“Floor raisers”: WeLab’s Simon Loong on leading AI adoption from the top

Rather than a top-down mandate or a central programme, WeLab encourages each team to fold the technology into its own day-to-day work, whether in Excel, PowerPoint or a customer call queue. “Just slowly, slowly increase the awareness and adoption of it,” Loong says.

Embracing an organic approach has produced unexpected evangelists. “Some guy on the finance team would be really good at using AI in Excel, and now they have internal training for all their colleagues. That was surprising,” Loong says. “Within a team of 10 colleagues, suddenly you find two are really good at AI. The other eight will always go to them and ask for advice. They become de facto AI champions within their division. People are willing to learn, and colleagues are willing to teach each other.”

At one point, WeLab toyed with, and abandoned, the idea of AI proficiency tests. “We did think of having universal exams, but we dropped it,” he laughs. “We’re going to raise the floor, but not through exams. We don’t want to be Asian parents. Nobody likes to take an exam. No one likes to be judged.”

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While WeLab faces off against incumbent banks, Loong is openly sceptical of rivals’ AI ambitions. Several large lenders have announced headcount reductions tied to AI automation, but “a lot of these are just announcements,” he says. “We haven’t seen them actually rolling them out yet.”

The reasons, he argues, are structural rather than financial. “Banks have a lot of investment. But because of regulatory [constraints], because of complexity, because of a lot of legacy systems, banks in general are slow. As a digital bank, as a challenger bank, we have a lot of opportunity to grow faster than others—all the way from customer servicing to risk management, technology, fraud detection.”

WeLab, he says, has already deployed AI agents for tasks including loan application verification and fraud detection—an AI Loan Agent at subsidiary WeLend has cut approval times by roughly 20 per cent. So far, the commercial backdrop has been favourable. “The growth has been quite spectacular,” Loong says. WeLab Bank’s revenue grew 35 per cent year-over-year to a record HK$942 million in 2025, with further growth of 10 to 20 per cent expected this year, and new products—across supply chain financing, stock brokerage and insurance—are due in the second half.

The fintech’s next chapter is being written in Southeast Asia—such as in Indonesia, where WeLab launched its second virtual bank, Bank Saqu, in 2023 and has since expanded it to 3.8 million customers. “We’re also, at the same time, looking at multiple new Southeast Asia markets,” says Loong, including “Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand.”

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As for fellow executives looking to AI adoption, Loong’s parting advice is direct: “Don’t just read about it. Don’t just get your colleagues to do a presentation, or get a consultant to come and present. Just try it,” he says.

“The hurdle to try an AI model is so low right now. You don’t need a supercomputer, you don’t need difficult setups,” he adds. “Once you try it, then you figure out what it really means—so you can predict, understand and explain where the market is going a lot better.”

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