Co-owners,

We've spun the wheel for the Developed Asia-Pacific bucket. The ticker has landed in Singapore, on a bank that turned 90 last year, that almost no one outside Southeast Asia thinks about, and that has spent its entire history doing one thing: betting on the rise of a region.

Before we dive in, a reminder of what the index itself has delivered over time.

Every week, we pull one company at random from the FTSE All-World with ~4,200 companies representing 90% of global stock market wealth. We share the index's long-term returns since inception in 1986 as a reminder of why we're here: the long game. New to the newsletter? Start here.

Founded in 1935 in Singapore. Listed on the Singapore Exchange.

Picture a Chinese merchant in colonial Singapore in 1935, trading rubber and rice along the river. His business is good. His credit, as far as the British banks are concerned, does not exist. They will not lend to him. So a group of men in the same position do the only thing left to do: they build their own bank.

That bank is UOB. Ninety years later it is the third-largest bank in Southeast Asia, it serves 8.5 million customers across the region, and it is still run by the family that started it.

A few key facts:

We'll come back to that last line, because it matters more than it looks.

On 6 August 1935, a Sarawak-born businessman named Wee Kheng Chiang and six partners founded United Chinese Bank with S$1 million of their own money. It opened that October in the three-storey Bonham Building, by the Singapore River, with a single branch.

The idea was simple and a little defiant. Singapore's Chinese merchants, mostly from the Hokkien community, were the engine of local trade in rubber, rice, sugar, and spices, yet they were locked out of the British colonial banks, who saw them as a credit risk not worth the trouble. So the merchants pooled their capital and lent to each other through a bank they controlled. Relationship banking, in the most literal sense: the lender and the borrower came from the same streets.

The name changed to United Overseas Bank in 1965, to avoid a clash with a bank of the same name in Hong Kong.

Here is what makes UOB unusual among the world's large banks. It has been run by three generations of the same family, in a straight line, for ninety years. The founder ran it first. His son, Wee Cho Yaw, took over in 1958 and spent roughly half a century turning a small local lender into a regional power, growing its assets from a few billion Singapore dollars to hundreds of billions. He died in February 2024, at 95, still advising the bank. His son, Wee Ee Cheong, has been chief executive since 2007 and runs it today.

Wee Cho Yaw's method was patient and relentless: buy a rival, absorb it, improve it, repeat. Chung Khiaw Bank in 1971 doubled UOB's size overnight. Overseas Union Bank followed in 2001, a S$10 billion deal where he out-maneuvered the government-linked DBS. Eight banks acquired across the decades, each one painful, he admitted, because buying a bank means taking on its people, its loans, and its mistakes alongside its branches.

The family still anchors the share register with a stake of roughly 18%. When the people who founded a bank are still steering it, the time horizon looks different from one quarter to the next.

UOB runs three businesses. The easiest way to understand them is to follow three different customers.

Group Wholesale Banking is the historical heart, and the most interesting story. This is the corridor business. When a company needs to ship components from a factory in Vietnam to a buyer in Indonesia, finance the trade, clear the payments, and manage the cash in four currencies, it calls a bank that operates in all of those places. UOB is that bank. Two editions ago we covered DSV, the Danish freight forwarder that arranges the physical journey of goods across the world. UOB does the financial version: it moves the money that travels alongside the cargo. In early 2026, its trade loans were growing close to 20% a year.

Group Retail is the consumer bank, and the story is the rise of the ASEAN middle class. As the region gets richer, its people open accounts, take out mortgages, use credit cards, and eventually start investing. The standout is wealth management: UOB now oversees around S$198 billion (~US$153 billion) of customer assets, and a striking 58% of that comes from customers outside Singapore. The affluent across Southeast Asia want their money held somewhere stable, and Singapore is that somewhere.

Global Markets is the trading floor: currencies, interest rates, treasury products. It posted record income in early 2026, but the first two businesses are where the real story lives.

For most of the last two decades, the global banking giants treated Southeast Asia's consumers as a market to dabble in. Citigroup, the American banking colossus, had built a respectable consumer business across the region: credit cards, deposits, and wealth accounts in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

In 2022, Citi decided to walk away from all of it.

UOB bought the lot for roughly S$5 billion, about US$3.7 billion at the time. The deal handed UOB around 2.4 million new customers in one stroke and doubled its retail business in those four markets.

Think about what that transaction represented. A global American bank looked at Southeast Asia's consumers and saw a business it no longer wanted. A local bank looked at the same customers and saw the future. Wee Ee Cheong's logic was blunt: Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand make up around 80% of the ASEAN market. Win those four, he said, and "I'm already home." The integration of all four was completed in 2025.

UOB's 2025 annual report carries a title that sums up ninety years of strategy: Building the Future of ASEAN. For a company that started as the bank for merchants the colonial system ignored, it is a fitting place to have arrived.

If you glance at the 2025 results, one number jumps out for the wrong reason. Net profit came in at S$4.68 billion, down 23% from the prior year's record. For a bank in stable markets, that looks alarming.

It isn't, and the reason is worth understanding. Most of that drop was a deliberate choice. In late 2025, UOB set aside about S$0.6 billion as a pre-emptive provision: money parked against loans that are performing perfectly well today but sit in areas the bank is watching carefully, mainly commercial property in the US and Greater China. It is the banking equivalent of topping up your emergency fund before you think you'll need it.

Strip that out and the underlying business was solid. Fee income hit a record S$2.6 billion. Total assets grew to S$572 billion (~US$443 billion). Bad loans held steady at 1.5% of the book. And the bank's capital cushion, the buffer that absorbs losses in a crisis, sits at 15.1%, among the strongest in the world.

Which brings us back to those credit ratings: Aa1 from Moody's, AA- from both S&P and Fitch. Only a small handful of banks anywhere carry marks that high. A bank's entire business rests on one belief: that your money is safe with it. Ninety years of conservative lending, deep capital, and a family that treats the bank as a multi-generational inheritance rather than a quarterly scoreboard is what earns a rating like that. The 2025 profit dip is what that conservatism looks like in a single year.

UOB has paid its owners a steady, growing dividend for years, currently yielding around 4%, and marked its 90th birthday with an extra special dividend on top. For a bank, returning cash to owners year after year is its own quiet proof of stability.

Every part of UOB points the same direction. The trade-finance corridors, the wealth flowing in from across the region, the Citi customers in four countries, the branches in Jakarta and Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City. It is all one wager, repeated for ninety years: that Southeast Asia keeps rising.

So far the bet keeps paying. ASEAN's economies grew almost 5% in 2025, Vietnam closer to 8%. A region of nearly 700 million people is getting wealthier, trading more with itself, and building the roads, factories, and middle-class lives that a bank exists to finance. We saw the consumer side of this when we covered Astra International, the company putting Indonesia on wheels. UOB is the bank financing that same rising region, one account and one trade at a time.

The merchants who founded UOB in 1935 were shut out of the financial system and built their own way in. The institution they created is now woven into the economic life of half a continent. If you own a global or Asian index fund, you have been quietly co-owning a piece of Southeast Asia's rise, banked by a 90-year-old family firm that has believed in the region longer than almost anyone.

Data and images sourced from UOB Annual Report 2025 and UOB Group Investor Presentation (May 2026). Share price and market cap as of late-June 2026.

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Next week, we'll be looking at a company from Emerging Markets.