IWD 2025: Building equitable workplaces from the ground up

“Workplace equality cannot be drive solely by females. It requires engaging men to be active supporters, from mentoring female colleagues to advocating for high potential women in succession planning, promotions and high-visibility projects.” – Jocelyne Loh, Chief People Officer for Trust Bank

As organisations worldwide prepare to celebrate International Women’s Day 2025, the call to “Accelerate Action” in workplace equity has never been more urgent. In the fast-evolving fintech landscape, Trust Bank has been making strides towards fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace, setting an example for the industry.

Jocelyne Loh, Chief People Officer at Trust Bank, shares how the digital bank has built a culture that champions diversity from day one—breaking barriers, hiring for inclusivity, and ensuring women have equal opportunities to lead and thrive. In this interview with HRM Asia, she discusses the bold steps Trust Bank has taken to close the gender gap and what more needs to be done to drive real change in corporate leadership.

You were one of the pioneering employees at Trust Bank. What was your vision for the company’s culture from the very beginning, and how did you translate that vision into reality, especially as Singapore’s first digital bank?

Jocelyne Loh: We were a new bank when I joined Trust Bank – in fact, I was employee #29 – and it was important for us to gain buy-in and ownership from each and every one of our employees as we grew. This was so we could create a meaningful set of core values and company vision collaboratively as a team instead of merely implementing what the management felt was of value.

Trust Bank’s vision has been to set new global benchmarks for customer experience and innovation and to build a seamless, efficient, transparent and easy-to-use app from scratch for everyone in Singapore to easily adopt digital banking services. We wanted to create a culture that was just as bold and differentiated where every employee plays a part in shaping efforts that the team collectively values.

We asked what our employees said was important to them and developed a culture that is open and collaborative, breaking down typical barriers of corporate communication. We were delighted to that this approach was met with strong support from our management.

Building a culture from scratch is a huge undertaking. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in establishing Trust Bank’s inclusive and equitable workplace, and how did you overcome them?

Loh: As a new entity, we were relatively unknown. This gave us a challenge to find talent that was willing to take a chance on us, especially females in a male dominated fintech industry.

We knew we had to do things differently. So, we set out to seek talent from diverse backgrounds and experiences so that we could genius together as one dynamic team. As a result, our employees and leadership team come from a range of industries such as banking, fast moving consumer goods, marketing and technology.

As we grew in size, we also knew that it was important for us to ensure that employees were a right fit for our new culture. We introduced a structured culture interview round as part of our hiring process to carefully select candidates who demonstrated a commitment to our success beyond their work scope.

We also committed to ensure gender hiring parity targets and worked closely with business leaders. This has ensured our gender balance is above what is typically seen in technology-led firms – with over 45% of our headcount being female.

As an inclusive employer, we wanted to ensure that all candidates are considered fairly, regardless of ethnicity, background or physical ability. We have since hired three persons with disabilities for a range of roles, making enhancements to our office environment to ensure that it is conducive for their comfort and mobility.

The theme for IWD 2025 is “Accelerate Action”. What does this mean to you in the context of workplace equity, and what are your hopes and aspirations for the future of women in the workplace?

Loh: Organisations need to think hard about how they can accelerate action to empower women to grow and succeed in the careers they choose, to the fullest of their potential. This includes enabling women to have an equal voice in the workplace, helping them feel confident enough to speak up and offer differing views without fear of repercussions.

Women have increased responsibilities as individuals. Many juggle work with multiple personal commitments such as being mothers. There is a need to recognise this and support them, so they are empowered to excel in their careers to take on larger leadership roles within their organisations.

Lastly, workplace equality cannot be drive solely by females. It requires engaging men to be active supporters, from mentoring female colleagues to advocating for high potential women in succession planning, promotions and high-visibility projects.

Looking at the progress made so far, what bold steps still need to be taken to close the gender gap in corporate leadership?

Loh: Equal representation of women is essential for closing the gender gap and building an inclusive workplace. One approach is linking leadership compensation and performance evaluations to gender equity goals, ensuring that commitment to diversity starts at the top and drives meaningful change throughout the organisation. This can be done through increasing female representation in leadership and by closing pay gaps to ensure that progress moves from aspirations to accountability.

Organisations need to shift to hiring for “culture add” to break the cycle of uniformity and mediocrity in leadership. This requires redesigning hiring and promotion processes to prioritise diverse perspectives, mandating gender-balanced candidate slates for executive roles and implementing structured, bias-free evaluations.

Through embedding these sweeping changes into corporate strategy, organisations can successfully accelerate meaningful progress towards gender parity in leadership.