DragonFi Securities Inc., the stock brokerage firm backed by businessmen Edgar Sia II and Tony Tan Caktiong, begins its inaugural operations at the Philippine Stock Exchange on Monday, March 13.
“The achievement of this milestone brings DragonFi a step closer towards unveiling our best-in-class stock trading platform that will thrill professional and aspirational investors alike. The coming weeks will be devoted to beta testing in preparation for our full-scale launch by the end of April,” DragonFi CEO Jon Carlo Lim said.
“DragonFi is the perfect vehicle to uphold our shared belief in the primacy of investing towards long-term wealth creation,” Sia said.
DragonFi will be under BeeDragon Global Corp., a joint venture with Honeystar Holdings Corp., Injap Investments Inc. and Lim.
BeeDragon houses the group’s fintech-related endeavors and managed by Lim as president and CEO and Cathryn Ann Lao as director and chief technology officer.
Honeystar Holdings Corp. is the holding company headed by Jollibee Foods Corp. founder Tan, while Injap Investments is the holding company headed by Mang Inasal founder and MerryMart chairman Sia.
Both Honeystar and Injap Investments are principal shareholders of listed firm DoubleDragon Corporation.
“Tony Tan Caktiong and myself carefully select the specific business and industry we invest in, and we see this venture to have significant long-term growth potential, and as an important strategic addition to the ecosystem that we are building the past several years since our first partnership in Mang Inasal in 2010, and our succeeding partnership in DoubleDragon in 2012,” Sia, who is also chairman of BeeDragon, said.
“Over the long term, we also see the FinTech space create the synergic gel that would enhance and bring benefits to the various other business units in our ecosystem,” Sia said.
Lim, also BeeDragon president and CEO, received his MBA focused on finance and accounting from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and has over 20 years of financial markets experience.
Lao, meanwhile, received her master of engineering in computer science from Cornell University. She worked in equities technology in New York for both the Bank of America and Citigroup N.A.
“Currently, less than 2 percent of the Philippines’ working-age population has a stock brokerage account. By making investing convenient and effortless, we hope to broaden participation in the capital markets, one of the key builders of wealth. We aspire to democratize personal finance in a meaningful way by leveraging best-in-class investment technologies. It is our intention to provide wealth-building tools to effect the dispersion of economic prosperity to more Filipinos,” Lim said.
