Disrupting Wealth Management with Samuel Rhee, Founder of Endowus
With Samuel Rhee — Co-founder, Endowus
Key Insights
Why do banks take one to three percent of your wealth management savings every year without delivering real advice?
Banks operate on a product distribution model — earning trailer fees and retrocession fees from fund managers for placing their products with clients. This creates a fundamental conflict of interest where the incentive is to sell, not to advise. Fee-only wealth management platforms like Endowus return all trailer fees to the investor, removing the conflict entirely and aligning the platform’s revenue with client outcomes.
How did Endowus build a CPF investing platform that the biggest Singapore wealth management firms had not?
Endowus spent two years and millions of dollars building a purpose-built technology stack for CPF investing — reducing account opening from two weeks to five minutes. Incumbent banks, including the largest in Singapore, had not built end-to-end CPF investing infrastructure because the economics of disrupting their existing profitable model did not justify the risk. Only a startup with nothing to lose could take that bet on a product that did not yet exist.
What stops Big Tech from taking over digital wealth management and robo investing in Asia?
Financial services is a licensed, regulated industry with high barriers to entry and significant compliance costs. Big Tech platforms have struggled to move beyond payments and simple deposit-like products because sophisticated wealth management requires deep financial domain expertise — not just technology. Trust, licensing, and the complexity of investment management service have so far kept Big Tech at the margins of the wealth space across Asia.
Why is the fee-only wealth advisory model inevitable for Singapore and APAC wealth management?
Regulatory change in developed markets — the US, Europe, and Australia — has already made commission-based product distribution illegal. Singapore and APAC are expected to follow as investor protection regulations evolve. Digital wealth platforms are accelerating this shift by proving the model works commercially, and incumbents are beginning to copy the fee-only structure. Samuel Rhee views this as a net positive regardless of who delivers it.
How does Endowus give retail investors access to institutional investment management service quality?
Endowus operates like a sovereign wealth fund for the individual — curating institutional-grade fund managers and investment frameworks previously accessible only to large institutional clients. By operating independently and at scale through a digital platform, it offers access, advice, and cost structures that replicate private wealth investment management service quality at a fraction of the price, powered by robo investing infrastructure.
Highlights
One thing you want to change in wealth management
The Conversation
01
The Endowus Thesis — Advice, Access, Cost
Why Endowus was built and what makes it structurally different from every bank wealth offering in Singapore.
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What are you and Endowus doing differently?
The biggest reason people resonate with the mission of Endowus is mostly because we try to solve a pain point that is very much real. The pain of having to pay too much in fees. The difficulty of investing well because products that exist aren’t available to you. And the advice problem — most people don’t feel they have enough tools, information, or education to make decisions that will help them build wealth for the long term, secure their financial future, and be prepared for retirement.
We’re a direct-to-consumer solution. We want to give individuals advice on a digital platform, with great content, give them access to products that will give them better success, and a wonderful experience. The three pillars of success in wealth are advice, access, and cost. We’re fee-only because that is where the world is headed. We don’t keep any of the trailer fees, retrocession fees — we give it all back to the customer. We’re independent, so we can give independent, unbiased advice. And we’re institutional in our approach — like a sovereign wealth fund, we’re empowering the individual to make better choices.
02
Why Banks Can’t Copy This
The structural reason incumbents are trapped — and why even their best digital teams can’t close the gap.
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There are so many banks out there. Why are they not doing the Endowus model — refunding trailer fees, working toward access, cost, and platform?
They are incumbent players. They own the client and the business. Wealth is a highly profitable business, so they have to start by cannibalising their own business. There’s a lot of inertia not to change what is working for any institution. The fundamental problem is they take one to three percent of someone’s life savings every year without providing meaningful advice. Changing that means going to zero revenue from a very fat margin business. That is not something any incumbent is eager to do.
03
The CPF Breakthrough — Building From Nothing
How Endowus built the infrastructure Singapore’s biggest bank hadn’t, and what it cost to get there.
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We’re the first and only digital advisor for CPF approved by the CPF Board and the government. No one had built a technology stack purpose-built to solve CPF investing. We spent two years building it, spent millions of dollars, hired a lot of engineers in-house — because there was nothing off the rack that could do this. We had to take that risk with no guarantee that the government was going to approve us. Only a startup can do that. Only a startup can go for something that is not there in existence and create something out of nothing.
DBS — the biggest bank in Singapore — has the people, the resources, the money, the technology, and all the accounts. They’re an agent bank of CPF. And they do not have an end-to-end CPF investing technology stack. Which is phenomenal. Which is crazy to me. But it’s an opportunity for people like Endowus, because we can go in there and take it.
04
Big Tech in Finance — Exciting, But Limited
Why Big Tech’s move into financial services hasn’t cracked wealth management — and what that tells us about the sector.
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Big Tech is increasingly offering financial services. How do you look at them when they’re both your enabling infrastructure and a potential competitor?
Financial services is a regulated, licensed industry. There are barriers to entry and a high cost of providing that service. To succeed you need to be both deep tech and deep fin. You need to understand the pipes — the middle and back office, the regulatory frameworks. It’s much more complicated than a delivery or e-commerce platform. I have yet to see a Big Tech company succeed in wealth in any meaningful way. Trust, licensing, and specialisation have kept them at the margins.
05
The Fee Reckoning — What Has to Change
Samuel Rhee’s vision for where wealth management must go — and why Asia will eventually have no choice.
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One thing you would love to change about wealth management today.
I dream of a day — and it will happen — when there is a sea change in global regulations protecting the consumer, and Singapore and the rest of Asia wake up and move toward protecting the best interests of consumers. In developed markets — the US, Europe, Australia — commissions on distributing financial products are becoming illegal. Asia has to follow. Ripping people off through high fees in just distributing or selling financial products is the wrong way to go about it. That has to change.
I dream of a day when people say — why did I ever go to a bank for wealth services? I go to a bank for lending — credit cards, mortgages. But for wealth services, I’m going to a digital wealth platform because they’re better, easier, cheaper, and on my side.
The Participants
