I want to tell you about the Singapore I grew up in. Not the ones in travel videos on YouTube.
It was the Singapore of kampung households where a single medical bill could undo years of saving. Where sending money home meant finding a middleman you hoped was honest and paying whatever he asked. Where a person could work with integrity for thirty years and still have nothing a bank would recognise as proof of their life. The financial system existed. It just was not built for people like us. It was built around us.
I was one of those people. And I never forgot what that felt like.
This week, EFGH filed its F-4 registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, a significant step toward a proposed listing on the New York Stock Exchange, or NYSE. I want to share what this milestone means to me personally, and explain what EFGH is building and why.
A mobile phone today reaches people that a bank branch never could. For the first time in history, the underserved are not inaccessible. They are communities that have been waiting a very long time for the financial system to show up for them.
EFGH is not an app. We do not compete for downloads or monthly active users. We build digital financial infrastructure: the settlement rails, identity layers, payment architecture and trust systems that sit underneath financial services and make them function at national scale. We call it the Finternet, the financial internet, designed to carry sovereign-grade weight and built to serve communities that conventional financial infrastructure has never reached.
People have asked me why NYSE, and not an exchange closer to home. My answer is straightforward. The problem we are working on is not a regional one. The market trader in Accra, the migrant worker in Singapore, the stallholder in the Mekong Delta, they deserve the same quality of financial infrastructure that a corporation on Park Avenue takes for granted. If I am serious about building that, and I am, I need to be where global capital lives and where global accountability holds.
Let me share what the work looks like on the ground.
In Singapore, we are working with SimplyGo, the system integrator and payment acquirer for Singapore's public transport ticketing system, to develop embedded micro-insurance services for daily commuters. Financial protection wired into infrastructure that millions of commuters already use without thinking about it. Inclusion built into the fabric of everyday life.
In Vietnam, we are building VNL1, a national blockchain infrastructure platform designed to support product authentication and combat counterfeiting. Vietnam's National Assembly passed a product traceability law in June 2024, backed by 408 of 420 deputies, which came into force in January 2026. Counterfeit medicines. Fraudulent food products. These are not inconveniences. They cost lives. VNL1 is part of the national infrastructure response, and we are building it.
In Ghana, our partner Nosmay is building NKWA, the country's first digital levy collection wallet, currently in the Bank of Ghana Regulatory Sandbox. EFGH has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the District Assemblies Common Fund, the statutory body that channels government development funds to every district in Ghana, recording the DACF's intent to work with us on digital financial inclusion across Ghana's communities. We have committed to contribute 10% of our Ghana-derived revenues to the DACF's Community Partners' Fund. The infrastructure must serve the mission. That is not a line for a pitch deck. It is how we operate.
I remember the first conversation with the DACF administrator. He did not ask about our valuation. He asked how quickly we could reach the communities that had been waiting the longest. That is the only question that mattered to me.
There were months early on when I questioned whether a two-year-old company from Singapore had any business knocking on doors in Accra and Kinshasa. Then I saw what was on the other side of those doors. I stopped questioning.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, we have signed a Master Services Agreement with REGIDESO, the national water utility, to modernise payment collection and expand access to digital financial services to more than 100 million people across 26 provinces. Here, households pay for water with cash because no digital alternative has ever been built for them. That is not a market observation. That is an obligation.
Governments. National utilities. Statutory bodies. I am not listing these to make a case for anything other than this: these are the institutions that serve the people the formal financial system has spent decades designing around rather than for. When those institutions trust you with their infrastructure, it means something that no document can fully capture.
In just two years EFGH has grown from a Singapore-based startup to a designer and operator of several nationally significant internet platforms, at times partnering directly with governments.
That frenetic pace of activity could not have been achieved without Singapore as a base. The systems, the values and the work ethic have helped us build trust with our team members and partners in regions some would consider as frontier markets.
Every rail built, every community connected to formal financial services for the first time, that is the attempt of a boy who grew up in Whampoa seeking to give back to a country and to under-served communities around the world.
EFGH exists so that feeling becomes a memory, not a condition the next generation inherits.
Our proposed listing on NYSE will help us fulfil our mission to enable the under-served.
Share
