Lu Global, a wealth-management fintech in Singapore, has just launched a marketplace to enable its customers to trade the same products they bought on the company’s website.
Kit Wong, CEO at Lu Global, says the company has developed its consumer-facing business and is now selling both funds and structured products.
But it believes some clients want to get out of these positions, particularly structured notes. Instead of having to hold them to maturity, they can now see if other users in the Lu system are willing to buy them (at a discount).
Wong says the firm, which has a capital markets services (CMS) license in Singapore, serves about 300,000 customers. Some are resident in Singapore (where the business can only market to accredited investors), others are from outside, who can be either professional investors or retail.
The biggest segment of investors are mainland Chinese, who already know the Lufax brand, but there are also a lot of Taiwanese and Hongkongers, and a growing number of Southeast Asian users, Wong says.
The electronic marketplace has just gone live, so it has no volumes to speak of. Lu Global does not take positions in this secondary trading environment – it merely matches its existing customer base in case users want to make trades among themselves.
Lu Global declined to state its assets under management. Wong says the largest number of products are mutual funds, issued by the likes of BlackRock and Pimco – but the biggest volumes are in structured products.
He believes this may have to do with economic and political uncertainty in the region, which is spurring demand for products with known outcomes and terms.
But such products only pay out upon maturity – and the same destabilizing factors may be leading more investors to want to cash out early, even if they do so at a loss. But providing a marketplace not only gives them access to liquidity (assuming there’s a buyer on the other side) but also lets them sell at a better rate.
The launch of this product is a strange parallel to parent Lufax’s journey. Shanghai-based Lufax began in 2011 as a peer-to-peer marketplace for transactions, financing, and investment management. It exited the transactions and financing aspects to focus just on wealth management.
Lu Global built itself first as a marketplace for wealth products – but now it’s expanding into secondary trading, creating a marketplace for customers to exchange financial products before they reach maturity among themselves – a different kind of P2P than lending, which mainland authorities are clamping down on.
