Simon Loong had spent years learning what a bank considered valuable. Then, with a new company to furnish, he and his co-founder Kelly Wong went across the street to collect free second-hand IKEA desks. Another startup was upgrading. WeLab was happy to take what it no longer needed. The furniture had already enjoyed one business career; now it was embarking on another.
Loong remembered the episode when Hong Kong Investment Corporation invested in WeLab in 2025. By then, the business had digital banks in two markets and a far less improvised relationship with capital. Yet the desks survived in his account of its beginnings. They are a pleasing corrective to the solemn vocabulary of entrepreneurship. Before a company can transform anything, someone may have to carry the furniture.
The boy at the back
He was born in Hong Kong in 1977. His father was an engineer in the civil service; his mother worked in a bank’s human resources department. His older brother was the studious child. Loong’s own description of himself includes sporty, naughty and rebellious. The future banking executive was not providing much evidence for the executive part.
At 13, he briefly followed his brother to boarding school in England before the family moved to Sydney. When his parents took the boys to an admissions interview at Sydney Grammar, his brother had an impressive conversation about politics. Simon sat at the back. The school accepted the older boy and then accepted him too, as he later recalled. It is an unusually candid origin story for someone whose biography now includes Stanford.
A childhood anecdote cannot explain an entire career. It can, however, show which version of himself a founder chooses to preserve. Loong keeps the awkward schoolboy in the picture. Readers expecting a straight line from prodigy to chief executive have to make room for a less orderly beginning. In his telling, academic distinction arrived neither early nor automatically.
Fifteen years, then another classroom
Loong graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Commerce in 1998. Citibank and Standard Chartered followed. He spent 15 years in retail banking, acquiring the experience that would later matter to WeLab: lending, customers and the assessment of risk. At Standard Chartered, his responsibilities included unsecured lending in Greater China.
There is a practical advantage to learning finance inside a bank. You see the work behind the apparently simple transaction. A loan application contains a person’s request and an institution’s uncertainty. The lender has to decide whether the money will return. Making the application pleasant cannot make that uncertainty disappear. Loong’s background put those questions close to the centre of his working life.
In 2011, he went to Stanford Graduate School of Business, completing a master’s degree the following year. Returning to education after a substantial career is a curious reversal. The experienced person becomes the person with homework. The authority accumulated in one setting is suddenly less useful in another. For Loong, the change brought exposure to Silicon Valley’s experiments with financial technology.
The university chapter also connects two members of WeLab’s founding team. Frances Kang, his wife, is a co-founder. Kelly Wong was a classmate from Sydney. The business they founded in 2013 grew from relationships stretching across different stages of Loong’s life. A company described through technology and investment rounds also has this quieter architecture: people who already know one another.
A banker learns the other side of the counter
Founding WeLab gave him a fresh appreciation of ordinary business obstacles. He has described difficulties opening a bank account, renting office space, recruiting and raising money. Fifteen years of financial experience did not arrange the new company’s affairs for him. The people building a financial service still had to persuade others to provide them with financial services.
Early fundraising brought another problem: investors wanted results, while the company needed money to build a record of results. Loong has acknowledged that the founders’ professional networks helped them reach potential backers. His account leaves room for both effort and existing connections. A useful banking career had supplied knowledge and introductions, though neither could make every pitch successful.
That matters to the tone of his story. An experienced professional can start a business and discover how much remains unfamiliar. The former title does not open every door. Each small task creates its own test, and several have very little to do with the skill that made the founder successful before.
The paperwork was part of the problem
WeLab began with online lending in Hong Kong and expanded into mainland China in 2014. Loong’s case for the business was straightforward: applying for credit could require substantial paperwork and a long wait. A digital process offered a way to handle the application and assess the borrower more quickly.
By 2019, he was describing the use of unstructured mobile data, credit models and machine learning to make decisions. Fraud detection was part of the same discussion. The technology had to help distinguish between applications that could be served and risks the business should avoid. Speed was attractive to the customer; dependable decisions were necessary for the lender.
This is where the banking background becomes visible. The ambition to make finance convenient sits alongside the obligation to understand a loan. The interface is what a customer encounters. Behind it, the company has to do the less photogenic work of evaluating information. A fast answer is useful only when the process producing it deserves trust.
One idea, different markets
WeLab received a Hong Kong virtual banking licence in 2019. WeLab Bank launched in 2020. The change broadened what the group could offer beyond lending. It also made the distinction between a technology business and a bank particularly concrete. Deposits, savings and the expectations attached to them give a digital product a considerable weight.
Loong has argued that Hong Kong and Indonesia require different approaches. In a market where customers already have bank accounts, another account needs a reason to exist. His Hong Kong emphasis has been lending and wealth. In Indonesia, he has stressed access for people who have not previously had an account. The software may travel; the customer’s starting point changes.
The Indonesian expansion involved Astra, with a lending joint venture established in 2018 and Bank Saqu launched in 2023. Regional ambition therefore meant working with a local partner. Building once and taking the work into another market has an obvious appeal. Each country still asks questions of its own about customers, regulation and the usefulness of the products.
“We see digital banking as the future of financial services.”
Simon Loong, 2022
His career has moved from working within established banks to building institutions with different starting conditions. That movement gives the regional plan its interest. Experience in Hong Kong can be carried abroad, but the next market supplies another classroom. The founder remains responsible for deciding what transfers and what needs to be learned again.
Growth acquires a balance sheet
WeLab Bank reported that it reached monthly profitability in December 2024 and sustained profitability through the first half of 2025. In April 2026, it reported full-year 2025 revenue of HK$942 million, a 35% increase. Its definition of revenue is operating income before changes in allowances for expected credit losses. Those are the Hong Kong bank’s figures, rather than the revenue of the whole group.
For a profile of Loong, the useful point is the kind of test these figures introduce. Founders can talk about replacing friction with convenience. A bank must also account for the economics of doing so. Revenue, credit costs and investment turn the broad promise into something that can be examined over time.
Reported revenue, up 35% year-on-year.
Operating income before changes in allowances for expected credit losses.In January 2026, WeLab announced US$220 million of Series D strategic financing, comprising debt and equity. Participants included Prudential Hong Kong, Fubon Bank Hong Kong, HKIC, TOM Group, Allianz X and HSBC. The group’s stated uses included expansion in Southeast Asia, new products and improvements to its platform. A financing round provides resources for those plans; the work still has to follow.
Another unfamiliar assignment
Loong’s appetite for trying things has also produced a lighter test. Approached about a magazine cover with six outfits, he initially declined twice. Business attire was familiar. Six different looks were a complication. After reflecting during the Christmas holidays, he contacted the editor and agreed. Colleagues helped prepare the clothes, and the shoot took place in the office.
He later wrote that the photographer introduced him to corners of the workplace he had scarcely noticed. The detail is charming because it makes unfamiliarity so local. You can run a company and still need someone else to show you around your own office. He came away with photographs he liked and a refreshed wardrobe. Few leadership exercises offer such a practical dividend.
At work, the experiments are more technical. WeLab announced an AI-focused partnership with Google in September 2025, covering operations, products, marketing and staff development. Plans included an internal investment research agent. The collaboration put training alongside tools, giving employees a place in the proposed changes rather than treating adoption as a procurement decision alone.
Loong has been trying AI tools himself despite lacking a formal software engineering background. His recent account emphasizes wider employee participation and learning from colleagues. WeLab considered universal proficiency exams and dropped the idea. For a founder who willingly recalls his own undistinguished school performance, a workplace with fewer exams has a certain biographical symmetry.
Room for a beginner
The culture book offers a small illustration of how WeLab wants people to behave. It recounts a chief financial officer opening the door for a visitor while the receptionist was away. Seniority did not make the door someone else’s responsibility. The example is mundane enough to be useful: it gives an abstract preference for initiative an action a person can actually perform.
Loong’s stated ambition is to bring AI-powered financial services to 500 million users by 2032. It is a target, with a date attached, and a considerable distance to travel. The next chapter will be judged through products, markets and customers. Its scale makes the small habits of learning more consequential, rather than less.
The desks, the classroom and the six outfits belong in the same portrait. Each puts an accomplished person in a situation where previous success offers incomplete instructions. Loong has repeatedly accepted that inconvenience. After a career spent learning how to assess other people’s applications, he continues to give himself assignments.