A trading business can move enormous sums and still find itself irritated by the bill. Wong Joo Seng had lived with that irritation. Running a foreign-exchange business meant paying the operators of the systems through which trades passed. Eventually, the machinery began to look like an opportunity of its own. If you have spent years using a tool, you acquire fairly specific opinions about its shortcomings.
By 2016, Wong was ready to act on his. He co-founded Spark Systems in Singapore to develop institutional foreign-exchange technology. The ambition was practical: make trading faster, more resilient and less expensive. The customers would be professional firms with little appetite for charming excuses when their systems failed. A pleasing company name could get a conversation started. The platform would have to finish it.
This was his third business-building chapter. Earlier came G K Goh Financial Services and M-DAQ. The sequence matters because Spark grew out of work he had already done, with people and problems he already understood. Wong’s story follows a professional customer becoming a supplier, carrying a trader’s knowledge into the design of the trading tools.
A trader learns the machinery
At the National University of Singapore, Wong studied mathematics and economics, graduating in 1987. Later, he described the two subjects as connected preparations for finance. Economic ideas acquire rather immediate consequences when someone must put a price on a transaction. Mathematics helps turn an argument about value into a number another person can accept, reject or trade against.
His banking career included currency and precious-metals options at Republic National Bank of New York in Singapore. He subsequently worked on currency options at Bank of New Zealand in Wellington, then returned to Singapore as head of treasury at TLB Bullion and Futures. These were roles inside the mechanisms of markets: making prices, managing positions and understanding what a trade leaves behind.
In 1998, he became founding chief executive of G K Goh Financial Services. He remained CEO until January 2014. It was a long apprenticeship in building an operating business, rather than simply occupying an established desk. A trader has to judge a position. A chief executive also has to make the organisation around the position work.
His account of that first venture contains a useful wrinkle. The offer came with capital, the CEO job and a share of profits. Only after building the business did he fully appreciate the missing equity stake. The distinction is small enough to fit into a contract and large enough to change how a founder thinks about the next company. Being responsible for the engine does not automatically make you its owner.
He co-founded M-DAQ in 2010 and became executive chairman in January 2014. M-DAQ addressed cross-border currency transactions, another expression of the difficulty of moving between monetary worlds. Spark would focus more directly on the professional trading infrastructure. Across the ventures, the currency problem kept changing shape. Wong kept finding a reason to stay with it.
The long way round a small island
For Spark, speed was partly a question of geography. Wong wanted more of the matching machinery close to the institutions using it in Singapore. A financial district can contain buyers, sellers and banks within a compact area while their electronic orders travel elsewhere to meet. The people may be neighbours. Their transactions can still take the scenic route.
The attraction of local infrastructure is easy to understand without pretending to be an options trader. A price belongs to a moment. Time passes between seeing that price and completing the trade. Shortening the journey reduces one source of delay. It does not abolish risk or guarantee a profit, but it can make the equipment better suited to the work.
Wong also recognised the awkward social problem inside the technical one. A bank considering a new Singapore centre needed to know who else would be there. Building first could mean paying for equipment before a useful network of counterparties arrived. Everybody could see the potential advantage; everybody could also wait for somebody else to spend the money.
That made the work larger than selling a piece of software. It involved encouraging institutions to commit to the same location and helping make the local network worth joining. His discussions of Singapore’s FX ecosystem put infrastructure and participation together. A fast meeting place is only useful when the people you need to meet turn up.
“I’m selling spades in a gold rush.”Wong Joo Seng, 2017
The spade analogy neatly locates his business. Spark provides technology through which institutions trade. It need not choose which currency will win tomorrow to see a purpose in improving how today’s orders travel. A supplier of tools still has plenty to worry about: reliability, customer requirements, the next competitor and whether the tools earn their place on the desk.
A new team, with old loyalties
When Spark began, Wong assembled a new team rather than taking the strongest people from M-DAQ. In a published conversation about the venture, he explained that he wanted to avoid damaging the previous business, in which he remained a shareholder. Starting again gave him a reason to recruit. It did not, in his view, give him a reason to empty the old office.
That decision adds something human to a career often described through funding rounds and trading systems. A founder’s relationships continue after the next company is registered. People remember how departures happen. Wong’s account suggests that continuity mattered to him: the new venture could pursue its opportunity while the earlier one retained its capacity to pursue its own.
His hiring advice is similarly practical. He looks for people who can apply academic knowledge and combine skills from different disciplines. A trading system sits where finance, software and a client’s daily workflow intersect. It would be inconvenient if the people building it refused to cross any of those boundaries. The customer is unlikely to organise the problem according to everyone’s university department.
Wong also tells aspiring entrepreneurs to understand enough about unfamiliar business subjects to recognise when help is needed. That leaves room for expertise without demanding that the chief executive personally contain all of it. Asking a good question can be a more productive use of experience than delivering a confident answer to the wrong problem.
The customers change the blueprint
Spark’s co-founders described an instructive product evolution in July 2024. The business started with aggregation for buy-side customers consuming liquidity from banks and electronic venues. Bank customers then brought particular use cases. Those requests helped develop a sell-side product, enabling banks to make markets and distribute currency prices to their own clients.
The change widened the company’s place in the transaction. A platform helping one institution obtain prices could also help another institution produce and distribute them. The connection came through actual customer work. Product development, in this account, involved sitting down with clients, showing prototypes and revising what had been built.
It is an unglamorous process with a sensible advantage: a prototype lets people argue about something visible. An abstract promise can accommodate everyone’s preferred interpretation. A working version is less diplomatic. It reveals whether the workflow makes sense, what is missing and which apparently clever feature creates another chore.
The co-founders also emphasised building the platform in-house. Owning the development process gave Spark control over timing and room to change the product. Their stated ambition in that 2024 interview included expansion to London and New York. The intention was global; the immediate method remained close attention to clients and the systems they needed.
Fast systems, patient work
October 2024 brought two concrete developments. ATFX announced a strategic Series C investment in Spark, intended to support its institutional offering and explore the use of ATFX Connect liquidity. Later that month, Spark announced the project to supply OCBC’s core FX pricing and trading platform. Both developments placed the technology in relationships with established financial businesses.
For Wong, that is a substantial kind of test. A bank project brings requirements that have to survive contact with existing operations. An investment relationship brings another set of expectations. The promise of speed must coexist with integration, scalability and the ordinary discipline of delivery. Milliseconds are an attractive unit for a headline; implementation has a much longer calendar.
Spark’s reported growth since 2022, published 3 October 2025. These figures describe its Singapore matching engine.
The company’s October 2025 update reported growth in both volume and clients for its Singapore matching engine. Those are measures of activity on a defined part of the infrastructure. They give a dated view of the business that followed the original complaint about trading costs. The early idea now had customers and transactions to count.
Wong’s public work also extends beyond Spark. In April 2025, as a deputy chairman of the Singapore International Chamber of Commerce, he moderated a manpower dialogue with Zaqy Mohamad. The subject fits his recurring interest in talent. Trading infrastructure depends on people capable of building and maintaining it, and the labour questions stretch beyond a single company’s recruitment list.
At the Singapore FinTech Festival’s 2024 discussion on a decade of fintech in ASEAN, he encouraged action on considered ideas. His own career gives that advice a specific setting: banking knowledge, successive ventures and a willingness to return to a familiar problem with a different business model. The irritation that started Spark was ordinary enough. He gave it years of work. Somewhere between a trader’s invoice and a bank’s pricing engine, a complaint became a company.