Today we highlight Keith Ong, the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of RealVantage, a growing real estate investment platform bringing investors access to global investment opportunities across different sectors. As part of this role, Keith directs all facets of the investment and asset management chain, business development and capital-raising activities.
He is an industry veteran with over 20 years of experience in investment banking and asset management, Keith has transacted in excess of USD 3 billion across geographies, sectors and the entire real estate investment spectrum.
We look at the technology tools that he uses in his day-to-day as part of managing a growing business. Keith is also an active spokesperson and contributing author and speaks on a variety of topical issues including wealth creation, real estate, private equity, investing and leadership.
Keith Tan, Founder and CEO of Crown Digital shares the tech tools he uses to run his team
His company, Singapore-founded and -domiciled RealVantage, is one of the region’s fastest-growing real estate investment platforms. Co-founded respectively by former C-suite investment management and technology executives Keith Ong and Mao Ching Foo respectively, RealVantage is also the first digital fractional private equity real estate platform to receive the Capital Markets Services (“CMS”) licence (CMS licence number 101156) from the Monetary Authority of Singapore in November 2021.
ChatGPT automates research (Free)
ChatGPT, as a free app, is truly great in helping myself and my team draft and write up content – particularly in the arena of tech development for RealVantage.
ChatGPT helps us save time in technical research for analytics and engineering. For example, ChatGPT can provide blocks of computer programming codes that can be used in solving our technical problems. This comes in very handy and saves us valuable time across productivity and efficacy in terms of deployment of our work hours.
Additionally, ChatGPT helps us summarise reports and meeting notes; give us talking points and prompts us ideas when we brainstorm strategy across projects and day-to-day tasks. ChatGPT also assists us in translating texts and documents – which saves us from hiring human translators!
Like so many of us tech geeks and engineers, ChatGPT was first launched for public access and use in late 2022. As a chatbot, ChatGPT is based on a very interesting model of large language and machine learning – which personally, I find very interesting, and will certainly revolutionise the way we live and work. In other words, co-founders and C-suite leaders like myself can treat ChatGPT as a human-like intelligence being, but with the capability of speedy responses in real-time.
Streamline internal communication with Slack (Paid)
Like WhatsApp, as we’ve just expounded upon in the above paragraphs, and whilst both instant messaging tools provide for end-to-end encryption, Slack has instilled additional security patches for the purposes of retaining absolute confidentiality in the arena of internal organisational communications.
Slack is a by-invite-only application to which only employees are allowed access to a specified workspace – which was initially set up by me, Foo Mao Ching, co-founder and chief operating officer of RealVantage.
Aside from real-time chatter, Slack allows me and my team to share documents, set up calendars and polls, to name a few. Instead of traditional inter-departmental meetings, various team members or division heads can now chat with each other based on department, project or assignment cluster, and so forth.
Slack also allows us to ‘Huddle’ and that is, we can phone or conduct video-call sessions if need be. Slack has a great historical and archives component – and affords team members to look up documents and conversations by timeline or by Slack’s very own domestic search engine.
So really, Slack is an all-in-one desktop and mobile communications platform to help companies better manage and function in real-time, and in a highly structured ecosystem.
Figma simplifies design and prototyping (Paid)
RealVantage utilises this paid cloud-based design and prototyping tool as Figma is an excellent collaborative platform for designers and developers to create, share and improve on designs, where needed and for us at RealVantage – Figma plays a pivotal role in our website creation. Figma, in short, is a user interface and user experience design desktop and mobile app.
Another reason why we like Figma is because it has a rich repository of design libraries; and it is, by far, the easiest tool to use as it does not lag – like other legacy design applications.
As a result, Figma helps companies come up with quick design prototypes for their range of products. Depending on design complexities, Figma can produce a first draft anywhere between a few minutes and no more than a couple of hours. Design prototypes include functionality of animations as well as screenflows; so as to allow teams from other departments to easily visualise and see the intended product aspects as envisioned. In other words, Figma cuts down on design time and volume of iterations.
Figma allows for cross-functional collaborations. For instance, staff from other departments can leave comments in order for the project dependency and owner to perfect the design.
Metabase for business intelligence support (Free)
Our selection of Metabase, free-of-charge, is perfect for a data-driven firm such as RealVantage – be it for tech or non-technology-trained staff.
We got to know about Metabase – an open-source business intelligence tool – from our business and tech contemporaries. This is demonstrative of how popular Metabase is – across small and large enterprises.
We love the intuitive interface of Metabase, which allows for excellent visualisation of the entire application in itself.
Our goal of utilising Metabase is to cull good insights and hindsight into how the business is faring; and more so, what we must look into, and improve accordingly.
Key features that make Metabase a worthy component of RealVantage’s business operations include data exploration such as discovery of a client’s demographics and financial standing – which then allows us to customise products to best suit their needs.
Next would be crawling for customer insights which results in how RealVantage can better target would-be clients. At RealVantage, we believe in quality over quantity when it comes to onboarding ultra- and high-net-worth investors.
Last but not least, Metabase affords RealVantage the ability to track business performance and assets under management. Metabase’s range of capabilities includes the power of visualisation that gives me and my team the full vista of how RealVantage is faring, in a most timely and efficacious manner.
Data analytics with Google Analytics (Free)
Google Analytics ensures that we, at RealVantage, make smart data-driven decisions. The tool allows my team and I to best understand customer behaviour and track performance including website traffic, acquisition sources, and engagement metrics.
In collecting data from our website – via Google Analytics – we are able to garner insights across various aspects of user behaviour. From Google Analytics’ insights and reports, we can learn which website pages the user engages with the most; how much time they spend on each of the pages, as well as the behavioural flow that leads them to convert as a user of the platform, through sign-ups, to becoming our client.
With these insights, courtesy of Google Analytics, my team and I can improve on website pages that are not operating at their optimum. As a result, we are then able to solve these issues by enhancing across user interface/user experience, content, or even optimising keywords to improve on search engine optimisation.
Should we run advertisements, data culled from Google Ads are readily available for us to dissect and discern which sets and keywords are performing up to standard, or not.