Swee Siong Lee, Founder & Managing Director

Swee Siong is a digital strategist and business transformation adviser with more than two decades of experience in financial services, public services and entrepreneurship. He held global leadership positions in international banks including Standard Chartered and OCBC, helping these institutions develop new products and capabilities in corporate and commercial banking. He was also involved in numerous industry-wide initiatives with the Monetary Authority of Singapore, including Offshore RMB Market Development, Real-time Payments and Common Addressing Scheme projects.

As a technology entrepreneur & investor, he started an industrial equipment life cycle management portal in 2000, and a healthcare AI & data platform more recently in 2022. He continues to invest in and advise technology start-ups as a venture partner in Spaze Ventures & EduSpaze.

Swee Siong is a well-regarded thought-leader in the industry and a prolific speaker/ moderator in industry events and writer in trade publications. A strong advocate of volunteerism, he was conferred the Institute of Banking and Finance (IBF) Fellowship in 2015 in recognition of his contribution to uphold the skills and standards of the financial industry. He sits on the board of 1FSS, a subsidiary of MOHH established as a financial shared service centre for all public healthcare institutions in Singapore. He is Vice President of the Association of Small & Medium Enterprises (ASME) and Chair of its Capabilities Development Steering Committee..

Swee Siong holds a Master’s Degree in Manufacturing Engineering & Management from UMIST, UK. He is a certified International Cash Management professional (ACT, UK) & Blockchain Strategist (Oxford Said Business School). He is also a qualified professional in Green & Sustainable Finance (Chartered Banker Institute), and holds an Advanced Certificate in Learning and Performance (ACLP) from the Institute of Adult Learning.

Hong Leong Chua, Chief Technologist

Hong is a technologist with more than 30 years of experience in Finance & Supply Chain enterprise solutions.

With an international experience (Singapore, UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand), he has been deeply involved in the entire spectrum of the IT life-cycle from pre-sales to production support. He has worked in brand name companies like Andersen Consulting (Accenture), PwC Consulting, IBM and Oracle Consulting.

As an Enterprise Architect, he has completed a number of large scale multi-site ERP implementations involving both complex process improvements and significant change management. Hong has integrated PeopleSoft to enterprise applications like Ariba, Maximo, Hyperion and SAP via third party adaptors like BizTalk.

Hong is also a business entrepreneur who successfully introduced and localised 2 International USA-based wellness companies with his business partners in South East Asia.

Gabriel Sham, Partner (Trade Finance)

Gabriel is a Trade Finance consultant for banks and corporates, leveraging experience across Product, Sales, Operations and Risk in global, regional and local capacities. He is a highly-regarded Trade Finance expert with many years of experience in leading international banks: HSBC, Citi, Standard Chartered, JPMorgan and RBS. (Last position: Head, Trade Services Asia, GTS Product, Royal Bank of Scotland plc)

Gabriel specializes in documentary trade including LC, guarantees and standby credits, bills of exchange negotiation, pre- and post-shipment financing etc., with proven success in commercializing and implementation of SCF solutions including seller-led receivables purchase and buyer-led payables finance programs.

As a trainer, Gabriel specialises in the design, development and delivery of training in English and Chinese (Putonghua and Cantonese), backed by ACTA v5 (Advanced Certificate in Training & Assessment). Fluent in English and Chinese, both written and spoken, he is a regular speaker in industry forums, including ICC Academy webinars for ICC Academy, IIBLP Annual LC Survey Conference and Guarantees and Standbys Forum and GTR trade finance workshops.

Tuck Wai Lee, Partner (Sustainability Practices)

Tuck Wai is the Managing Director of Upconverge, a technology-focused consulting firm specializing in complex infrastructure projects and cleantech deployment. After spending 20 years with Jacobs Engineering leading consulting work for infrastructure and technology, Tuck Wai has connected these experiences to develop a Systems Leadership Practice to help practitioners navigate the biggest challenges of our time in delivering sustainable, low-carbon infrastructure and in developing & deployment of novel clean technology.

Delivering sustainability work is complex because it is always multi-disciplinary in content, involves multi-sector collaboration and requires multi-stakeholder approaches to be successful. Tuck Wai brings the practice of Systems Leadership to build partnerships with forward-looking owners such as PUB and JTC, global consultants like Jacobs Engineering, Surbana-Jurong and DHI Environment, contractors like Vector Infotech, accelerators like Imagine H2O and Alacrity Canada and many startups & providers of specialist solutions & services, as they unlock the ecosystem’s collective potential to secure a sustainable future.

All his recent projects have a strong focus on building climate resilience & adaptation towards a low-carbon infrastructure, including a desalination plant, floating solar PV systems, smart metering infrastructure, coastal adaptation for climate change and digital twins for water treatment plants.

Joshua Cohen, Partner (Europe)

Joshua Cohen is the Managing Director of Mayer & Co Advisory based in London. An experienced banking professional with strong relationships in corporate and FI client segments, Joshua is a well-respected individual with a strong reputation built over 25 years in the industry, possessing a diverse skill set incorporating Financial Markets, Capital Markets, Foreign Exchange, Interest Rate Products, Trade Finance, Risk Distribution, Regulatory Change, Balance Sheet Management, Treasury, Syndications, Portfolio Management, Risk Management, Product Knowledge, Credit Insurance, Financial Technology and Digital Transformation.

Joshua is a regular public speaker, engaged in meetings with regulators, frequently published in industry journals. Founding Chair of the BAFT Liquidity Working Group

Patrick Sim, Partner (Technology)

Patrick is a co-founder of RobustTechHouse, an IT development company. He is invigorated each day interacting with the great team of developers at RobustTechHouse, with startup entrepreneurs pursuing new tech-driven business ideas and with established companies re-inventing themselves through technology. He enjoys learning about and experimenting with new technologies and building new business lines around these technologies.

Patrick was previously a Private Equity professional focussing on investments in South East Asia, as well as a trader in a global fund. He started his career as a Singapore Police Force Overseas Scholar and served in multiple roles in the Singapore Police Force as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Finance.

Patrick is an Electronics Engineer by training, with a Masters of Engineering from the University of Cambridge. He also obtained an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of the Pennsylvania in 2009.

Hsu-sheng Wong, Adviser (Sustainability)

Hsu-sheng has an extensive legal and finance background, having worked for over 16 years as a lawyer, investment banker and commercial banking relationship management in London, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore.

A keen sustainability proponent, Hsu-sheng has been actively involved in developing ESG frameworks and operationalising them for practical application in the office and at home, and is an advocate of bringing impact investing and sustainability finance to bank clients. He has attended the Yale-SOM Sustainable Finance and Investment and SMU-GoImpact Impact Investing and Mega Trends in Sustainability programs and is in the process of being qualified as a certified Green and Sustainable Finance Specialist from the Chartered Banker Institute.

Hsu-sheng holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Law from the University of Cambridge and a post-graduate Diploma in Singapore Law from the National University of Singapore. He is an Advocate and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Singapore, a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales and a former Military Prosecutor.

Alex Ng, Adviser (Startup Investments)

Alex is the Managing Director of Spaze Ventures, a startup incubator and seed capital firm focused on technology startups in South East Asia, where he leads the investment to help founders launch and grow their startup. He has invested in more than 15 startups, helped them to expand overseas and raise the next round of funding.

Alex has more than a decade of experience from both the public and private sectors. He was most recently the vice president of Korvac Holdings, a regional Fintech company that specializes in payment processing and consumer data, where he helped to expand into new markets and also achieved the “Most Impactful in Asia” award at the 2012 ICT Awards. Wirecard subsequently acquired three subsidiaries of Korvac.

Prior to that, Alex was leading the enterprise technology team in International Enterprise Singapore. He specialised in the e-government and financial services clusters to help companies expand beyond the shores of Singapore. He received the MTI Borderless Award in 2010.

Alex holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical) and a Master of Science (Technopreneurship & Innovation), both from Nanyang Technological University. He also attended the International Business Fellowship, Middle East Executive Management Program at University of Dubai.

Alex King, Adviser (FinTech)

Alex is an experienced FinTech entrepreneur with a proven track record in start-up and high growth enterprises.

As CEO of Future Finance based in Ireland, Alex assembled an impressive c-suite that dramatically revamped the product, devised a path to profitability, raised a €40 million C-round, closed a £60 million portfolio sale and executed a £100 million forward financing deal. In 2017, Future Finance was ranked No. 39 on KPMG’s list of Global 100 FinTech companies.

Prior to Future Finance, Alex was at Enova in Chicago for 10 years where he developed deep expertise in thin-file/no-file under-banked consumers [NYSE ticker symbol ENVA] . He was part of Enova's IPO team and helped craft the S1 filings. More importantly, Alex was responsible for launching Enova's UK business, China business and US Near Prime instalment lending business from ideation/white board phase. Alex grew the UK team organically from skeleton crew to ~400 corporate and call centre employees; Enova UK generated ~US$300 million in revenue (close to half total revenues), US$150 million in EBITDA (more than half total EBITDA) and ~US$1.5 billion in loans annually. For Enova's China JV, Alex's team built the B2C business on the ground in Chongqing China and was awarded the only foreign National Micro-Lending license (10 total licenses with local licensee holders Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Xiaomi, etc.)

Prior to Alex's journey into FinTech, he was a Consultant with McKinsey & Company in Atlanta, Georgia and an Credit Officer at DBS Institutional Banking Department in Singapore. Alex has an MBA from University of Chicago and a Bachelor's degree in Finance from University of Florida.

Aaron Lee, Adviser (Legal & Compliance)

Aaron Lee is a regulatory and ethics lawyer with twenty years’ PQE (post-qualifying experience) in policy-making, cross-border business and government relations. He has worked in the civil service and various financial institutions overseeing governance, regulatory compliance and investigating financial crime and misconduct. As a consultant he has been appointed independent expert witness in several recent lawsuits involving banks. Aaron is also a published writer, public speaker and community organizer.