Rejected By Two Regulators, iFAST Founder Lim Chung Chun Bought The Bank Nobody Wanted
Lim Chung Chun heard no twice. In 2018, Hong Kong’s regulators passed over his bid for a digital banking license. Two years later, Singapore, the city where he had spent two decades building one of Asia’s first fintech companies, awarded its new digital wholesale banking licenses to mainland Chinese firms instead. Lim recalls feeling “deeply, deeply disappointed.” The rejection stung more for its logic: regulators prefer applicants who already hold banking licenses elsewhere, which locks challengers out by design.
So in 2022 he went around them. iFAST, the Singapore-listed wealth platform Lim founded, paid £40 million ($54 million) for an 85% stake in BFC Bank, a money-losing London lender owned by a Bahraini group. Its main customers were migrant workers in Gulf countries sending remittances home. It made no loans. What it had was a clean balance sheet, fee income and a banking license in one of the world’s top financial centers. Three years on, the renamed iFAST Global Bank holds S$1.6 billion ($1.2 billion) in deposits, a 13-fold increase from 2023, and returned to profitability in late 2024.
The workaround matters because of where the money in Asian wealth management is moving. The Asia-Pacific wealth management market was worth $27.57 trillion in 2025 and is forecast to reach $41.82 trillion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence. Private banks still hold 37% of those assets, but the same research finds fintech advisers growing at a 15.7% compound annual rate through 2031, the fastest of any provider type. The clients driving that shift are not the ultra-rich. McKinsey projected the wealth pool of Asia’s affluent and mass affluent households, those with $100,000 to $1 million to invest, would hit $4.7 trillion by 2026, up from $2.7 trillion in 2021, and found that roughly 80% of them would consider taking financial advice through digital channels.
That is precisely the customer Lim, 58, is building for. “Private banks serve customers from all over the world, but focus on high-net-worth individuals. We think the big opportunity is mass affluent customers,” he says from his 26th floor office overlooking Singapore’s Raffles Place.
The flywheel started with S$500,000 and eight engineers
Lim left his job as head of equity research at ING Barings Securities in 1998, and with co-founder Moh Hon Meng, a former Procter & Gamble marketing executive, launched Fundsupermart.com in December 2000 with S$500,000 raised from friends and family, including S$200,000 of his own savings. The management consultants who suggested the online investing idea declined to put in capital.
One early decision compounded for two decades. Lim spent months evaluating third-party technology vendors, then scrapped the plan and hired eight software developers to build the platform in-house. “I realized that if we built our dependence on an external IT vendor, over time we’d be working for them,” he says. That in-house stack now runs a business with 1.2 million customer accounts and 29,000 investment products, including more than 16,800 funds from over 350 fund houses. The business-to-business side serves 14,700 wealth advisers across 850 banks and financial institutions and accounts for over two-thirds of iFAST’s S$33 billion in assets under administration. Lim says the same technology keeps iGB’s platform costs about a fifth below other digital banks.
The numbers back the model. Net profit more than doubled to S$67 million in 2024 on a 49% revenue jump to S$383 million, earning iFAST a spot on Forbes’ Best Under A Billion list in 2025. That year profit topped S$100 million on S$515 million in revenue. Lim, iFAST’s largest individual shareholder with a nearly 20% stake worth S$540 million, has told investors to expect S$100 billion in assets under administration by 2030, implying compound growth above 25% a year.
Singapore is still 70% of the story
A fair reading of iFAST’s global ambition has to account for its record abroad. The company entered India in 2008 and exited after regulatory changes in 2022 made the business untenable; along the way, its transparent fee model backfired with price-sensitive customers who could not see the hidden commissions in competitors’ bundled products. Singapore still generates 70% of assets under administration, and first-quarter 2026 earnings came in slightly below expectations, pulling shares back from their January peak despite net profit rising 48% to S$28 million. In the U.K., iGB competes with Revolut and Monzo, digital banks with far larger customer bases, though Maybank Securities analyst Xuan Hao Toh notes neither has matched iGB’s fee-free multicurrency accounts with interest.
Lim’s answer to the scale gap is connectivity rather than headcount. An April partnership with Alipay lets iGB customers pay over 150 million merchants across more than 100 markets, and a Malaysian payments license granted in-principle approval in 2025 is due to launch this year. The model he cites is not a bank at all. “To me, the best example is Netflix and Spotify. You operate from one or two countries, but you have customers from around the world,” he says. “When it comes to banking and wealth management, I’ll say there’s no reason that won’t happen.”
Moh, who left in 2022, describes his former partner as a long-term thinker who rejected a string of fashionable high-fee products, from pre-2008 structured notes to cryptocurrencies. “He calls them ‘casino products’ — they are for gambling, not investing,” Moh says.
The discipline that kept casino products off the platform now has to coexist with a target that requires the company to triple in four years. Lim is not hedging the ambition. “We are no longer targeting six million people—our customer base is potentially a billion people.”
