Learning early on that the best investment is education

Moomoo exec credits her parents' forward thinking for the success she has now

- Sue-Ann Tan

To describe her early years as a struggle seems like a massive understatement for finance sector executive Echo Zhao.

Ms Zhao, 46, grew up in a rural part of China with limited resources, forcing her parents to save every penny to fund her education and her sister's.

And when she finally made it to the workforce, her first job as a private sales associate was equally a slog, involving making 100 calls a day and facing many rejections.

"I started in a client-facing role, covering retail investors in Asia out of Europe. It was like the movie Pursuit Of Happyness," she says, referencing the 2006 Hollywood film about a struggling salesman.

But having gone through the grind, these difficult experiences stood her in good stead when she began climbing the career ladder.

Ms Zhao is now the country head of Moomoo Singapore, an advanced financial technology company that offers a digitalised brokerage and wealth management platform. It is a subsidiary of Nasdaq-listed Futu Holdings.

The Moomoo brand has a presence in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Japan, Canada and the United States.

Ms Zhao studied international business and finance at the Copenhagen Business School in 2001. It was where she cultivated an interest in investing by taking part in share trading competitions, all on paper, of course.

"Experiencing the ups and downs of the market was like a roller coaster ride of emotions, with both fear and excitement. I was very intrigued," she says.

Ms Zhao is married to an entrepreneur in the blockchain technology space, who is the founder of start-ups that include cur8.io, a display technology for digital arts, and Splash, a web3 community. They have three children.