Founder's Spirit

The innovators. The founders. The fighters. The independent thinkers. The underdogs. One common thread binds them all: a unique brand of daring to go where no one has gone before. Meet three of them from this year's Gen.T List

- Jamie Nonis

GREGORY VAN CEO, Endowus

When you have already charted a stellar career in investment banking at UBS and snagged a spot at Grab as part of the pioneering team that launched the firm’s digital payments services across Southeast Asia, jumping ship to establish your own start‑up could be quite the risk.

“I was at an exciting place in a very exciting time managing six countries; it was a broad role with a lot of opportunities, so leaving Grab to start Endowus was a risk,” says Gregory Van, recollecting the year his life trajectory changed dramatically when he became an entrepreneur for the first time.

In 2017, Van co‑founded Endowus with Samuel Rhee, ex‑chief executive officer, and chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley Investment Management in Asia. The former is now CEO of Endowus, which is licensed and regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, while the latter heads the investment office as chairman and chief investment officer.

The duo is on a mission to make investing accessible and at the lowest achievable cost for investors via a new platform accompanied by a new business model never before seen in the local financial markets. “Our motto is to help people invest—not speculate—so they can live easier today and better tomorrow,” says Van. “We focus on holistic wealth management and provide strategies to people that can meet their investment objectives. We put together portfolios of strategies that suit your individual life goals and you can run all of those portfolios on Endowus at levels of cost and automation that have never existed before. This is [how we think the future of wealth management should be].”