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CW Innovation Awards: M1 aims to become digital-native telco
The digital-first telco is running all its back-end systems on the cloud, enabling it to speed up decision-making and enhance customer service
M1’s ambitious journey toward becoming “fully digital-native” may have taken several years, but it has proven to be a necessary path for the Singapore telco to remain agile and able to innovate in an evolving landscape.
Its digital transformation took 4.5 years from December 2020, when it kicked off its migration to a unified hyper-cloud platform and overhaul its processes. Founded in 1995, M1 has an annual IT budget of about S$110m.
Its goal was to leave behind its legacy infrastructure and become a digital-first company, armed with the foundation to tap artificial intelligence (AI) and ride the next wave of digital transformation.
M1 had set out a roadmap to achieve several key objectives, including moving all back-end systems to the cloud and creating a fully cloud-native stack, coupled with the use of reusable application programming interfaces (APIs) to simplify integrations and drive faster time-to-market.
It also wanted to build a data fabric that connects backend systems and supports a self-service platform, establish an environment that facilitates hyper-personalised digital customer interactions and digitise and automate online ordering to improve customer experience.
The overarching goal was to bring in new digital capabilities that can drive operational efficiencies and add value to every interaction. This also means enabling business teams across the organisation to make decisions more quickly, increasing their relevance to customers.
M1 worked with its parent company Keppel and systems integrator Infosys to consolidate its legacy systems while maximising the value of existing assets. Born Group was brought in to help M1 with its web channel revamp.
In addition, offshore internal resources in neighbouring Malaysia were leveraged for areas where heavy customisation was needed, such as microservices, data and mobile apps.
M1 also worked with technology partners to integrate the backend systems, so it can have 360-degree view of its customers and put in place best practices to deliver a richer consumer journey. Salesforce Service Cloud now operates as the backbone of M1’s contact centre, providing consistent customer experience across its sales channels, while Tableau is used to push data insights that power smarter decision-making.
Armed with these tools, M1’s marketing team, for instance, can identify devices and service plans that are popular and run the relevant promotions, without support from the IT team.
Streamlined tech stack
M1 has moved 90% of its operational and business support systems to the cloud and streamlined its tech stack from almost 300 applications to 30 cloud-native applications. It now runs a unified data lake, which pooled information from 200 databases that were once scattered across different areas in its previous IT stack.
M1’s cloud-based platform has further given the telco the agility to offer customers a choice of six million possible permutations from its Bespoke Flexi services plans. Users can also design their own plan within seconds via the telco’s self-service platform, bypassing the need to wait two weeks for M1 to configure and activate new plans.
Such enhancements in customer experience drove a 30% gain in M1’s net promoter score, compared to 2019, and a 75% improvement across its sales journey. Through the automation of its “lead-to-cash” process, M1 has also accelerated its time-to-market by two-folds, fuelling a 15% year-on-year increase in its enterprise revenue. This business segment grew 82% between 2021 and 2024.
Retiring its legacy technology also added S$10m in cost savings for M1, with its “cost-to-serve” expected to generate 20% in annual savings per customer from 2025. Reusing API integrations has also enabled M1 to complete 13% more projects a year and save up to 15 man-days per project. This is estimated to yield S$135,000 in savings.
The telco is now working with technology partners to run proof-of-concepts to test and develop AI applications. It also is developing a roadmap to integrate AI into its applications and boost internal capabilities.
M1 has further prioritised the training and upskilling of employees with AI skillsets, so they have the knowledge to harness generative AI effectively. The Singapore telco recognises the need for all its 1,400 employees, including 160 in IT, to keep up with changing technologies. It has worked to change not only the way its operations are structured, but also the way employees work.
For example, sprints were introduced so several product teams are working on multiple release cycles simultaneously, with scrum masters assigned to lead each sprint. M1 believes this is necessary to retain its agility and differentiate the telco from its competitors.
Read more about CW Innovation Awards 2025
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