GoBear has appointed Adrian Chng to succeed Andre Hesselink as its new chief executive effective July.
GoBear is Asia’s first and only metasearch engine in insurance and banking. The appointment will see Chng lead the management team with Ivonne Bojoh, Frank Stevenaar, and Marnix Zwart as GoBear continues to build on its successes and rapidly scale the business into new products and markets.
Chng is one of Asia’s foremost fintech startup entrepreneurs, co-founding two startups so far and sitting on the board of many others.
Most recently, he was CEO of Fintonia, a merchant bank he founded in 2015 that invests in fintech companies in Asean and Hong Kong. In addition, he co-founded Credolab and AsiaKredit in 2016 and 2017 respectively, driven by strong commitment to helping customers and the community thrive and creating employment for people.
Chng is also well known for leading Asian jobs portal JobsDB.com and a key achievement was their Au$1 billion merger with JobStreet.com in 2014. “There is no doubt that faster, cheaper and easier access to basic financial services improves people’s lives,” he said. “That is why I am so excited to join GoBear right now; we are in the middle of launching new products and expanding into new markets like Indonesia – we are reaching more and more people every day.”
GoBear was started as a partnership between Aegon, a global insurance company, and Walvis, a Dutch venture capital fund, in 2015. Since its inception, GoBear has grown from its home market of Singapore to serving millions of users across Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Vietnam and, soon, Indonesia. The company now employs over 100 people with 19 different nationalities.
