Su Fen Lee (PhD in Finance, 2014): “You can’t do financial research by just sitting in your office and reading research papers”

Su Fen Lee (PhD in Finance, 2014) first studied electrical engineering, then obtained a Master’s in Management Science at Stanford University. While working for the Monetary Authority of Singapore, she was offered the opportunity to pursue the EDHEC PhD programme in Finance. It allowed her to broaden her knowledge in finance and build capability in research skills. She details for EDHEC Alumni how research and policymaking can be interconnected based on her own career experience.

What are your current position and responsibilities?

I work at the Ministry of Finance in Singapore, where my team and I oversee the three reserve entities of Singapore, which are GIC, Temasek and the Monetary Authority of Singapore, our central bank. We make sure these entities invest the reserves of Singapore according to their respective mandates . We also look at the governance over the use of Singapore’s reserves.

Were your stints in the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Ministry of Finance (MOF) planned one after other?

My career path has certainly not been pre-planned right from the start. I took up an MAS undergraduate scholarship, so I knew that I was going to work for MAS when I graduated, but I didn’t know exactly in what area. MAS is a large organisation with multiple mandates. It is both a central bank and a financial regulator. It also has a mandate to develop the financial sector in Singapore. I had the opportunity to experience several different roles during my time at MAS. When I first joined MAS after graduation, I started out in financial supervision, then I worked on financial stability  and finally on data governance.  Two years ago, this current opportunity at the Ministry of Finance came up, and I decided to give it a shot.

You have worked on very different subjects in finance. How have you built your career on the diversity of the financial sector?

Finance is indeed a very broad field, and there are many sub-areas one could specialise in. At the same time, there are a lot of interlinkages and connections between the sub-areas within finance. You can move to something that is seemingly different from what you previously spent time on but you will find something relevant from your prior experiences. In fact, I wasn’t formally trained in finance before the PhD. I learned about banking  on the job when I started work. As a banking supervisor I took on a relatively micro lens – I was part of the team overseeing a group of banks and how they managed their risk. When I worked in financial stability I had to take a more macro perspective, looking at the financial system as a whole. A very different perspective doesn’t mean that my previous experience was irrelevant, I was able to draw on my understanding of how banks operate and manage risk on a day-to-day basis to better understand and assess systemic risk at the sector level and how individual banks may contribute to such risks. With each new stint, there was always something I could bring to the table from my past role, something new to learn, and something I could take with me to my next role. What I’ve taken away from my fifteen years of working is that one cannot assume that once you’ve graduated from school you’ve acquired all the knowledge that will take you through to the end of your career. In fact, school just provides you with the basic foundations; the “real” learning only just begins when you start work.

When I moved to data governance I had to put all my prior knowledge together, because whether you were looking at individual banking operations or the financial system as a whole, you needed to use data. 

To what extent is your background in electrical engineering useful in your everyday job? 

The quantitative rigor, being able to think analytically and being comfortable with numbers, help in many ways. As a banking supervisor , I had to understand complex risk management and valuation models. When I was working on financial stability issues I had to build stress testing simulation models. During my data governance stint, being able to understand how data analytics techniques like machine learning helped in my efforts to champion the cause of using good quality data and leveraging data to generate insights for decision-making. 

How is financial research connected to the world?

What is distinct about financial research is that human behaviour is a very important element in understanding how financial markets work. Understanding and having a sense of what is happening in the financial industry, what people are thinking and worrying about, is helpful in making sure the research you do remains relevant. If you want your research to make a difference, then you would care about how the readers, presumably some of whom include those working in the financial industry, will think about issues or do something differently in their work after having read your research. You can’t do that by just sitting in your office and reading research papers. Building your network, talking to bankers and regulators about what’s keeping them awake at night, will be helpful in giving you a sense of current concerns and challenges.. Collaboration with practitioners in the financial sector is also another way to keep your research applicable.

In your experience, how do you transform research results into actual policies?

In my work, I often have to make policy recommendations and proposals on issues that don’t have textbook answers. This means I have to do some form of research, whether qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative research could be looking at what has been done in tangential fields and drawing parallels from there. Quantitative would be pulling relevant data and performing analysis to draw insights. Oftentimes I have to do both! More often than not, the research question stems from a policy question that needs to be answered. Having said that, the research results form only one part of the solution. In writing up my policy recommendation I cannot just show what the research results mean for the policy decision, I need to take into account other factors such as practical implementation issues and public communications, before making the final recommendation.

Why did you choose EDHEC for your PhD programme?

It was a convergence of factors. I first came to know about the EDHEC PhD programme through MAS HR department, who encouraged me to apply. When I went to read up and find out more about the programme, it did prove an attractive opportunity. What appealed to me was that I could pursue the programme in Singapore and didn’t need to relocate, as there is an EDHEC campus here. The programme was also structured such that I did not have to quit my job or take no-pay leave. It also helped that MAS was very supportive and gave me time off to attend classes, do my assignments, prepare for exams and work on my dissertation. This arrangement worked out nicely because when it came time for me to decide on my dissertation topic, I could draw inspiration from my work at MAS.