Dr Gary Ang

Could you share about your educational background and the early days of your career path?

I completed my undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Toronto. It was a rigorous experience, but it also gave me the mental space to explore my creative side through sketching and 3D modelling at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

When I returned to Singapore, I started at the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts (MICA), handling development work for the creative industries. It was an exciting, highly social environment. I quickly realised I needed a more structured professional routine, which ultimately drove my move to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).

How did you pivot into the financial sector?

While at MICA, I saw an advertisement for a Master's in Knowledge Engineering. It was highly affordable at the time, so I took it. That was my first real introduction to AI. Back then, the field was about encoding human expertise into structured rules to build knowledge-based systems.

While working at MAS, I noticed that technical roles highly valued a Master's in Financial Engineering. It matched the direction my work was heading, so I went back to school. Financial engineering is brutal, it requires wrestling with deep econometrics and stochastic processes. Out of all my academic milestones, including my eventual PhD, that Master's was the hardest. It demanded pure quantitative mastery.

Could you walk us through your time at MAS?

My time at MAS spanned several distinct operations. I started in the Prudential Policy Department working on the Basel capital rules. The job was highly structured, centering on writing the regulations that force financial institutions to keep safe capital buffers. It is one of the few policy roles where you deal directly with complex mathematical equations.

Later, I moved to the quantitative model risk inspection team. We conducted deep-dives into commercial banks to audit their credit risk and market pricing models, tearing apart their validation and development reports.

From there, I headed the Investment Risk Division within the Reserve Management Department.