Executive Profile: How Wei Chen Built a $2B Trade Finance Platform at 35

Wei Chen did not set out to build a financial technology company. A former commodity trader at a Hong Kong-based metals trading house, he spent seven years watching small suppliers struggle to fund transactions that his company — with its banking relationships and balance sheet — could execute effortlessly. "The information was the same. The product was the same. The price was the same. The only difference was access to capital," he says. "That seemed wrong to me." The company he founded in 2017, TradeConnect, has processed over $2 billion in trade finance transactions and serves more than 3,000 SME trading companies across Southeast Asia. Chen is 35 years old. The journey was not straightforward. Chen describes three moments when the company came close to failure: a failed fundraise in 2019 that left the company with six weeks of runway; a major client default in 2020 that forced painful provisions; and a regulatory challenge in Indonesia in 2021 that threatened their operating licence. In each case, persistence, adaptability, and what Chen calls "embarrassingly transparent" communication with investors and clients proved decisive.

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