This eventually landed Cokeng in the position of co-founder and chief commercial officer of Hong Kong-based financial services and technology company Oriente. While there, she looked at how to disrupt the ways that lending was being executed in Southeast Asia, with the goal of offering consumers much more accessible lines of credit.
Becoming a co-founder happened almost by accident for Katrina Cokeng, CEO of Xen Capital, a Singapore-based alternative investment platform. She has experience in investment banking at Merrill Lynch, and management consulting at McKinsey & Co; and was an investor for private-equity firm Pomona Capital. Having had a wide exposure early in her career to the financial ecosystem, Cokeng’s finance-rooted career soon took what she considers a “natural evolution” towards the financial technology (fintech) scene.
“In 2016, I joined a few partners originally with the intention of starting a fund to think about investing in fintech, and more specifically, fintech disruptors,” Cokeng recounts in an interview with The Edge Singapore. “While looking at the space and trying to find that product market fit of what we were doing, we realised that in Asia, there was still a lot of different areas of finance that were ripe for disruption.”
