More is certainly needed in the area of empowering women through financial literacy
One would like to think that in 2023, gender diversity in the workplace would not be as much of a hot-button issue. But the reality is that there are still too few women at the top, particularly in the more male‐dominated industries such as the finance sector.
Choo Oi‐Yee is one such woman at the helm, as CEO of private market exchange ADDX. With more than 20 years of capital markets experience in global banks from Morgan Stanley and Nomura Singapore to Citigroup, Choo was most recently the head of investment banking for Singapore at UBS, prior to joining ADDX as chief commercial officer in 2020. She was appointed CEO of the fast‐growing digital securities exchange in March 2022.
Founded in 2017 to democratise private market investing, the fintech firm is backed by major financial institutions including the Singapore Exchange (SGX), Temasek Holdings subsidiary Heliconia Capital Management, and Japan state‐backed investors JIC Venture Growth Investments and the Development Bank of Japan.
“We are building the Amazon of the private markets,” says Choo, who has previously worked on notable mergers and acquisitions and initial public offering deals, including the listing of Suntec REIT (real estate investment trust) and Parkway Life REIT on SGX. To this end, the Monetary Authority of Singapore‐regulated platform is on a mission to provide investors with access to private market deals that have traditionally been available only to institutional investors such as sovereign wealth funds and endowment funds.
Through the ADDX platform, various groups from institutions and accredited individuals to, eventually, retail investors, therefore have greater access to investment products of varying risk‐reward profiles, with reduced barriers to entry. The multi‐asset exchange has thus far onboarded funds, bonds and equities, with asset classes represented by products on the platform including private equity and venture capital, private debt, real estate, hedge funds and crypto funds.
Using blockchain and smart contract technology, the ADDX platform automates manual processes in the issuance, custody, distribution and secondary trading of private market products. The resulting efficiency from tokenisation allows the platform to fractionalise investments, thereby reducing minimum subscription sizes from US$1 million to approximately US$5,000, depending on the investment product selected.
Demand for such asset tokenisation is projected to grow fiftyfold into a US$16.1 trillion market by 2030, according to a report jointly published by global consulting firm BCG and ADDX last year.
In June last year, ADDX became the first financial institution in Singapore to accept cryptocurrency assets for the purpose of qualifying as an accredited investor, and it was also the only platform from Asia to be named one of the nine leading tokenisation platforms in the world by Amsterdam‐based blockchain data provider Blockdata, owned by US market intelligence firm CB Insights.
The company is clearly on an exciting growth trajectory, evidenced by an 80 per cent year‐on‐year increase in its investor base in 2022. With US$140 million of total funds raised to date, including a pre‐series B funding round, ADDX is Asia’s largest private market exchange today with transactions projected to surpass US$1 billion by 2023.
Leading the company into its next phase of growth is its first female CEO, a passionate advocate in championing gender diversity, gender equality and financial literacy among women.
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SHIFTING ATTITUDES
“To me, gender diversity is a bigger conversation around diversity and inclusion,” says Choo. “I’m of the very strong view that inclusivity means having different talents and different viewpoints make a team better, not weaker—and gender just happens to be one of the most obvious representations of that.”
Addressing this highly nuanced topic, she believes, requires a well‐calibrated and balanced approach—so as to avoid the possibility of disenfranchising other stakeholders. The lack of gender diversity in certain industries such as the finance sector has its roots in patriarchal systems beginning in the home environment, notes Choo. “Our grandparents', and maybe even our parents’, generation tend to have a preset idea that women should be at home or in certain [types of] jobs. That attitude is slowly filtering away, but it does still exist within a more senior age group,” she observes.
While Choo does see such attitudes shifting with the younger generation who are more “progressive” in their thinking, the road to dismantling such pre‐existing stereotypical mindsets starts at the very top of society. “I wish that our political parties could be more diverse, and at senior government levels, at least,” she says.
“But you can’t just slap on a whole class of women [into those positions]; it takes time to grow into that. It’s a very slow build; it starts from schools, from universities, encouraging kids to move into different educational pathways, and then feeding that pool of candidates into the workforce and putting the right infrastructure in place for them to be promoted, mentored and sponsored.”
The success of such initiatives to advance gender diversity in corporate environments hinges on carefully tuning the way the messaging is framed. “The tone at the top is important,” Choo urges. “The messaging needs to be quite balanced—you don’t want it to swing the other way and disenfranchise the male colleagues.”
This applies to board diversity, too. According to the Singapore‐ based Council for Board Diversity, women’s participation on the boards of the top 100 primary‐listed companies hovered at 20.8 per
cent as of June 2022. This lags significantly behind the 32 per cent of S&P 500 board seats held by women at the largest US companies, based on data compiled by Bloomberg last year. “The approach has to be very careful,” says Choo, “because you don’t want the messaging to cause them to wonder if they are the token woman.”
Clearly, there is a lot more to be done to improve these statistics. And it begins with awareness
and education. “The problem is that women don’t really know that it is a different playing field. Partly because the structure of the hierarchy, the structure of the working and the networking relationships, in a lot of places are set up for men because they are really male‐dominated. Therefore, the path of which women need to climb up is actually harder; it’s actually not equal,” Choo explains.
Compounding the situation is the tendency for women to be less assertive than their male counterparts. “Men tend to ask for those promotions and positions, they tend to articulate that very early on and quite assertively to their superiors. Whereas women tend to wait for the role to be offered to them. So things like promotions and pay tend to be underdeveloped with women, because they don’t ask for it,” she says.
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