Tan Suee Chieh

Member of Corporate Associates (1996 – 2001, 2007 – 2017)

Mr Tan Suee Chieh’s involvement with IPS started in the early 1990s when he was with Prudential. He left and rejoined the Corporate Associates Programme when he was CEO of NTUC Income (2007–2013). An early but distinct memory for him was the Young Singaporeans Conference that Dr Vivian Balakrishnan participated in, as he was impressed by the passion and conviction of the participants. He had also attended numerous IPS events in recent years. Milestones he recounted included a conference on population presented by IPS Senior Research Fellow Christopher Gee; lectures by the 1st S R Nathan Fellow Ho Kwon Ping; conversations with British economist John Kay and Lebanese-American author Nassim Nicholas Taleb; and the IPS-MHA Forum on Religion, Extremism and Identity Politics.

While he believed that the relationship between IPS and the business community was healthy, he hoped that business people would speak up more at events, and be more interested in social and political concerns. He said that IPS would always be seen as intertwined with the government, given who IPS’ Patron and Director were, but what was important was that IPS created an environment where people could have intellectual debates on policy.

Looking to the future, he spoke about competition between China and United States, climate change, income security, digitalisation, ageing and funding elder care, as potential areas of research, concluding that there was no shortage of issues for IPS to study.


This interview was conducted on 9 Jan 2020. Click here to listen to the full interview.