Lessons from the late Elizabeth Sam and Gloria Lee

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

Lee’s cover story is spectacularly minimising: painted as a stewardess-turned-housewife urged by her doctor to stop playing so much golf and get out of the sun, she “scraped together” S$700,000 from savings and a bank loan to buy herself a seat at the Malaysian stock exchange (Singapore’s was still part of it at the time).