Richard has more than 12 years experience in Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) and contactless smartcard payment systems. He started his engineering career with the Land Transport Authority of Singapore (LTA) upon graduating from the Nayang Technological University of Singapore (NTU). Having cut his teeth in several in-house projects for the LTA, including the migration of the Central Computer of the AFC from VAX system to client-server architecture; to having led the development of the Bukit Panjang Light Rail backend clearing system for the magnetic farecard; he was then promoted to be the lead engineer in charge of the design, development and implementation for the bus transport system, which is part of the current contactless smart card system now known as EZ-Link in Singapore. He was also the campaign manager of the SuperRider trial programme prior to the rollout of the EZ-Link system in Singapore back in 2002.
Following the successful launch of the EZ-Link system, Richard was seconded to EZ-Link Pte Ltd (a wholly owned subsidiary of the Land Transport
Authority) and later decided to join the organization full-time as Vice President, Business & Technology with the primary responsibility of managing the IT & Operations Division within the organisation. The 4 years that Richard has been in EZ-Link, he has enhanced services such as the on-line application of the auto credit/debit card top-up to reduce the cycle of application from 3 weeks to 5 days, implemented several new top-up channels via internet, mobile banking, and most recently self-service kiosks as well as provided smooth IT operations for the financial apportionment and settlement system. He was also the person behind EZ-Link's NFC Mobile phone trial with StarHub which comprised of payments with the ez-link purse - embedded in the phone, in both the transit and retail sectors to the downloading of information and advertisements from SmartPosters to assess the receptiveness of the new technology by Singaporeans.