Profile | He ‘didn’t study enough’ but was a bank vice-president at 28 – WeLab fintech founder and CEO on his path to success
- Simon Loong was not a dedicated student, but threw himself into work and rose through the ranks at Citi and Standard Chartered before starting his own company
- Now the group CEO of fintech company WeLab in Hong Kong, Loong credits his success to good timing and midlife lessons well learned, he tells Kate Whitehead
I was born in Hong Kong in 1977 and was a sporty, naughty and rebellious kid. My dad was a civil servant, an engineer, and my mum worked in human resources for a bank. My brother is two-and-a-half years older than me and was the studious one. I hung out with friends and was never really good at school work, I had bad grades.
My brother went to Haileybury, a boarding school in Hertfordshire (England), and when I was 13, I went there, too. I loved the freedom but it was short-lived, because after a term my parents migrated to Australia and the whole family moved to Sydney.
Like most parents, mine wanted to get their kids into the most academically demanding school, which was Sydney Grammar School. At the admissions interview with my parents, I sat at the back while my brother, being the older kid and smart and intellectually curious, had a good conversation about politics.
The admissions officer accepted my brother and then looked over my parents’ shoulder and said, “What about the one at the back? OK, we’ll take him as well.”
Arty and parties
At Sydney Grammar, my housemaster was the head of the art department. He suggested I take art as my elective and I really enjoyed it and took it for three consecutive years. For the university admissions exam, in addition to English, maths and science, we had to choose an elective and I took art.