GoBear appoints Adrian Chng as CEO

GoBear has appointed Adrian Chng to succeed Andre Hesselink as its CEO. In the new role,  Chng will lead the management team with Ivonne Bojoh, Frank Stevenaar, and Marnix Zwart, and rapidly scale the business into new products and markets.Chng is one of Asia’s foremost FinTech startup entrepreneurs, co-founding two FinTech startups so far and sitting on the board of many others. Most recently, Chng was CEO of Fintonia, a merchant bank he founded in 2015 that invests in FinTech companies in ASEAN and Hong Kong.Chng co-founded Credolab and AsiaKredit in 2016 and 2017 respectively, driven by strong commitment to helping customers and the community thrive and creating employment for people. Chng is also well-known for leading Asian jobs portal JobsDB.com and a key achievement was their AUD 1 billion merger with JobStreet.com in 2014.“There is no doubt that faster, cheaper and easier access to basic financial services improves people’s lives,” Chng said. “That is why I am so excited to join GoBear right now, we are in the middle of launching new products and expanding into new markets like Indonesia – we are reaching more and more people every day.”GoBear was started as a partnership between Aegon, a global insurance company, and Walvis, a Dutch venture capital fund, in 2015. Since its inception, GoBear has grown from its home market of Singapore to serving millions of users across Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Vietnam and, soon, Indonesia.Hesselink said: “I am proud of how much GoBear has accomplished, becoming a leading Asian financial comparison platform. I would like to thank the employees, partners, and users of GoBear for making this possible. I will definitely miss my day-to-day involvement with GoBear, but I am assured that the company is in very capable hands to make it even more successful.”Hesselink will move back to the Netherlands and continue to be involved as a special advisor to GoBear and its shareholders, Aegon and Walvis.