StashAway announces assets under management (AUM) of USD 1 billion

By Edil Corneille

Singapore-based StashAway, Southeast Asia’s growing digital wealth manager for retail and sophisticated investors, has announced that it is managing more than USD 1 billion (MYR 4.05 billion).

The company mentioned that since the launch of StashAway’s services in 2017, numerous wealth managers in Southeast Asia and MENA have emerged. The company is said to be the first digital wealth manager in any of those regions to announce that it manages more than $1 billion USD.

Michele Ferrario, Co-founder and CEO of StashAway says, “When the company was founded, our objective was to significantly improve the way people build their wealth. For those who do invest their savings, traditional investment options just weren’t acceptable. But we knew that cash in the bank is actually our biggest competitor: in Asia, 46% of financial wealth is held in bank deposits, compared to 14% in North America. That’s why we’ve always focused not only on sophisticated investment principles and a great customer experience, but also financial education to help more people understand how to better manage and grow their wealth. This relationship with our clients and the public has been a key to our fast growth.”

StashAway has attributed the attraction of assets to its ability to generate strong returns even through the last few years of volatility. Through 2 market corrections in 2018 and a market crash in 2020, StashAway portfolios generated annualised returns (as of the end of December 2020, returns in MYR) ranging from 16.3% (for its highest risk portfolio) to 3.5% (for its lowest-risk portfolio) since it launched in July 2017. In 2020, the portfolio returns ranged from 22.8% to 3.9% for those same portfolios, and consistently outperform their same-risk benchmarks.

Wai Ken Wong, Country Manager of StashAway in Malaysia adds that, “Reaching this $1 billion USD milestone in less than 4 years is only one of the many signs we see that Asia truly wants a better way to create wealth: We see high conversion rates, large consistent deposits, and engagement with our educational content, for example. We’re still only scratching the surface for what’s possible when it comes to transforming wealth creation in Singapore, Malaysia, and MENA.”