MariBank CEO Natalia Goh on being tough on standards, not people

Ask Natalia Goh how her team would describe her management style, and the answer comes quickly: warm and empowering, approachable.

But Natalia clarifies that being kind shouldn’t be confused with being lenient. More often than not, the two are easy to mix up, and like many of us, she’s still learning to tell them apart. 

“We don’t want to be tough on our people, so we say we want to be tough on standards instead,” she says. This belief shapes how she runs a bank that, by her own account, is still young enough to build its habits from scratch.

She became CEO of MariBank in July 2024, after more than 14 years at Standard Chartered and a two-year stint as COO at Trust Bank. On paper, that reads like a natural progression.

“As a CEO, you really see the whole picture,” she says. “You’re accountable for it, and that, for me, is very exciting.”

MariBank, one of Singapore’s newer digital-only banks and a wholly owned subsidiary of Sea Group, was built around a simple idea. No minimum balances. Daily interest crediting. A personal loan with a deliberately low $100 ticket size, so first-time borrowers could try it without commitment. An investment account that opens with a single dollar.

“We were free from the constraints of legacy systems, free from existing product economics,” she says. “So our starting point could be: how do we solve for the customer?”

That same instinct, building without inherited baggage, shaped how she had to learn to lead. 

Early on, she struggled to let go of micro-managing and doing things herself, habits left over from years of being the one who executed rather than the one who decided. “It was when I realised I couldn’t be involved to the same degree in every single thing,” she says.

Letting go, she says, was never the hard part. Knowing exactly where the line sits, between empowering someone and adjusting her expectations of them, is what she is still working out, she candidly admits.

She’s also brutally honest about the cost of leadership - time. “You’re directing different things at any one point. If something comes up at work, because you’re accountable for it, sometimes that takes priority,” says the mum of two. 

What’s a leadership habit you had to unlearn?

I had to understand that my role as a senior leader is to provide strategic oversight, give guidance and support, and unblock things, not jump in and do everything myself. It was about finding that balance between letting go as I progressed as a leader, and growing into the scope of the role.

What would you tell a woman who’s often the only one in the room?

Just be confident. Demonstrate the value that you bring. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. 

What’s a leadership tension you’re still working through?

There’s a lesson I’ve learned, and it’s around being tough on standards, but not on people. Sometimes I have a bias where I conflate the two. We say we don’t want to be tough on our people, we want to be tough on the standards, but the converse is also true for me: we’re kind to our people, but that shouldn’t be confused with not being tough on them on standards. It’s easy to conflate the two, and when that happens, performance is compromised, because you think you’re being kind to people, when really you’ve just let the standard slip.