When it comes to asking for loans, Jason Teo has been on both sides of the fence. He started his career in branch banking where he met people from all walks of life and dealt with their financial needs. Some of their requests were unusual – demanding, even – and Teo honed his soft skills whilst working out whether he could give those customers what they wanted. These days, the roles have been reversed and it is Teo who is making the requests and using those same people skills to find the right bankers and backers who will make his company’s real estate ventures a success.
Teo, like many corporate treasurers didn’t set out on a career in corporate treasury. In his earlier days, he was a sales professional for Fuji Xerox products before emerging from university as a finance and marketing graduate and embarked on a career in retail banking, where he got a real feel for how everyday banking operates. His first job was at an OCBC Bank branch in Singapore, where he focused on the personal mass market as well as small-medium businesses. From there he moved to Standard Chartered Bank and focused on a different segment, this time high net worth individuals or accredited investors. In this role he was also exposed to corporate clients and was involved in loan financing, trade finance and investment advisory.
After this role, he found himself at a fork in the road of his career journey. At this juncture, Teo explains, “There are two paths that one can go down. Either you can continue with the private wealth side and manage even higher net worth clients. Or you can go down the management route and take on a bank branch management role.”
Teo opted for the latter and pursued his career in branch management and became a branch manager for Maybank Banking Berhad (also in Singapore). In addition to managing and having oversight of about 20 people, he had numerous other responsibilities. These included sourcing new customers through community events and roadshows, keeping existing customers happy, and also reporting positive financial results to his managers. After a while Teo began to feel that the work cycle was like a merry-go-round with targets set, a month-end review, then it was back to zero starting again striving to reach the new month’s goals. Teo yearned for a change, he explains. “That’s when I thought I should switch from selling to buying and continue to have a nexus with banks.”
The switch from selling financial products to buying them was a big change, but one that he adjusted to with ease. With his academic background in finance, and his fondness for studying and unconditional desire to learn new things, he was able to pick up what he needed to know to succeed in his new role. He moved from branch banking into management consultancy, which led him to corporate finance and treasury. “That marks the beginning of my treasury realm,” he says. There are a number of commonalities between the two worlds, and Teo explains what lessons he learned from first working in the world of branch banking: “Having a background in banking gave me a helpful perspective of the operations part of the business, as well as the sell side – I know the background of how things work at an operational level. Now I’m on the buy side I’m able to see things more clearly. If a corporate banker makes a pitch and brings someone to the meeting from transactional banking, treasury or the investment team, I have the experience to discern and distil information, whether what they are saying is correct or not.”
Teo had an instinct for knowing whether customers or bankers were trying to pull the wool over his eyes, and he wanted to go deeper into the corporate treasury and enterprise risk world. Teo further progressed his career by moving into a group treasury role at The Ascott Limited (a CapitaLand Group company). “This was where I landed my first pure treasury role,” he says. His responsibilities covered the entire spectrum of treasury management including managing a loan book in excess of S$3bn, managing the group’s cash flow in over 30 countries, notional/physical cash pooling, enterprise risk management and acts as primary dealer for FX/IR transactions. CapitaLand is one of Asia’s largest diversified real estate groups and is headquartered in Singapore, and working for such a company was a good fit as Teo had already completed a diploma in real estate management from Singapore’s Ngee Ann Polytechnic many years prior. After five years, Teo was keen to pursue opportunities that would expose him to the debt-raising side of corporate treasury life. He then landed a job at CFLD International (a public listed Chinese real estate developer), which is a leading global end-to-end master planner, creator and operator of full-scale new industry cities.
CFLD International has been active in the emerging markets of Asia, and it was this aspect that attracted Teo to the company. Teo was able to work in Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar and the Philippines, becoming a frequent flyer around the region. He soon learned the differences between the markets and the nuances in the banking landscape and regulations. “It was really rewarding,” says Teo of this time. He adds that having this experience was beneficial to his career as this region is becoming increasingly prominent. “AI is the next growth engine of the world to watch, with A being ASEAN [the Association of Southeast Asian Nations] and I being India; the countries’ rapid growth is propelled by many forces including a huge young population with rising income, global shift in supply chain diversity, untapped consumer market and emerging market opportunities – it is a key market not to be missed,” he says.
That experience stood him in good stead for his current position at LOGOS, which is a major logistics specialist that manages many aspects of real estate, including the financing and investment, the sourcing of the land, and also finding the tenants for large-scale real estate ventures, such as warehouses. Teo joined the company to set up the Southeast Asia (“SEA”) treasury in 2019. “When I came onboard, I was the corporate treasurer,” says Teo. Since then, he has been busy building the function and expanding the team whilst also streamlining a number of processes.
AI is the next growth engine of the world to watch, with A being ASEAN [the Association of Southeast Asian Nations] and I being India.
The role has many challenges, and the aspect that most excites Teo is securing non-recourse development financing for the company – particularly with its unique needs. He explains that he needs to secure non-recourse loans (where the lender cannot seek direct claims from sponsor/investor and enforce more than the pledged collateral if the loan defaults), which is what the company needs for its greenfield projects. This kind of lending is tipped in the favour of the borrower, especially if the loan goes south. “Banks usually prefer income-generating stabilised projects – it has lower risk for them,” explains Teo. Also, some industrial assets land leases are short (<15 years), which makes securing a loan against them even more challenging. Now Teo finds himself on the other side of the fence, as the customer making demanding requests to the bank – the opposite scenario he was in as branch manager when he was in a position to approve or decline the loan requests that came through his door.
“I’m excited to be doing this job – there are constant challenges,” says Teo. In the early days, securing the funding was some sort of a numbers game, with Teo having to try all the banks in the region. Teo works in various markets in the region – including Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia – and needs to secure financing large-scale real estate ventures in all of them. For this reason he has to keep his options open because the needs and capabilities of the banks are different in each of the countries. “We have more than 50 banking relationships in the region – including the foreign and local banks – that we had to approach. Once we went through the list we found out each bank’s capabilities and challenges, which made it easier as we now have the proprietary list for our new financing. Then we could approach the right banks without going through that painful exercise again,” he says. Teo has built up a network with respective relationship managers at the banks and he knows what their lending policies are so it is much easier to navigate securing the right financing with the right bank in the most cost effective way.
This has been enough to keep him busy in his day job, but when he’s not working it seems Teo likes to study for leisure. His LinkedIn profile is filled with certifications and qualifications that he has completed. This includes a certification on Climate Change: Financial Risks and Opportunities that he received online (with a perfect grade of 100%) from Imperial College London. Such a course aligns well with his professional work because LOGOS has been proactive in pursuing its environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda.
The company has been involved in a number of green projects. In September 2023, for example, LOGOS and Tokyo Electric Power Company announced a joint venture to install solar power generation facilities on the rooftops of LOGOS’ properties, such as logistics warehouses and data centres.
Another project that puts sustainability at the forefront is currently underway in Malaysia: construction is currently happening for a 177-acre world-class facility at E-Metro Logistics Park in Bandar Bukit Raja, which has the ambition of revolutionising industrial and logistics capabilities in the region. In Singapore, the ground-breaking has already occurred on DSV Pearl, a sustainable warehouse facility, which is owned by Pan Asia Core+ Venture, a private fund that ESR Group and LOGOS launched to target sustainable Asia Pacific prime logistics opportunities.
Although Teo has spent much time with relationship managers at traditional corporate lenders, LOGOS has also developed a partnership with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and has received a green loan from the organisation. In December 2020, IFC and LOGOS announced that they had partnered to develop a green logistics hub, which was expected to drive economic activity in Indonesia and address a critical infrastructure gap in the country.
Teo has been able to put these projects in the context of what he has learned from his online courses. Meanwhile, there are numerous other lessons he has learned that he can also apply to his day job, and what corporate treasury may look like in the future. To give a taster of the other courses he has taken, there are 11 licenses and certifications, including ‘Finance Strategies for Business Leaders’ and ‘Smart Thinking: Overcoming Complexity’. He has also done some banking and finance qualifications. And if you count all the university courses he has completed, there are another nine. These range from his formal degrees at Upper Iowa University in Marketing and Finance, a Master’s in Finance at the City University of New York (Baruch College), as well as the various online qualifications. These include Risk Management for Projects; Financial Analysis and Decision Making; FinTech, Finance and Technology; Entrepreneurship; Data Science Basic R, Computer Science and Programming.
He is always learning and seeking to stay on top of the latest trends. With R, for example, the open-source programming language that is typically used for statistics and data science, Teo explains that he learned it to get an understanding of what the next wave of thinking with artificial intelligence (AI) technology is likely to be. He completed this online certification with Harvard University back in 2018 although he hasn’t been able to use it in his role yet. He explains that he took the course because he wanted to learn how data science and data analytics can apply to finance as a whole.
For now, the company is undergoing a transformation of its processes and platforms to prepare itself for the future. Teo’s team is hoping to reduce manual inputs and migrate to an in-house system while preparing to implement a group treasury management system, which will be part of the group’s plans to rationalise. Since it was acquired by ARA and subsequently by ESR Group, there are plans to centralise various treasury functions and bring them onto a single platform for visibility and control. He is looking forward to having cash visibility and forecasting on a single platform, and will be a landmark project in the near future. This is similar to previous roles that he has taken where he has spent a lot of the initial time closing out unused and unnecessary bank accounts, reducing operational risk, managing the Kyriba/ERP system and streamlining how they operate.
Teo has a lot to keep track of; LOGOS currently has around 32 ventures, all of which have different sets of investors and shareholders. At the moment it is difficult to integrate and rationalise a single view of all the projects – a problem that is not unique and something that other large fund managers also experience. There are numerous banking relationships to maintain due to different capabilities of each bank when it comes to debt financing, although streamlining treasury will mean there will be fewer transaction banks to deal with, rather than working in siloes with multiple contact points. Maintaining such relationships comes naturally to him because of the people skills he developed earlier in his career, although these days the shoe is on the other foot, and he is the one asking for the money on behalf of each borrower of the asset.
