More than a pawnshop, from day one

MoneyMax opened its first store in Singapore in 2008, founded by Chun Seng's parents together with his uncle and aunties. Even then, he says, the ambition was never to stay a pawnbroker.

"We could have very well named our organization MoneyMax Pawn Shop Private Limited," he says. "But if you take a look at the name of the listco today, MoneyMax Financial Services Limited, I think straight from the onset, there was always this vision of being more than just a pawnbroker. Pawnbroking was just the first step into the financial services space for us."

Chun Seng joined the business in 2018. What followed, he describes as a natural progression rather than a strategic pivot: automotive financing in 2019, and real estate financing in 2023. Each new lending line was chosen through the same lens: identifying asset classes with durable value that could be securitised - automotive vehicles and real estate.

"So three major lending portfolios for us: pawnbroking, automotive financing, real estate financing," he says. "Every single one of this portfolio has an underlying asset." Pawnbroking is backed by gold, automotive by vehicles, real estate by property, a common thread of securitised lending that lets MoneyMax serve, in his words, "the unbanked and underbanked segments" of Southeast Asia sustainably, without taking on unsecured risk.

Ask Chun Seng about the industry's oldest problem and he doesn't hesitate. "When we started in 2008, I think the stigma attached to the industry was quite strong," he says. "The pawnshops of old tend to have steel bars, are dimly lit, and deliberately designed in a manner where the staff of the pawnshop is always on a higher level than the customer. Consumer experience is not ideal. And because of that, the stigma of entering a pawnshop perpetuated within the entire community."

Nowhere is that customer-first instinct more visible than across the Causeway. MoneyMax has operated in Malaysia since 2014, running a pawnbroking-only network of roughly 75 stores, including 15 drive-through pawnshops, believed to be one of the largest such networks in the country.

The idea, Chun Seng says, came from observing everyday friction points. "Our shops tend to be limited by the availability of parking lots within the vicinity," he explains. In a country where most customers arrive by car or motorcycle, a full car park can mean losing them to the next pawnbroker down the road. Then there is the question of privacy: customers carrying valuable items or large amounts of cash are understandably security-conscious. "This is why it's very common in our older shops to see customers coming in with a red plastic bag, wrapping things in newspaper, trying to hide it from plain sight." And because pawnbroking is often accessed during moments of financial urgency, long queues and crowded counters can add unnecessary friction.

Drive-through services were already a familiar part of Malaysia’s convenience landscape, from food and retail to essential services. MoneyMax saw an opportunity to apply the same principle to pawnbroking: making the process faster, more private and more accessible. A typical transaction, including item drop-off, authentication, valuation, KYC, loan negotiation and disbursement, takes around 15 to 20 minutes.

"To be honest, not too different from a drive-through experience," Chun Seng says. The concept was first piloted in Johor before being scaled across the peninsula. "In fact, I would say probably our better performing stores tend to be the stores equipped with drive-through," he adds. "I'm fairly sure it's a solution that the customers prefer."

Chun Seng's answer on what he rewards internally is unambiguous: a growth mindset, ranked, deliberately, above qualifications and experience.

It's a philosophy he ties directly to how the company itself grew: "Every single business that we have built in this organisation, pawnbroking, automotive financing, real estate financing, even our retail and trading, we have all done it without prior experience," he says. "We have all done it by ourselves, learning along the way, pivoting along the way, changing along the way." Those same instinct shapes how he wins over long-tenured staff on new initiatives too: less charisma, more clarity. "The best ideas tend to be the simplest ideas, and then you work off the simple ideas to scale the business," he says, testing every new initiative against unit economics before scaling it up.

The company's move from the Catalist Board to the SGX Main Board this year draws a similarly reflective response. "We look at it as kind of like a full circle moment," he says, contrasting the investor appetite at MoneyMax's original 2008 listing with conditions at its 2026 Mainboard transfer. "There's a big difference, vast difference, actually. I think that is probably testament to how far the organisation has grown in a short space of time." It's a mindset he traces to an old saying inside the company: "We are just looking to better ourselves at 1% a day, because come the end of the year, you're 365% better than the start of the year."

MoneyMax's raise on ADDX marked its first time borrowing outside the banking system. "It was a good litmus test for us to see whether we could progress past the traditional ways of doing businesses," Chun Seng says. Four years on, he describes the experience as "extremely pleasant" and the platform as having become "a staple part of our funding sources," one component in a deliberate strategy to diversify funding as part of the company's broader risk and capital management.

Looking ahead, Chun Seng frames MoneyMax's growth along two tracks. The first is addressable market: Southeast Asia, he notes, consumes gold heavily, for jewellery, investment, savings, and heirlooms alike, which is precisely why the company anchored its vision here in the first place. The second is less visible but no less important: internal readiness, including AI. "AI is definitely certainly something that is at the forefront of everyone's mouths: to be honest, I think a sexy word that people bandy around a lot," he says. "There's a lot of work to be done before your company can be AI-ready, and it's extremely expensive as well." For MoneyMax, that means unglamorous groundwork first (data migration chief among it) before any AI ambitions become real.

Chun Seng describes his one enduring love, football-wise, as Manchester United, a devotion strong enough that he offers a word of warning to newlyweds watching: "Don't bring your wife to football matches on your honeymoon. She won't really like it."

At the time of this interview, he was, by his own estimate, somewhere between 24 and 48 hours from becoming a first-time father, hospital bag already packed and waiting in his car.

It's a fitting footnote for someone whose answer to "what do you want customers to think about MoneyMax" circles back, in the end, to the same instinct: build for what's coming, not just what's here.