Alex Chua of Goldbell helps family business carve out new growth in finance
A Renaissance man — or a master of all trades and jack of none — does not a good leader make. “Your staff need to understand what you’re bad at,” says Alex Chua. “They don’t expect you to do what you’re bad at, but to find people that are good at doing what you’re bad at.”
No one can be good at everything, says Chua, CEO of Goldbell Financial Services. “If someone can do your job better than you, it doesn’t mean that you’re irrelevant. It means that you can spend more time doing things that you are better at for the company.”
Interestingly, playing to each person’s strengths has helped the Goldbell Group expand into the broad corporation it is today.
Goldbell Group was established in 1980 by Chua’s father, William Chua; and his late grandfather, Chua Kim Cheng. For over 30 years, Goldbell specialised in leasing and distributing commercial vehicles and industrial equipment, eventually growing to become Singapore’s largest name in the space.
Then, in 2015, Chua founded Goldbell Financial Services (GBFS), a subsidiary of his family’s business. Taking the heavy lifting they are familiar with to the financial sector, GBFS is a fast-growing non-bank financial institution established to invest in SMEs. As of March this year, GBFS has cumulatively loaned out over $1 billion, with a low non-performing loan rate of 0.3%.
For growing a new wing in the family business, the 41-year-old has been named EY Entrepreneur Of The Year — Financial Services, and will compete with other finalists for the overall title of the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year award.
“Honestly, I took part because one of my friends suggested it,” Chua tells The Edge Singapore. “This year, with Covid-19, I had more time to ponder this company. So, I just decided to take on this challenge.”
Chua: If someone can do your job better than you, it doesn’t mean that you’re irrelevant. It means that you can spend more time doing things that you are better at for the company
As the third-generation leader of the family business, Chua does not raise funds like a start-up would. “With that, there is no stamp of acknowledgement from [the industry]. I guess this was to see whether or not the judges saw our business to be good enough to win such an award,” he adds.
Chua says: “As much as Goldbell is a household name in the sector, it is never one of your big ‘brand recall names’. Without Goldbell, there would be no Goldbell Financial Services. So, it’s a testament to our family’s legacy.”
New methods
Chua spent nearly a decade avoiding that very legacy. After spending eight years at JP Morgan Chase in Hong Kong, he finally decided to join the family business in 2012.
Going from an international bank to his own family’s business, Chua had to adapt to a different working style.
For one, Goldbell’s employees were less expressive than his previous colleagues. One of his biggest projects then was overhauling the company’s IT system to gather and analyse big data, which took three years and cost approximately $4 million.
From there, Chua established GBFS to further serve clients’ financing needs. “When we started in 2015, it was a very simple goal: to finance the trucks that we sell. But we always evolve around customers; you buy a truck, lease the truck and finance the truck. Then, we went on to add products to our suite of offerings. We do car financing, truck financing and equipment financing; we do term loans, factoring, mortgages; we even do inventory financing.”
Chua’s business model for GBFS saw the subsidiary break even from its first year. Today, GBFS’ ecosystem includes a Monetary Authority of Singapore-regulated private debt investment platform called Goldbell Evolution Network (GEN); and Polaris, a “venture lending launchpad for growth acceleration” that targets start-ups and digital platforms.
“We like to work with start-ups [and] ecosystems that can scale. When they scale, we actually scale with them,” says Chua.
While GBFS is staffed by veterans from the financial sector, Chua seeks out talent from elsewhere for GEN and Polaris, with staff coming from backgrounds in insurance and sports facility management.
“They have no financial knowledge whatsoever. All I need is the fire, which means that they can solve problems. I throw them problems that don’t have answers right now, and their job is to learn from the existing team to find a solution and implement it,” says Chua.
“When people are so focused on expertise and you hire them for that, you cannot expect them to really meander away from their expertise. So, we have another team that distils all that knowledge, pieces that back together and comes up with something that evolves from that original knowledge,” he adds.
“When you have two teams, it’s almost like they also learn [from] what the other team does,” says Chua. “It changes their mindset. So, these two teams may be a little bit wasteful, because we have the exact same positions in place, but they do things very differently.”
One of the first start-ups GBFS lent to was “buy now, pay later” company Rely. In 2019, Rely raised an undisclosed seven-figure sum in a pre-series A round with GBFS and family office Octava Foundation. In December 2020, Rely announced a $100 million facility from Polaris.
See: How Rely is moving up the retail value chain
“We lend to pre-profit companies on a smaller scale. For us, we try to lend a little bit more innovatively, and structure the product to meet the needs of the customer rather than the set product that we just give them,” says Chua.
Some may call it altruism, but Chua sees a bigger vision. In its early years, GBFS applied for Enterprise Singapore’s (ESG) Enterprise Financing Scheme (EFS), but was unsuccessful due to a lack of track record.
When the pandemic emerged in early 2020, Chua anticipated that small businesses would be hit the hardest in the coming months and quickly got to work. He gathered six local family businesses: Apricot Capital, Ho Lee Group, Paradise Group, Sing Lun Group, Soilbuild Group and his own.
Led by GBFS, the Singapore Business Federation’s Young Business Leaders Network (SBF-YBLN) raised $5 million in a couple of weeks.
Hope Fund
Amid the lockdown, GBFS launched the Hope Fund with a fully digital loan processing flow, which let them review and disburse loans within two days. “It was a very simple philosophy: the government and the banks would take time to come up with aid, but at that time everybody needed a bandage. We created that $50,000 bandage,” says Chua.
Despite the speed of processing, the risk evaluation process was not compromised. That portfolio currently has zero defaults.
That April, CIMB Bank Singapore enlarged the fund’s potential with a $50 million partnership. SMEs that had been approved for the SBF-YBLN Hope Fund could extend their loan facility from the initial $50,000 to a maximum of $5 million, from CIMB Bank.
ESG took notice of Chua’s determination. Years after the rejection, GBFS was invited by ESG to be onboarded as the first privately owned local non-bank financial institution on the EFS and Temporary Bridging Loan Program.
Putting people first and anticipating their needs has helped GBFS grow rapidly in a matter of years. “Solutioning is the key difference between us and most other competitors,” says Chua. “As much as we want to scale, we actually find more joy in providing a solution specific for customers’ needs.”
“There’s no point giving you money in a structure you don’t need, or a structure that is not efficient for your company,” he adds. “We work within our means.”
Photos: Albert Chua/The Edge Singapore
