GoBear hires former Fintonia, JobsDB.com chief Adrian Chng as next CEO

SINGAPORE-BASED banking and insurance startup GoBear has hired former Fintonia and JobsDB.com chief executive Adrian Chng as its new CEO.

Mr Chng will assume the role on Monday, July 16. He will also step down as CEO of Fintonia, a financial technology (fintech) consultancy and investment group that he co-founded, on the same day, The Business Times has learnt.

He will remain as the non-executive chairman of Fintonia and a non-executive director on the boards of Fintonia's various portfolio companies, including consumer credit scoring business CredoLab and Asian digital lending business AsiaKredit.

Mr Chng told BT: "Fintonia has a strong team that will continue to manage these portfolio companies and make new investments. For example, Fintonia is about to complete a couple of private equity investments that it expects to be public soon."

BT understands that Fintonia's new CEO is currently a managing director at Fintonia, whose name Mr Chng declined to reveal. He is a private equity and investment banking professional originally from Hungary, and has worked in Singapore for the last eight years, said Mr Chng.

Before Fintonia, Mr Chng held the reins at Asian jobs portal JobsDB.com.

At GoBear, Mr Chng will succeed Andre Hesselink, a Dutchman who has served as GoBear's CEO since the startup's founding in 2015. Mr Hessenlink will move back to the Netherlands and continue to be involved as a special adviser to GoBear and its shareholders, Aegon and Walvis.

GoBear is a comparison site for financial and insurance products that started as a partnership between Aegon, a global insurance company, and Walvis, a Dutch venture capital fund. Today, it operates in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Vietnam.

GoBear said in an announcement on Thursday that it will launch new products and continue to expand across Asia, starting with Indonesia.