Company founder Lim Chung Chun reshaped retail investing in 2000 by making it easy to buy mutual funds online. Now, with a suite of 29,000 investment products and 1.2 million customer accounts, he’s betting digital banking can take the firm global.

Long before fintech was a buzzword, Lim Chung Chun was bringing retail investors in Singapore online. In 1998, at the peak of the dotcom boom, he left his job as head of equity research at ING Barings Securities and two years later launched Fundsupermart.com, offering low-cost, easy access to a range of mutual funds online. Other fintech firms that followed in its wake focused either on investments or banking, but Lim built for both, naming the company iFAST in 2003.

Today, that first business-to-consumer platform (now called FSM Global) is one of the most comprehensive sites for wealth management in Southeast Asia, which together with a business-to-business platform that Lim simultaneously built, has 1.2 million customer accounts and offers 29,000 investment products, including over 16,800 funds from over 350 fund houses. It has expanded from mutual funds to bonds, equities, government securities and exchange-traded funds in markets beyond its home base, including Malaysia, Hong Kong, mainland China, the U.K. and the U.S. The B2B business accounts for over two-thirds of the company’s S$33 billion ($25 billion) in assets under administration (AUA) as of Mar. 31, meaning assets that are not actively managed, serving 14,700 wealth advisers at 850 banks and financial institutions.

These days Lim, 58, is focused on leveraging that breadth for iFAST’s big play: plugging iFAST Global Bank (iGB), a digital bank it owns in the U.K., into its investment platform to widen the customer pool. And he’s targeting the segment he knows, the mass affluent, people with investible assets of up to $1 million. “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,” says iFAST’s chairman and CEO in an interview at his 26th floor office in Ocean Financial Centre, overlooking Singapore’s Raffles Place central business district.

In February, Lim outlined the company’s plan to clock a compound annual asset growth rate of over 25% to reach S$100 billion in AUA by 2030. “The scale is as big as we want to dream. Where we are at today, with over S$30 billion in AUA, is a tiny drop in the context of where the global banking and wealth management opportunity is,” says Lim.

Accelerating growth will involve securing more payments licenses, in addition to the couple it already has, to help customers move money seamlessly across borders. iFAST received in-principle approval for a Malaysian payments license in 2025, and plans to launch services later this year. To further beef up its payments connectivity, iGB in April partnered with Alipay, the e-wallet gateway of Ant International, the Singapore-based arm of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group. That enables iGB customers to use the bank’s app to pay over 150 million merchants across 100-plus markets.

With its headquarters in Singapore, iFAST is well-placed. The city-state’s reputation for strong regulation and an investor-friendly tax regime has strengthened its position as a global wealth management center, and it’s poised to remain a magnet for capital, family offices and globally mobile investors, notes Nirgunan Tiruchelvam, Singapore-based head of consumer and internet research at investment advisory firm Aletheia Capital. Hyderabad-based market research firm Mordor Intelligence forecasts Asia-Pacific’s wealth management market will surge to $41.8 trillion by 2031 from $27.6 trillion in 2025, thanks to urban growth, rising middle-class affluence and widening use of affordable robo-advisory models, a type of automated financial advisor. Lim’s strategy has already begun to pay off. iFAST’s net profit more........

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