Keshmahinder Singh-Asia's Best Business Leaders 2026

Artificial intelligence may be the defining technology of today, but Keshmahinder Singh (aka Kesh) recognised its potential long before it entered mainstream business conversations. At a time when AI was largely confined to research labs, he saw its potential to solve real business problems rather than remain a technical curiosity. That conviction laid the foundation for his journey with Kollect Systems, where he has spent decades building enterprise solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes.

Throughout his entrepreneurial journey, Kesh navigated many changing technologies, evolving customer expectations and new business models, without losing sight of one guiding principle: innovation only matters when it creates tangible value. From intelligent debt collections & recovery to eInvoicing, risk and compliance systems, Kesh’s team at Kollect Systems has continuously adapted to meet emerging enterprise needs.

In this exclusive interaction with TradeFlock, Kesh reflects on his entrepreneurial journey, the early lessons that continue to shape his leadership, the evolution of AI in business and why adaptability remains the defining quality for building enduring technology companies.

What drew you from your family business background into technology, and how did that choice shape your journey?

I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs where joining the textile business was the expected path, but I chose technology instead, driven by its emerging potential. My education and exposure to Management Information Systems from the US shaped my thoughts. That decision was not immediately understood by my parents when I returned from the US in the early 90s, and for a time, I tried to contribute to the family business, attempting to balance both worlds while building my professional depth in software.

Studying in the US in the late 1980s introduced me to Knowledge Based Systems (now known as AI) and it completely changed how I viewed business problem-solving. Years of working with pioneers in AI and analytics at Inference Corp, followed by a close working relationship with Singapore’s National AI Initiative, namely the Japan Singapore AI Center (JSAIC), from 1992 onwards, reinforced that I had chosen the right path.

How did your journey into AI-powered collections and customer engagement begin?

It happened quite organically. We never set out to build a company focused on collections or debt recovery. In the early years, we developed CRM systems, workflow automation and knowledge-based applications for organisations like Shell Malaysia, EDI Malaysia and TNB, the national electricity utility. We often joked that we had “a solution looking for a problem”. We understood AI’s potential but were still searching for the right business problems to apply it to.

That opportunity came when Malaysia’s largest telco asked us to automate and improve its collections and recovery processes. By combining AI, CRM and predictive analytics, we transformed a traditionally rigid function into an intelligent, data-driven operation. The success of that project quickly got us to pivot to banks and other financial institutions, ultimately laying the foundation for Kollect Systems and the AI-powered customer engagement business we have built today.

How are you leveraging AI today, and where is it delivering the greatest impact?

AI is now embedded across our platform ecosystem, driving both customer engagement and operational intelligence. One of the biggest recent advances is Conversational Voice AI. We have moved beyond automating outbound calls to intelligently deciding who to contact, when to engage, and which channel is most likely to deliver the best outcome. The AI Voice Bot system understands intent, adapts to conversation responses and communicates naturally across multiple languages.

In one large banking outbound collections deployment, our Voice AI deployment manages hundreds of thousands of customer interactions every month, delivering nearly 70 per cent workforce reduction. This translates to documented savings of RM 7 million per annum by the Bank. That’s huge!

Strict banking regulations also influenced our Voice AI architecture. Limited use of the cloud for ensuring tight PDPA compliance and data had to be sovereign on premises. Hence, rather than asking the customer to change their processes, we engineered the platform with a “transient data strategy”, so all voice files, speech-to-text transcriptions and interaction records from the cloud AI Voice engine are brought back to the bank’s own data center, live.

Moving forward, we’re seeing a greater push for better governance, risk and compliance (GRC) management within the financial services sector. Statutory mandates from the central bank are driving a lot of this change. However, most still manage it with fragmented spreadsheets, manual workflows and siloed systems. My team and I are pursuing this AI driven initiative to incorporate intelligence into GRC to better improve third party risk management (TPRM), contracts and vendors.

Beyond customer engagement, we apply machine learning AI across collections & debt recovery, eInvoicing, data pipeline ETL management, risk & compliance management, while Generative AI is enabling dynamic financial reporting based on live prompts, multilingual voice conversations and intelligent document processing to streamline enterprise workflows.

What early lessons from building your company still guide you today?

The most important lessons I learned was the focus on execution and the power of differentiation. Customers rarely care about the technology behind a solution. They want solutions that solve business problems, reduce costs and deliver measurable value.

My early lessons on differentiation came from AMEX, the customer of my AI technology partner (Inference Corp) in the early 1990s. The person who wrote the book “If Only Elephants Could Dance”, the CEO of AMEX then, pushed for differentiation of the AMEX cards, resulting in a charge card approach, with no credit or spending limit to dynamically evaluate the pattern of spending and payment capabilities, in real time. This association allowed me to get deep insights into how AI and expert systems were used by AMEX to differentiate itself in the market.

As for execution, it was my interactions with the veteran VC Vinodh Khosla in Silicon Valley in early 2000s that got me to understand what successful investors look for when investing in companies. His one magic word to me repeatedly was execution. The ability to take an idea to market and get customers to pay for it. It’s execution.

These insights shaped my thinking significantly. Instead of competing on features, we focused on outcomes. In markets like Malaysia and Singapore, where enterprise CRM platforms were often expensive, we bundled software with implementation, training and support into a single offering. It created simplicity and trust. Although delivery models have evolved to SaaS and usage-based pricing, the principle remains unchanged: adapt to customer needs, not the other way around.

How do you see your role evolving in the years ahead?

I see my role evolving across several dimensions. As an entrepreneur, the focus remains on footprint expansion across Asia-Pacific and the Middle East through partnerships, product mix expansion and selective strategic initiatives. Alongside this, mentoring the next generation of young founders, sharing lessons from both successes and failures to help them avoid common pitfalls and build stronger ventures.

Beyond business, I hope to contribute more to the community via the concept of “sewa”, which is unconditional volunteer services.