“World domination comes to mind”. Walter de Oude’s answer when asked about his long-term vision may be more than a little tongue in cheek, but it is confident enough to suggest that the region’s most disruptive financial start-up—headed by one of its most forthright entrepreneurs—has still got its mojo.
The latest frontier for Chocolate Finance, the two-year-old fintech, is Hong Kong, where founder and CEO de Oude has just returned from a launch that was characteristically multi-coloured, with a giant purple wheel rolled through the city’s streets in recent weeks to symbolise the business’s arrival in its second market. It also, perhaps, points to a recovery from what he euphemistically describes as a “learning point” and “bump in the road”, when Chocolate was forced in 2025 to suspend instant withdrawals amid a media firestorm caused by a misfiring promotion.
Hong Kong was chosen because, aside from regulatory and demographic similarities to Chocolate’s original Singapore market, the firm identified the “same need” for savers to make their cash work harder in a “long-term stable place”, says de Oude. “Hong Kong is a sophisticated savings community, highly astute when it comes to comparison of various financial products in the main, and we find that in that environment the Chocolate Finance offering is very well understood and very attractive, and that’s showing already in the numbers.”
Chocolate is a fund management company that acts like a savings product, though its real trick is stripping away the rhetoric that often surrounds financial services and appealing to a younger demographic with a straightforward premise and a vibrant, highly digital offering (helped initially by the presence of actor Henry Golding as a brand ambassador). It sits askance from its competitors because it invests in fixed income funds, offering instant access and, critically, a return of 2% in Singapore and 3.8% for most customers in Hong Kong. There is no attempt here to outperform the market; instead, Chocolate wants to improve returns on what its South African-born founder calls its customers’ “cash buckets”.
Couple that with a notably jargon-free sign-up process and intuitive platforms and it’s not hard to see why de Oude, who formerly built and later sold insurer Singlife, is trumpeting more than 100,000 customers (with more to come in Hong Kong, where it’s been hiring fast) and SG$1.15 billion in assets under management at returns between 50 and 80 basis points higher than average fixed deposits.
But none of that would connect without a thought-through brand, the much-vaunted “happy place” for money that seems to be working for its core demographic. “The brand is around the authenticity of simplicity,” says de Oude. “That comes through the visualisation of the brand and the product delivery itself. If you look at the target customer segments and how the product and brand fit within those segments, I think if people are very familiar with financial services, then there are hundreds of solutions that are available to them. But there are a lot of people who bury their heads in the sand… that particular segment of the market is not getting great value and is generally under-serviced.”
Strikingly, the brand has consistently rolled out OOH and digital ads that disregard the playbook followed by competitors from Moomoo to MariBank. Many barely mention money and certainly don’t delve into product details. The language is deliberately lush rather than technical, and the Gen Zers in the imagery aren’t staring wistfully across a cityscape in business attire while contemplating their returns. None have sensible hair.
“In marketing, you’ve only got one chance to make a first impression,” says de Oude. “If you’re going to play, you might as well play as hard as you possibly can and make the best possible impression that you can. We believe we should be putting out one big campaign a year. The bigness and boldness will vary over time depending on where and how our business is going at the time. But for all new businesses, it is vitally important to be as omnipresent, as intense and as aggressive on branding as you can in the beginning, to cast the widest possible net for customer engagement.”
He adds, “We’ve been phenomenally successful because the underlying product is good. You can put lipstick on a pig, and it’s still going to be a pig. We’ve put lipstick on a Ferrari.”
The firm’s latest high-octant stunt is The Chocolate Games, another attempt to “improve the happiness factor around money” through a series of decidedly retro mobile challenges in which users shake or tap phones in double-quick time in order to ascend a leaderboard and win travel miles through the HeyMax loyalty programme (Campaign, for the record, flirted with the lower reaches of glory in the rapid shaking contest but was woefully unable to blink repeatedly for 60 seconds, managing only a fraction of the top performers’ 300-plus eye movements per minute).
It also hints at a directional shift away from brand ambassadors. “We needed a Henry Golding in the beginning,” says de Oude. “He added a lot of value in that early stage, but we’ve played the superstar brand, which won us a lot of credibility, and we can now find new ways to advocate the brand.”
It’s all a far cry from March 2025, when Chocolate saw $500 million in withdrawals in what was breathlessly described at the time as a “near bank run”. In truth, the firm’s decision to limit withdrawals in response to spiralling uptake for its promotion (which encouraged customers to earn points for transactions, including bill payments via popular AXS machines) was understandable, but the situation – and the initial comms response – struck many commentators as naive.
Today, de Oude, who says the business was “ruthlessly transparent” about the problem and has now “surpassed where we were at that juncture” in financial terms despite the withdrawals, is reflective and bullish about it in equal measure. “If we were a traditional financial institution, an event like that would have killed us, it would have destroyed us, but given the way we operate, all it really did was demonstrate how safe and secure we really are, which is brilliant. You couldn’t wish for a better test of confidence.
“Some of the best businesses in the world have gone through the fire to come out on top, and I look back at that chapter, and I’m really proud of the fact that we delivered phenomenal returns to customers, that money was safe, and we delivered it exactly as it said on the box. Even though social media and others threw us a difficult ball to catch, we played it as best we could, and customers have responded phenomenally well to continue supporting the business.”
The “media critique cast doubt in people’s minds,” he adds, but trust levels in the business are now “higher than they’ve ever been”. Certainly, Chocolate is not lacking fresh ambition. Broadly, de Oude wants to shift its focus into “rainy day cash” more commonly used for traditional savings products (“everybody that has money in the bank not doing very much is a potential customer, not just your digitally native 20-35-year-olds or your first movers and rate seekers”) and has plans to expand into Japan and the UAE that are both currently “getting very close” to receiving regulatory ascent. He is notably more reticent on his previously stated desire to take the brand into his old stomping ground of life insurance or to launch business accounts.
Chocolate has yet to turn a profit, but for a privately held business, that’s not a pressing priority, adds de Oude. “We have sufficient capital for the time being, for our immediate needs. The future really depends on how aggressively we grow; if we put new markets to work, there is always a cost factor that goes into growth. But technically, if we were to dial back on the growth, we would be profitable very, very quickly. The most important part of our business now is scale.” An eventual exit also isn’t foremost in his thoughts, although de Oude concedes: “Businesses and brands should be bigger than the people that run them over time, and my hope is Chocolate Finance finds its own identity and growth story as we continue to expand.”
What he’s confident about is that the market will “stay with us” and that Chocolate will remain resolutely different to the banks it intends to disrupt. “Banks and others try and use promotions to get deposits but they do dishonest things. They say ‘I’ll give you 6% for the next 50 days’, but that’s just a headline and after 30 days, it actually goes down to 0.05% again, so that campaign is basically deceitful. Our rate is our rate. We have no intention to buy you as a customer with better rates. We’re just going to give you the best rate we possibly can and do that forever.” It’s not as headline-grabbing a claim as some he’s made in the past, but maybe realism is bankable too.
