At Ferovinum, which is a fintech company that serves the drinks industry, it is not sommeliers but software engineers who play the leading role in the current and future success of the business. The Chief Technology Officer at Ferovinum, Ho Yin Lai, discusses what it is like to be part of his team, how technology and his team are helping Ferovinum clients and what gets him excited about work.
Q: Who are you, what’s your role at Fero and how did you end up here?
Ho Yin: My name is Ho Yin and I've been the CTO at Ferovinum for three years now. I was the fourth joiner. Previously, I was doing all the technology stuff in an investment bank. And the similarities between my previous role and my current role is that in my previous role, I was trading black gold - oil – and now I'm working with red gold – wine.
Q: How did you end up getting into tech generally?
HY: So my first contact with computers was when my father brought an IBM PC back home from his work. And the only thing I could remember from that is playing this math game where I was a wizard and had to answer correct questions in order to power up. I think it was primary school. My first game that I wrote actually was for my primary school year six science project where I wrote a clone of space invaders. So basically being a player at the bottom and shooting up monsters and stuff, so that surprised and made every geek in the class excited. I was hooked.
I think definitely the love for technology has brought me all the way to Ferovinum. And it really served me well because I am really interested in puzzles and problem solving and very, very curious about how machines work. How you actually control the machine to work. I think that's where my passion is and it has served me well in my career.
Q: And do you find at Fero you are putting that kind of puzzle solving to work and in what kind of way?
HY: Yeah, for sure. Definitely. I think every day is a puzzle, which is fantastic. And for us, the puzzles could be in different forms. And here, obviously, the solution is in the software... We are definitely solving things where software can actually help our clients and their businesses.
Q: What’s the opportunity to have an impact on at Fero?
HY: I think particularly for the wine and spirits trade, for those software engineers who haven't come across the industry before, I think that it's slow to adapt with technology. So actually, technology in this space could have a huge impact and it's been under-invested in. A lot of these businesses tend to be really passionate about the wine and spirits products, so they love the wine or the spirits that they're selling, but actually how they go about doing it and using technology to do that, it means there's quite a big opportunity in the industry to help businesses leapfrog forward and quite quickly.
From a banking background, I thought the whole world is well organized and well conformed to standards however to my surprise obviously SMEs in this space have the problem of having to deal with lots manual processes, having to deal with very bespoke way of working and having to do whatever it takes to actually get their business running. It was quite an eye-opening experience for me and another puzzle to solve. But it means we are having to give them tools and building tools that work for them and not just for big corporations. It's quite exciting, yet challenging as well.
Q: What does that mean specifically for the people on your team, actually, in their day-to-day work?
HY: For us, we're a small, nimble team at the moment, which is great because all the engineers on my team have the opportunity to have direct customer interaction and have direct customer feedback as well.
We're also blessed at Ferovinum, whereby our product is actually being used on a day-to-day basis and is having a pull factor from our clients to actually bring more value or bring more features into the product. This is fantastic for engineers. What engineers love most is that their stuff is in use and what they've built brings value.
Q: What do you see as some of the big tech challenges that Fero is solving right now? And what does that mean for product offering? How is that evolving?
HY: We have a lot of avenues to attack, obviously with a small, but growing team, one of the key challenges is resources – where to prioritise and attack first.
Another challenge is that, due to decades of under-investment in tech, many processes remain unstructured and companies rely on manual workarounds to operate. With the introduction of tech, we are having to form structure, which is what works best for a technology product, but we need to find the middle ground. How much structure do you want to put in? How much can we actually help make the business work more efficiently, but at the same time, not have to lose the nature of how these businesses work and not be too disruptive for them. Having that fine balance is where the biggest challenge is.
Q: Is AI able to play a role here?
HY: It's a big cliché but AI could play a big role. We do actually see some benefits where AI can actually play a big part in this. By giving more natural interfaces like English or human language to our customers so they can interface with the tooling will be a massive benefit and also bridges the gap in this problem. I believe AI can help in ways where things are not currently as well defined as we like.
For example, things like credit analysis, understanding swaths of our clients' credit, help and ongoing monitoring of credit is going to be quite transformative with AI and be able to process a lot of qualitative information quickly.
The other thing that is actually quite interesting for us is the internet of things. These are maybe “five-years-ago” kind of technologies, but they haven't quite yet seen it deployed in this industry very well – yet.
If we could actually have the ability to track every page or every bottle and have that available on your iPad, I think that would be a fantastic kind of product that we could actually apply to this industry. I think that would be amazingly useful as someone who used to work on the other side of that. It would be a game changer, definitely.
Q: Can you give us some insights into the tech stack that Fero’s built and are continuing to add to? What for example are some of the programming languages you are using regularly?
HY: We started out as a financial product, so it was more heavily based on the finance side, with a more mature technology in the backend, core engine which is built in Java.
We have then added more exciting product features that are built in TypeScript and React.
We have Python as our data analytics tooling.
With all of these languages and where we see using tools, is that we pick the tools that are right for the specific application. We find the best tools for the best situation.
So even AI, for example, we are starting to embed AI tooling into various situations. One that is very obvious is for developers and productivity. Developers' productivity has markedly increased given the tools that we are providing them. But also things that we are very excited to explore are around analyzing unstructured data, say, for example, an invoice. How do you actually manage to understand tabular data in a way that is not well-formed? The invoices can be very different even with different words and the languages are all different. Everyone has a different abbreviation for the same word. How do you actually manage and reconcile that?
We are exploring using AI in those areas, as well, and also traditional ML stuff to do more predictive and forecasting mechanisms for our clients. I think those are some of the exciting things that we are trying to achieve here.
Q: How is Fero able to better help its clients using some of these tools?
HY: We are sitting in the middle of all our clients' transactions. By the nature of how we actually provide funding as well as the tooling – we actually see all the stock inflows, all the transactions, all the output of our clients. I truly believe that Ferovinum is in a great position to actually help our clients understand their data that could help them make better business decisions or identify opportunities they could pursue because of the data oversight we have – both internally as well as externally.
We take that position of trust very seriously.
Q: How do you approach your role with leading the team?
HY: I think, first of all, I believe in the team and their capabilities. Empowering them and giving them the best information to do their jobs is critical. Where I come in is helping them have context, then the ask is that they give me the best solution from what they understand of the problem. So empowering them, giving them autonomy to do that is important.
At the same time, I also need to find where things can be automated. Take testing for example – in terms of verification of the features that are being built – how can we automate this. That then means our software engineers are able to concentrate and build upon a robust foundation, which, I believe, allows them to move faster and to be able to build faster as well.
Q: What is the culture at Fero like and what it is like for the software engineering team?
HY: From my first day joining, when there were only four of us to now, the culture – even with 40 of us – is the same.
We're all very passionate. We're also very driven. We all know what the mission is. And we're a very genuine, smart and collaborative group of people. Everyone is here to help each other. We all know where we can grow this business and our clients’ businesses. And that is very, very refreshing.
Engineering is definitely a team sport, I believe, because not everyone can do everything in the technology space. Everyone has their strengths and their weaknesses. I think everyone in the team so far has shown, including myself, hopefully, to the team that we have everyone's back.
And when there is a problem that we're facing, we come together and we find a solution, and that shows that everyone is genuinely trying to solve the problem, and our clients' problems.
I feel that the culture of the engineering team, at least what I'm trying to foster, is one whereby you're not afraid to share your opinions. It's one where we can actually debate, everyone's opinion makes sense and is valued as well. Not being afraid to share opinions, to have the courage to justify them, having the knowledge as well as the frameworks, to be able to give you that confidence to bring your ideas forward – that is what the culture is and should be.
Q: What are some key attributes that you find in new team members that really help them to thrive?
HY: Curious, passionate – which are similar to our values and culture of Ferovinum – but also slightly geeky, I would say. Obviously, we are a tech team and we love to talk tech.
A passion for problem solving. We're solving problems for our clients. The beautiful thing for Ferovinum is that we're still at a stage where we have that tight loop with our client as well.
So I think if you're that person you will love our team as well.
Also having that constant feedback, knowing that the feature that you put into the product is going to be used by a particular client that you have spoken to on the phone or on Zoom. It's definitely very, very refreshing.
As a starter, obviously there are a lot of places where you can actually put your effort in and there's a lot of greenfield projects.
I think those who are excited about building new things or entering into the unknown and are definitely up for a challenge – they would love it.
Q: Remote working versus in the office – what's the approach?
HY: We have an outcome-based kind of approach there. So there will be times where you're more efficient at home. I think that is fine. You can collaborate on Google Meets. There will also be many times where you're more efficient in the office. And we will encourage you also to be able to have access to that as well.
We have what we call stand-ups and we have those probably twice or three times a week. Obviously, it's better when you're in person. I think working with great people in person, you're basically sharpening each other's acts when you're working much closer and collaborating closer. It is actually a real benefit as you are able to learn from each other by working here.
Word of advice is to be here on Fridays. Drinks on the rooftop are super.
Q: How do you ensure that you're helping your team stay at the cutting edge of engineering space and really driving innovation?
HY: We have unstructured learning in the sense that every person on the team is forced to actually do presentations every so often. There’s two reasons for that – having a chance to present your work, share your work is important, but also allows us to learn from each other.
We also have more structured ways of learning. We host internal seminars bi-weekly, so every Wednesday night. We also have, say, someone that's from a senior level of the engineering team present their work on a specific topic. Usually it's outside of work. It's more geeky, but more like software engineering related, latest trends, AI frameworks, latest programming frameworks that we don’t always cover in our presentations.
Our software engineers are all curious, so we'll go and scour the internet. We do share amongst ourselves good reading lists, YouTube playlists. We also attend external seminars as well.
Q: Anything we are not currently doing to further development for the team?
HY: Something we are looking at for the team is getting offsite, where we bring in external speakers to talk about the latest trends, how to apply them. Drafting in speakers where we can understand certain applications of AI technologies into specific domains like the logistics or it could be in the finance domain – this is something we are exploring right now.
The other thing I want to organise is a hackathon. So having everyone to collaborate, to share ideas, to basically be in an environment where it is not driven by deadlines or certain requirements, to be able to have the time to explore outside of their usual work.
Q: With the growth that Fero is experiencing does that mean there are opportunities for career growth here?
HY: For sure. We have seen career growth where you have the traditional step into more seniority of engineers, but also as a start up, there's a lot more responsibility for engineers to handle as well, especially as the business is growing. We're also growing into different client bases and into different products – which provides more opportunities for the team.
With this growth there are some common career tracks including engineering managers and into ICs. There are also pathways where it might be less traditional, like if you wanted to enter into more of an analytical role that will also be available. Even as we learn more about the different customer segments in this industry, how we can serve them –it will continuously unlock opportunities to further grow from a career perspective. The better understanding we get of our customers, and their needs and therefore how technology could really help their businesses operate and the efficiencies that they could get out of that with the use of technology – the opportunities are huge.
Q: What are some of your favourite things about working at Fero?
HY: Obviously, it's a wine and spirits business, so Friday night's rooftop drinks are fantastic. But the top thing about working at Fero are the people. Everyone is lovely. It's hard work as well. We are all very good at our craft, but we all learn so much from each other.
.jpeg)
