Socially Distanced Financial Decisions

Having navigated his company Call Levels through choppy waters, trader-turned-techpreneur Daniel Chia is poised to change the financial world, one WhatsApp message at a time.

- Farhan Shah

As Daniel Chia sat across from his bank’s relationship manager at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic a few months ago, both with face masks and shields, he knew there and then that the banking industry’s digital transformation was imminent. And that he would be one of the entrepreneurs leading the way through unchartered waters.

Chia was at the bank to sign a form regarding his formal acceptance of additional financing for his company Call Levels. the irony of that moment was clear. With his signature and the bank’s rubber stamp, he was effectively kick-starting the transformation of the role of relationship managers.

A Cambridge and Harvard graduate, Chia has a calm, measured way of talking that belies his passion for statistical modeling, quantitative analyses, and mathematics. he joined the Government of Singapore Investment Corp (GIC) as an investment manager in 2006, after throwing his mortarboard into the air, and soon found himself neck-deep in the manic world of foreign exchange, commodities, and global economies. and he loved every second of it.

His keen interest in quantitative trading and working in GIC enabled him to nurture this passion. Quantitative analysts – or quants as they’re more commonly known in the finance world – essentially use various forms of mathematics to create models that can be applied in trading. “traders get tired. Models don’t,” says Chia. “My trader friends were always on edge, even during weekends and especially during times of crisis, when new economic policies would be enacted. that’s when I realised that models were a lot more effective in this regard.”