Rising up in India, Dhruv Arora’s mom gave him one key piece of economic recommendation: Put his cash within the financial institution.
However Arora, now the founding father of Singapore-based fintech platform Syfe, rapidly realized that following his mom’s recommendation meant his cash “did completely nothing.”
“We’ve fairly a heavy tradition of saving,” Arora says, citing Asia’s usually unstable financial and coverage historical past. However inflation and low rates of interest find yourself eroding the worth of family financial savings. “Over time, the $100 you place within the financial institution doesn’t turn out to be $101, however successfully $98” as a result of results of inflation.
Asian households generally hold as a lot as 50% of their internet price in money, somewhat than in investments or belongings. In distinction, in developed markets just like the U.S. and Europe, that determine is nearer to fifteen%.
However that conservative perspective in Asia is beginning to change. Asians are getting wealthier, pushing them to discover totally different funding choices. Sturdy inventory market efficiency can also be driving a brand new wave of retail traders throughout the Asia-Pacific.
“Asian households are slowly dipping their toes into inventory markets,” HSBC economists wrote in a Jan. 9 report, although famous that “general fairness funding stays fairly low.” The financial institution predicts {that a} regular shift from low-yield money to higher-yield investments will imply “extra money will proceed to rotate into fairness markets over the following few years,” decreasing a reliance on international traders.
A slew of fintech apps have emerged lately to faucet a rising curiosity in investing and wealth administration amongst Asian customers. These various finance platforms, resembling Syfe, Stashaway and Endowus, usually provide a variety of funding choices, starting from money administration to managed portfolios and choices buying and selling. The problem, Arora says, is learn how to “bridge the hole between holding cash and rising wealth,” and “give extra folks the arrogance to place their financial savings to work.”
Arora started his profession as an funding banker for UBS in Hong Kong in 2008, quickly after the World Monetary Disaster. Regardless of Asia’s comparatively fast restoration, Arora seen that the area’s professionals have been constructing wealth but didn’t know learn how to handle it. “These have been good folks like docs, attorneys and consultants, who have been doing properly professionally, however simply didn’t know what to do with their cash,” he says.
He launched Syfe in 2019, only a few months earlier than one other international disaster: The COVID-19 pandemic. But the pandemic ended up being a possibility for fintech platforms like Syfe. “It acted as a catalyst for a shift in investor conduct,” Arora defined, as folks immediately had the time to interact with monetary markets.
Within the U.S., for instance, folks caught at residence started to get entangled in inventory buying and selling via platforms like Robinhood. Fueled by social media, these retail traders started to closely commerce in so-called meme shares like Gamestop and AMC.
Syfe has since expanded from its residence market of Singapore to new Asia-Pacific economies like Australia and Hong Kong. The platform continues to develop each its userbase and firm income, and the corporate claimed it reached profitability in This autumn 2025. It’s now a “self-sustaining group,” Arora says.
Syfe closed an $80 million Sequence C funding spherical final 12 months, and is backed by main traders like NYC-based Valar Ventures and UK-based funding agency Unbound.
The platform’s customers generated $2 billion price of returns whereas saving $80 million in charges final 12 months, in response to the corporate.
Presently, Arora desires to deepen Syfe’s presence in its present markets. Final 12 months, the platform started to roll out bespoke choices for its customers, like non-public credit score for accredited traders seeking to diversify their portfolios on Syfe. Syfe will launch choices buying and selling in 2026.
Arora notes that a lot of Syfe’s customers, over time, have grown extra comfy with taking bigger funding dangers, transferring from placing their cash in Syfe-managed portfolios, to extra actively buying and selling on brokerages and earnings portfolios.
But he finally desires to carry Syfe to new markets in North Asia and the Center East, which boast sizable populations of what Arora phrases the “mass prosperous,” a inhabitants with vital investable belongings and higher-than-average incomes, although nonetheless not within the high-net-worth class.
“This demographic has traditionally been ‘caught within the center’: too giant for fundamental retail banking, but usually underserved by conventional non-public banks,” he explains.
