iFAST’s mission is to help investors around the world invest globally and profitably.

All our business initiatives start with the mission in mind. Traditionally, unit trust (mutual fund) investing was done with the banks and was typically limited to a small range of funds. iFAST’s founders Lim Chung Chun and Moh Hon Meng felt that investors can be better served with a wide variety of funds, reduced entry costs, ease of investing and investment education. With this in mind, ‘Fundsupermart Holdings Pte Ltd’ was incorporated in Singapore on 11 September 2000.

Set up as a start-up dot.com company with an online fund supermarket portal, our focus was to become a unit trust specialist. While the others had spent the bulk of their revenue on advertising, we chose to invest in technology innovation and investor education. Fundsupermart magazine was thus launched in 2001 as an initiative to create awareness in unit trust investing and education. The magazine is now widely recognised as the industry standard literature for unit trust investing. We also have the largest in-house research team in the industry specialising in unit trust research.

In October 2001, the Financial Advisers Act was passed and became operational in the third quarter of 2002. This act gave birth to a new financial intermediary, namely the Independent Financial Adviser (IFA). The IFA business model has numerous ingredients to be the dominant player in the financial intermediary space.

Firstly, the business model is driven by entrepreneurs, are not tied to any product provider or financial institution and can have a wide range of products to advise investors. This allows investors to enjoy independent advice, flexible fees structure, better service and long term relationship. However, the IFA face the following challenges: the lack of scale, IT and administration infrastructure, research expertise, brand equity and competition from the traditional sources of advice, i.e. banks and insurance companies. The iFAST Financial platform was developed to address these challenges.

In 2003, the Group was renamed ‘iFAST Corporation Pte Ltd’. The iFAST name is an acronym of Integrated Financial Adviser Services and Transaction platform. iFAST Financial was started as the B2B arm that provides services and fund administration to financial advisers.

To provide the breadth of services to IFA, we acquired a software company Vexist that specialised in financial adviser CRM in 2003 and renamed it as Verve Technology in 2007. In 2004, we developed an insurance administration platform integrated with our unit trust platform. In 2006, the pension administration service was introduced.

In recent years, iFAST Corp has been expanding beyond local shores. It is now the holding company for various iFAST subsidiaries overseas. In 2007, iFAST Corp launched its first overseas business, Fundsupermart.com in Hong Kong. In the same year, iFAST Corp entered into a JV agreement with OSK Investment Bank Bhd to prepare for its business entry in Malaysia. In 2008, iFAST Corp entered into a joint venture agreement with Deutsche Bank’s asset management division, to expand its businesses to India in the first half of 2009. In March 2009, we acquired ING’s I-WRAP platform in Hong Kong.

From a business that started with 4 staff, we have grew rapidly to 278 staff strong currently in the 4 countries. Our Assets Under Administration (AUA) in Singapore has a compound annual growth rate at 72.7% (fundsupermart) and 95.2% (iFAST Financial) in 2005 to 2007.

As of January 2010, iFAST Corp celebrates its 10 year anniversary in business. iFAST Corp envisage many more bountiful 10 years to come.