IN RECENT weeks, two doyens of the banking and finance industry passed on: Gloria Lee, who founded Kim Eng Securities, and banking veteran Elizabeth Sam, a pioneer leader at Singapore’s central bank, and the first woman to sit on the board of a Big Four bank (which, at the time, included the Overseas Union Bank).

Regrettably, neither woman gave many interviews – yet both were veritable founts of wisdom, based on what I culled from our archives. Here’s what I learned from their lives, and the stories told about them:

1) The power of being underestimated