iFAST started life in 2000 as an online shop for mutual funds, a modest Singapore website called Fundsupermart that let ordinary savers buy funds without a broker at the counter. A quarter of a century later it administers about 33 billion Singapore dollars, roughly 25 billion US dollars, across some 1.2 million customer accounts. Net profit crossed 100 million Singapore dollars in 2025 on revenue of 515 million, and the stock has become one of the standout performers on the local exchange, climbing about 33 percent in the year to early July 2026.
At the center of that rise is Lim Chung Chun, the 58 year old chairman and chief executive who still owns close to 20 percent of the company, a holding worth around 540 million Singapore dollars. His story runs alongside the firm he built. He grew up in Johor, Malaysia, where his father ran a photography studio, was sent across the causeway to Singapore for schooling at the age of 12, and studied electrical engineering at the National University of Singapore, graduating in 1991.
From equity research to a startup with 500,000 dollars
In 1998 Lim walked away from a comfortable perch as head of equity research at ING Barings Securities. Two years later he and co founder Moh Hon Meng launched Fundsupermart with 500,000 Singapore dollars in seed money, of which 200,000 came from Lim's own savings. The capital markets services license arrived in December 2000. The company took the name iFAST in 2003 and listed on the Singapore Exchange in 2014. Moh left the business in 2022, leaving Lim as the public face of a firm that had grown far beyond its first website.
A deliberate bet on the mass affluent
The strategy that defines iFAST is a refusal to chase the very rich. While private banks fight over a small pool of high net worth clients, iFAST aimed at the far larger group of mass affluent savers, people with investible assets of up to a million dollars. Lim has long argued that the real opportunity sits with this crowd rather than at the top of the wealth pyramid, and the numbers reflect that view.
To serve them, the company built a full service platform rather than a single clever feature. Its menu now runs to about 29,000 investment products, including more than 16,800 funds from over 350 fund houses, alongside bonds, equities, exchange traded funds and government securities. That breadth sets it apart from narrower rivals such as StashAway, known for robo advisory, or Chocolate Finance, built around cash management. A key early decision was to write its own technology in house rather than rent it, a choice that left iFAST in control of its own costs and roadmap.
The quiet engine is business to business
For all its consumer brand recognition, the bulk of iFAST's money comes from serving other financial firms. Around 14,700 wealth advisers at roughly 850 banks and institutions run their client money through its rails, and that business to business segment accounts for more than two thirds of assets under administration. The consumer arm, the descendant of the original Fundsupermart, now trades globally as FSM. Singapore still supplies about 70 percent of assets, but the reach extends into Malaysia, Hong Kong, mainland China, the United Kingdom and the United States.
