Talent & Tech Asia Summit 2024
Up the ranks: Stephanie Nash joins Circles.Life as Chief People Officer to support global expansion

Up the ranks: Stephanie Nash joins Circles.Life as Chief People Officer to support global expansion

This comes as the digital telco is embarking on a tech hiring drive in Singapore to grow in new markets and business verticals.

[This story has been updated with Stephanie Nash's exclusive insights into her new role.]

Digital telco Circles.Life has appointed Fortune 500 tech veteran Stephanie Nash (pictured above) to the newly-created role of Chief People Officer (CPO) to support its just-announced hiring drive, global growth ambitions, and move to new business verticals. 

In this role, Nash is looking to Circles.Life’s global talent and culture strategy in line with supporting the company to achieve its growth targets. She will oversee people and culture operations and initiatives in multiple countries around the globe, including Singapore, Taiwan, Australia, Indonesia, Philippines, and South Asia, among others.

Circles.Life Co-founder Adeel Najam, commented: "Her combination of foresight, global perspective and local roots is exactly what we need to realise our vision to crack the formula for scaling our high-performing culture in Asia and beyond.”­­

Nash added: "It’s remarkable how Circles.Life has built not just world-class tech, but also a robust core of homegrown tech talent. I’m eager to unlock the full potential of our team, and enable the exceptional performance needed to build cutting-edge digital services for the 5G era and beyond.”

Nash brings over two decades of global HR experience in Fortune 500 companies such as Microsoft, BHP, and Allergan. She also oversaw the early stages of RedMart’s growth through to its acquisition by Lazada-Alibaba, and has been credited for her human capital contributions at ChapmanCG and Thrive HR Exchange, where she is a Co-Creator and Co-Founder, and will continue supporting in an advisory capacity.

To start with, for the coming year, Nash will "ensure that Circles.Life is a company that people want to join, stay with, and recommend to their friends as a great place to learn and grow," she shared with HRO exclusively. As such, she looks forward to working with leaders and her team to inspire the organisation towards exceptional performance and enabling people to realise their potential.

On a personal note, Nash's endeavour is "to start each day with a sense of purpose and to end each day with a sense of accomplishment at work and with my family".

Other recent additions to the telco's management team include Dhanush Hetti, ex-Chief Technology Officer at Venmo / PayPal, and Mak Chee Kiong, ex-Chief Financial Officer at Singtel Group Digital Life.


Nash's appointment comes in parallel to Circles.Life's announcement on expansion plans - both geographically and in new business lines.  

As the company accelerates plans to take its proprietary Circles X Digital Telco Operating System (OS) to global markets, it is doubling down on efforts to expand its Singapore core of tech and innovation talent. 

The company is looking to boost headcount by 25% over the next 12 months, aiming to recruit key hires for tech and tech-lite roles such as software engineers, product managers, and digital marketers across new and existing business lines.

Staff numbers in its Singapore home base have grown two-fold since 2019, and the global team now comprises over 450 staff across Singapore, Taiwan, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, and South Asia.  

The planned hiring drive is expected to benefit from Circles.Life's partnership with a telco in Japan, giving rise to a new digital telco brand running on the Circles X OS. Going forward, Circles.Life is aiming to establish a 100% cloud-based, full-stack vertical Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) telco business and replicate its digital telco model in more markets.

On this, Najam added: "He continued, “We see incredible potential to build Circles.Life into the next made-in-Singapore global tech brand, and want to quickly scale up our capabilities to bring our world-class digital telco tech and innovation to many other markets.”

Photo / Provided (featuring Stephanie Nash, CPO, Circles.Life)

Follow us on Telegram and on Instagram @humanresourcesonline for all the latest HR and manpower news from around the region!

Follow us on Telegram and on Instagram @humanresourcesonline for all the latest HR and manpower news from around the region!

Free newsletter

Get the daily lowdown on Asia's top Human Resources stories.

We break down the big and messy topics of the day so you're updated on the most important developments in Asia's Human Resources development – for free.

subscribe now open in new window