McKinsey acquires KL-based VLT Labs

By Digital News Asia September 20, 2017

Second digital acquihire for McKinsey within the last 12 months
First in Malaysia as well as Southeast Asia

McKinsey acquires KL-based VLT Labs

MCKINSEY & Company on Sept 19 announced that it has acquired talent and assets from VLT Labs, a Malaysian digital business builder and product development studio based in Kuala Lumpur.

The announcement was made at McKinsey’s inaugural Digital and Analytics Forum in KL, which attracted over 152 C-suite executives from 52 public and private sector organisations in Malaysia.

VLT Labs has over four years of digital product engineering and design experience, specialising in helping corporations to conceptualise, design and build digital products.

VLT Labs’ talent will further boost McKinsey’s digital capabilities in Asia where demand is fast growing and with a view of helping local organisations become regional and global leaders in a digital age.

This is the second digital acquihire for McKinsey within the last 12 months, as part of the firm’s strategy to accelerate the growth of its footprint in Asia.

The firm’s first acquihire was Agiliti, a boutique digital-focused management consulting firm based in the US.

VLT Labs is also McKinsey’s first acquihire in Malaysia as well as in Southeast Asia and is aimed at expanding the firm’s digital capabilities in the region.

Commenting on the occasion, McKinsey Digital Labs APAC senior partner and leader Michael Gryseels said, “Successful digital reinvention starts with transforming the core of the business: the company’s value proposition as enabled by its people, processes, and technology.

“The process can start with building new businesses and launching pilots, but to get the full value from digital over time, companies must ultimately change the way they work. As our clients face rapid disruption of their businesses, we, too, have accelerated our pace of change to support them in their digital transformation journey.

“With Digital McKinsey, we have integrated our digital and design capabilities along with our strategy consulting services.”

Digital McKinsey brings together McKinsey’s expertise in technology, design, strategy, organisation, and analytics to help clients reinvent themselves.

Digital McKinsey has built, at a global and local level, an exemplary track record for business building and, for driving large scale digital transformations.

Celebrating the announcement and strengthened capabilities in Malaysia, McKinsey & Company managing partner, Malaysia Nimal Manuel (pic, above) said, “We are committed to growing a digital studio in Malaysia to serve our clients across the region. We are proud to have found exceptional talent in home-grown VLT Labs to help us achieve our mission.

“We look forward to integrating the team of designers, developers and product managers into McKinsey, taking them to serve our clients globally.”

VLT Labs will join the existing team within McKinsey Digital Labs which includes developers, designers, IT architects, agile coaches, and data engineering experts.

The digital practitioners work side by side with client teams, not only for product delivery but also to help bring in new ways of working like agile methodology.

“We are very excited to be joining McKinsey. When we founded VLT Labs, all we had was a dream, and the passion to ‘build the companies of tomorrow’ by designing digital products and ventures.

“Joining McKinsey is a validation of our beliefs, values and model; as well as to continue our team’s journey on a global stage. This is a very special new chapter for us all.” said VLT Labs CEO and co-founder Andrew Tan.

McKinsey acquires KL-based VLT Labs

McKinsey’s inaugural Digital and Analytics Forum in Malaysia is a key step towards a capability building effort in the country. Titled ‘McKinsey Innovation Forum: digitizing Malaysia’, it brought together esteemed CEOs who shared learnings on how to drive the digital and analytics breakthrough in Malaysia.

The forum also saw leading global experts of McKinsey come together to lead workshops on design thinking, big data and analytics, fintech, Industry 4.0, among other topics.

“Now is the time to deliver on Malaysia’s vision to grow into a global digital studio. Clients are more than ever seeing the need to build new capabilities within the digital and analytics space.

“By the end of this year, 30% of all our consultants in McKinsey’s Kuala Lumpur office will have this expertise. These domains bring new, more focused ways of impacting clients’ top and bottom lines and we are ready for the challenge,” concluded Manuel.

The year 2017 also marks McKinsey’s 20th Anniversary in Malaysia. The firm is an advisor to the country’s largest companies in all major sectors, including telecom, oil and gas, banking, energy, consumer goods, and healthcare.