Financial powerhouse emerged from chrysalis of Tai Po Tsai house

26 June 2021 rmedcalf BUSINESS 0

^{Don and Kelvin co-founded AQUMON in 2015 with the vision of democratising financial services}

A financial powerhouse has emerged from the unlikely location of a Tai Po Tsai, Sai Kung village house with two dogs guarding the door. Budding billionaires went through their incubation just down the road.

Kelvin Lei and Dr Don Huang created AQUMON, one of the first independent robo-advisers accredited by the Securities and Futures Commission. Heavyweight investors are now backing the financial start-up: Alibaba, Cyberport, Lenovo and Zheng He Capital.

^{Kelvin Lei}

In 2015, when Don was teaching financial engineering at the University of Science and Technology he got a call from Kelvin asking him to join a new venture. Don said, “Yes.”

“Kelvin told me his vision was democratising wealth management so more people could enjoy better services.” Kelvin had been working for investment banks, watching the 2008 financial crisis. He started thinking, were the banks serving the best interests of their clients? “Bankers were incentivised to sell sophisticated derivatives to those who didn’t understand the risks. Quality advice was offered only to premium clients while retail investors could hardly get any personal advice. That’s when I realised there’s a market for digital, algo-driven wealth management products,” Kelvin said.

^{Don Huang}

AQUMON began with Don and Kelvin bootstrapping out of the UST library. They applied for the UST’s entrepreneurship programme. After hiring six interns they decided they needed more space, so they rented a village house at Tai Po Tsai not far from the university. “When people came to visit they were surprised to find our office based in a village house with two dogs at the entry.”

Today the company has an office in Taikoo Plaza, hires 50 talented people, many with PhDs and has 20,000 registered users. Don says its success is due to the all-in-one platform, processing 100 terabytes of real-time data in global financial markets to seek the best exchange-traded funds for clients. It lets users invest in more than 50 asset classes worldwide.