The head of sustainable finance for Asia Pacific at UBS will reportedly leave the Swiss bank to join Temasek Trust next year.
Desmond Kuek will join Temasek Trust – the philanthropic arm of state investment company Temasek – as its chief executive, according to a report by «Strait Times», effective January next year.
He is currently serving notice at UBS which he joined in February 2019 as head of sustainable finance for APAC. At the Swiss bank, he is also the global head of its sustainable finance group and chair of the UBS Optimus Foundation.
In response to his departure, UBS APAC president Edmund Koh said he hoped for the Swiss bank to work together with Kuek and Temasek Trust on future opportunities to advance sustainability-related goals.
Non-Financial Career
Prior to joining UBS, Kuek was the chief executive of Singapore public transport operator SMRT where he notably oversaw a number of failures including a power outage in 2015, the death of two maintenance staff from a train crash in 2016 and the flooding of train tunnels in 2017.
Previously, Kuek also served as permanent secretary for the environment and water resources and as chief of defense force at the Singapore Armed Forces. He also has a leadership role at consultancy Genium & Co which he set up with two former military colleagues to advise in areas including organizational transformation, strategy execution and crisis leadership.
