The Founder

Rufina Lee began her career in management consulting at Accenture, working on the CIMB–Southern Bank–Bumiputra-Commerce Bank merger integration, one of the largest banking mergers in Southeast Asia at the time. The work focused on operating model integration, process alignment, and project management across a complex multi-entity transition.

This was an early exposure to how systems fail quietly during transition, how misalignment compounds across teams, and how decisions made on paper behave differently when executed under real delivery constraints.

She later spent close to a decade in Financial Markets at Standard Chartered Bank, advising corporate clients on foreign exchange and interest rate risk across Singapore, Vietnam, and Malaysia. During this period, Rufina established Ho Chi Minh City's first dealing room for the bank, operating as the sole on-the-ground lead during setup and early operations.

These environments demanded precision, discipline, and a clear separation between signal and noise. Decisions had to hold under scrutiny, audit, and repetition. The cost of error was immediate and real.

Rufina Lee's first role at Grab was Head of Reliability for GrabFood Indonesia, at a point when the platform was a new entrant in one of the most competitive food delivery markets in the region. Reliability had to be designed without mature technology, requiring close on-the-ground observation, creative non-technical workarounds, and empathy-led problem solving.

Systems were built to function under non-uniform conditions, absorbing local variation instead of assuming ideal or centralised environments.

Building on this reliability foundation, Rufina Lee later led the expansion of GrabFood operations across 175 cities in Indonesia. Consistency had to be engineered through structure and sequencing, not imposed through uniform rules. What worked in one city could not simply be copied into another without distortion.

In parallel, Rufina created Southeast Asia's first Grab Merchant Centre, a physical, operations-led hub designed to onboard merchants, diagnose operational failure, and standardise execution at scale. The centre integrated people, process, and tooling to allow problems to be surfaced, examined, and corrected directly in context, rather than inferred from dashboards alone.

In Singapore, Rufina Lee led changes to GrabFood's merchant operating model that materially improved platform reliability. The merchant operating landscape she established later became the foundation for merchant onboarding and execution across Grab platforms, including GrabPay, GrabMart, GrabExpress, and Grab for Business.