic solutions to both new and existing customers.

Dev Dhiman, Managing Director, APAC at GBG shared, “Bernardi, Shekhar, and Han Liong, bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to GBG that will enable us to boost our presence in the region and position ourselves for long-term sustainable growth in Southeast Asia, and across APAC. Today, GBG is well-positioned as APAC’s leading fraud, compliance, identity and location intelligence solution provider, for both large and small organisations across multiple industries. Having these new hires onboard will enable us to grow from strength to strength.”

“Singapore is Asia’s premier business and tech hub with excellent regional and international relations, local talent pool, and collaborative tech ecosystem in the financial services space. Leveraging on these resources, the team will bring to market sustainable solutions and create robust partnerships across data, technology, and channels that can help financial institutions improve the detection and prevention of emerging financial crime. ” continues Dhiman.

Rest of APAC

In addition to investing in talent and growing its leadership team in Singapore, GBG is also increasing its technology footprint in Malaysia. The technology team size in Malaysia has grown by four times to focus on innovating the next-gen financial crime platform. This investment is critical to keep our award-winning solutions ahead of evolving financial crimes. Further south in APAC, our acquisition of greenID identity verification solution, and Loqate location intelligence solution, has seen a healthy year-on-year growth. These solutions are serving a number of verticals including financial services, fintech, wagering, telco, government, retail, and education in the Oceanic region today and their strong market fit would benefit customers in Asia as we broaden our identity verification and location intelligence product portfolio in the coming months.

Technology Leadership

As the category leader across three Chartis RiskTech Quadrant®— Enterprise Fraud Management, Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML)—GBG is committed to innovating and fortifying defences to be more proactive and agile against the burgeoning threat of Financial Crime 4.0. Helping organisations build digital trust with modern fraud and compliance platform with dynamic data intelligence and AI is a prime focus for APAC.

For more information about GBG’s range of solutions in APAC, click here.

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About GBG:

GBG offers a range of solutions that help organisations quickly validate and verify the identity and location of their customers. Our market-leading technology, data and expertise help our customers improve digital access, deliver a seamless experience and establish trust so that they can transact quickly, safely and securely with their customers online.

Headquartered in the UK and with over 1,000 team members across 16 countries, we work with 20,000 customers in over 70 countries. Some of the world’s best-known businesses rely on GBG to provide digital services and keep the economy moving, from US e-commerce giants to Asia’s biggest banks and European household brands.

To find out more about how we help our clients establish trust with their customers, visit www.gbgplc.com/apac, follow us on Twitter @gbgplc or LinkedIn.

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