May 2024 – August 2024
AsiaVerify was my only product management internship. I took it deliberately, between data science (Setel) and AI engineering (Prudential), to understand how products actually get built — not just the technical layer, but the requirements, the stakeholders, the compliance constraints.
It gave me a different lens. One I still use.
AsiaVerify is a B2B fintech company providing Know Your Business (KYB) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) verification services. Their clients are financial institutions, fintechs, and corporates that need to verify the legitimacy of businesses they're working with.
The core product: Ongoing Monitoring APIs that continuously track business entities for risk signals — adverse media, sanctions, regulatory changes, ownership structure shifts.
I authored technical specs and QA plans for the Ongoing Monitoring APIs. This meant translating regulatory compliance requirements — AML directives, MAS guidelines, financial risk frameworks — into precise backend system requirements that engineers could build against.
The gap between "we need to monitor for adverse media" and "here's the API schema, the trigger conditions, the retry logic, and the QA test cases" is where a lot of products fall apart. My job was to close that gap.
I worked across engineering, compliance, and external partners — coordinating third-party API integrations into the monitoring system. In a regulated space, every integration has legal as well as technical requirements. Learning to navigate both in the same conversation was the main skill I took out of this role.
Product management in fintech is fundamentally about constraint management. The regulatory layer is non-negotiable — you can't ship around it. The best product decisions are the ones that find the cleanest path through the constraints, not the ones that ignore them.
Coming into AI engineering at Prudential after this, I was better at asking "what are the constraints?" before writing a single line. That matters when you're building for 5,200 financial advisors in a regulated industry.