Cover Personalisation is important because everyone has different goals. Gone are the days when you had a tool that worked for everyone (Photo: Courtesy of Prenetics)
Personalisation is important because everyone has different goals. Gone are the days when you had a tool that worked for everyone (Photo: Courtesy of Prenetics)
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Reflecting the personalisation in Standard Chartered’s Priority Banking campaign, Danny Yeung explains why it’s important to assess risks and aim for prevention, in all areas of life
Nothing is more individual than the DNA inside every living organism. Danny Yeung harnessed the idea of that uniqueness to build Prenetics, a company that grew in less than a decade from start-up to the first Hong Kong unicorn to list on the Nasdaq—and a leading genetics-focused company in the field of prevention, diagnostics and personalised care.
“I’m not from a medical or scientific background,” says Yeung, CEO of Prenetics, whose previous ventures range from franchising Hong Kong dessert chain Hui Lau Shan in the US to running a hospitality furniture company in Las Vegas. “After a previous venture was acquired by Groupon, I wanted to challenge myself and make an impact. I wanted to utilise my entrepreneurial experience and bring it to healthcare. The biggest challenge early on was getting my head around the science; I spent a lot of late nights reading research papers and talking with any scientists that would speak to me. It really opened my mind—and I continue to learn daily, as there is just so much we can do to make healthcare more accessible for everyone.”
Like Yeung, Standard Chartered recognises the value of personalisation. Its newly launched platform, "myWealth", provides affluent clients with a full range of wealth insights to help them achieve more. A digital investment portfolio reviewing service, "myWealth" is integrated into the bank’s mobile banking app, offering investment recommendations tailored to clients’ individual needs.
Personalisation has been of vital importance in Yeung’s own life, too. An inspiration behind Prenetics, as well as a range of changes in his lifestyle, was the discovery that he had a heightened genetic risk of colorectal cancer.
Prenetics became the first Hong Kong unicorn to list on the Nasdaq Pre-Market Indicator (Photo: Courtesy of Prenetics)
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“Data is knowledge and very powerful if you know how to use it,” he says. “I discovered I had a genetic mutation associated with an increased risk of colon cancer. It was a surprise to me as I have no family history of cancer. I was able to take measures such as changing my diet, getting more exercise and not eating beef. I’m a big believer in prevention rather than treatment, and science tells us that the majority of cancers and diseases are preventable if you act early.”
Likewise, in financial services, he says, “Personalisation is important because everyone has different goals. Gone are the days when you had a tool that worked for everyone. It depends on your positioning in your career and your personal preferences, and the need for a balance of those two things; some people are very aggressive and some are very conservative, and there is no right or wrong. It just depends on what the individual wants out of life.”
Those variables are precisely what "myWealth" takes into account, providing tailormade investment ideas that incorporate clients’ portfolios, including cash holdings, level of diversification and their risk appetite, as well as the bank’s own investment perspectives. Having helped customers discover their investment approach, it then takes care of the difficult—and time-consuming—business of choosing which funds to consider, with monthly “fund select picks” presenting investors with only those most relevant to their needs. By sharing the data and any potential risk factors of each possible pick, the platform enables investors to make informed decisions. It also helps them respond quickly to changing conditions, with updated investment ideas provided to each client as the market changes.
Similarly, Yeung has had to be nimble to react to the challenges of the past few years, successfully pivoting his company at the start of the pandemic to become a leader in diagnostic testing. Yeung says it's really important to continue to grow via the launch of new innovative products such as the launch of ColoClear, a non-invasive stool DNA test for the detection of Colon Cancer and Circle Snapshot, an at-home painless blood test. In addition, Yeung cites much of his time is now spent on strategic M&A opportunities across the globe, given an IPO has provided Prenetics with now more than US$200m of cash to create his vision of building out a full end-to-end health ecosystem.
“As an organisation, we can’t rest on our past success,” he says. “It’s very important that we continue to innovate and launch new products that are going to be impactful.”
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