Extended to September 30, 2026 8/31, 6/30, 5/31, April 30, 2026, 02/28/2026, December 31, 2025, November 15, 2025, September 30, 2025, 6/30/2025
Offer at a glance
Maximum bonus amount: $750
Availability: IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, OH and WI
Direct deposit required: No
Additional requirements: See below
Hard/soft pull: Soft
ChexSystems: Yes
Credit card funding: Up to $3,000, no American Express cards.
Monthly fees:
Early account termination fee:
Household limit:
Expiration date: December 31, 2024
The Offer
Direct link to offer
Associated Bank is offering a checking bonus of up to $750. Bonuses are as follows:
$100 bonus when you open a new Business Foundation Checking account and maintain a $2,000 balance for 90 days
$400 bonus when you open a new Business Core Checking and maintain a $5,000 balance for 90 days
$750 bonus when you open a new Business Advanced Checking account and maintain a $20,000 balance for 90 days
The Fine Print
This offer is limited to a new Associated Bank business checking account opened and funded through December 31, 2024. Open a new Associated business checking account and receive up to a $750 Bonus with one of three options:
A. Open a Business Foundation Checking® account and receive a $100 bonus with a minimum deposit of $2,000 in new money within 30 days of account opening. Also, must maintain a minimum daily balance of $2,000 between days 31 to 90 after opening your account. OR
B. Open a Business Core Checking® account and receive a $400 bonus with a minimum deposit of $5,000 in new money within 30 days of account opening. Also, must maintain a minimum daily balance of $5,000 between days 31 to 90 after opening your account. OR
C. Open a Business Advanced Checking® account and receive a $750 bonus with a minimum deposit of $20,000 in new money within 30 days of account opening. Also, must maintain a minimum daily balance of $20,000 between days 31 to 90 after opening your account.
New money must be funds from outside Associated Bank; deposits or transfers from existing accounts do not qualify. The bonus is deposited into the new Associated Bank business checking account within 120 days of account opening. Account must be open at the time the bonus is paid and must remain open for a minimum of 12 months. If the account is closed within 12 months, Associated Bank reserves the right to deduct the monetary bonus from the account prior to closing.Offer limited to one per customer and cannot be combined with other specials or offers. New customers opening online are limited to IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, OH and WI. Offer not available to customers who have received a new business checking account monetary bonus within the last 24 months and have or have had an Associated Bank business checking account within the last 12 months. Primary owner on the account must be 18 years or older to qualify. For tax reporting purposes, the bonus may be reported to the IRS on Form 1099. Associated Bank colleagues are not eligible. The offer is subject to change, at Associated Bank’s discretion, at any time without notice and other exclusions may apply.
All bank account bonuses are treated as income/interest and as such you have to pay taxes on them
Avoiding Fees
Monthly Fees
Business Foundation ($100)
This account has no monthly fees to worry about.
Business Core ($400)
Business core has a $20 monthly fee, waived the first two months. After that is waived if you meet any of the following:
Maintain average monthly balance of $5,000
Hold $20,000 in average relationship balances.
Utilize an Associated Bank Merchant Services Account
Business Advanced Checking ($700)
Monthly maintenance fee of $35, waived by:
Maintaining an average monthly balance of $15,000 OR
Average relationship balances⁵ of $75,000 OR
Utilize an Associated Bank Merchant Services Account
Early Account Termination Fee
Account needs to be kept open for 12 months otherwise bonus is forfeit.
Our Verdict
Previous best bonus was a $300 referral but requirements were significantly easier. If you put $15,000 into a 5% account for 12 months (this is required for the $750 bonus to keep fee free) you’d miss out on $750 in lost interest, so that one is not worth considering (keep in mind you’d need $20,000 in there for the first three months to trigger the bonus). $400 bonus you’d miss out on $250 so that one is barely worth considering either. I’d probably just give this one a miss and hope for a bigger bonus to come along.
I earn 4.00% APY on my savings right now, which is a really good interest rate. I keep about $20,000 in cash for emergencies there, and that earns about $800 per year in interest. Not bad at all!
But beyond that emergency fund, I don’t want to keep too much money in a savings account. At some point, extra cash sitting there actually costs me money instead of making it.
That’s because those same dollars could be working a lot harder if invested long term. Here’s how I split my cash between saving and investing — and why keeping too much in the bank is a mistake.
How much interest a savings account earns
Right now, the national average savings account pays 0.38% APY, according to the FDIC. Top online savings accounts pay upwards of 3.50% to 4.00% instead.
That gap is bigger than it looks. At the 0.38% APY average, a $20,000 balance earns about $76 a year in interest. At my 4.00% rate, that same $20,000 earns roughly $800. It’s the same money at the same risk, but it pays about 10 times more.
So if your cash is still parked at a big bank earning next to nothing, that’s the easiest money you’ll make all year. Compare today’s best high-yield savings accounts and grab a rate that actually pays you.
Where “a lot” turns into “too much”
Even if you’re earning a high interest rate, there’s a point at which excess savings isn’t doing you much good.
A full emergency fund in savings should be between three and six months of essential living expenses. This is cash you need to keep liquid, and you’ll want it earning the highest APY possible to keep up with inflation.
If you have other short-term savings goals (like saving up for a house or car in the next couple years), you should keep that in a savings account, too.
But for any money above that, it’s like your long-term money is stuck in a short-term job. It can grow way bigger if you invest it instead.
Let’s say you’re a supersaver and you’re sitting on an extra $50,000 in savings (congrats, by the way — that’s a huge accomplishment on its own).
Keeping that money in savings feels safe, and it is. But safe money barely keeps up with inflation, so it’s not really growing much at all over the years. If you invest that money instead, that same $50,000 could work a whole lot harder for you.
The S&P 500 has returned nearly 10% a year on average since 1928, according to Motley Fool Money research. Let’s be conservative and assume 8% instead of 10%. Here’s what a spare $50,000 looks like over time, sitting in savings at 4.00% versus invested at 8% annual return.
Time
In Savings (4.00%)
Invested (8%)
Difference
After 10 years
~$74,000
~$107,900
~$33,900
After 20 years
~$109,600
~$233,000
~$123,400
After 30 years
~$162,200
~$503,100
~$340,900
Data source: Author’s calculations.
The longer the money sits, the wider the gap gets because of compound growth.
What I do with all my savings
My money set-up is pretty simple. I keep my emergency fund in a high-yield savings account earning the highest APY possible. Right now my account pays 4.00%, which is a top rate in 2026.
Everything beyond that goes to investing accounts. I’ve been buying index funds for over 15 years, inside my Roth IRA, workplace 401(k) and regular brokerage account.
There’ve been a few really scary years when the stock market has had massive drops (during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example). But I’ve thankfully never sold anything and my accounts have always fully recovered — and way more. Volatility is part of investing, but if you hold for years and decades, that’s where true wealth is built.
Start by figuring out how much you really need in savings. Add up your emergency fund plus anything you’ll need in the next couple of years, and keep that in a high-APY savings account.
Then take a hard look at what’s left over. If you’ve got a huge balance just sitting idle, that’s the money that could be growing long-term wealth.
Compare the best online stock brokers and put your excess savings to work. The sooner it’s invested, the more time it has to grow.
Vishal Garg and Better Home & Finance will square off before a federal judge as the sides’ boardroom battle reaches a major early hurdle.
Processing Content
U.S. District Judge Margaret M. Garnett on Wednesday afternoon will listen to Better’s motion for a temporary restraining order on Garg to stop his shareholder rally, according to a case docket. The company says the former CEO, seeking to return to his post, can begin collecting proxies from shareholders Thursday morning once a consent solicitation he filed last week becomes effective.
“If through those solicitations he accumulates a bare majority of the outstanding voting power of the company, he can enact his corporate takeover, which presents a real and irreparable harm to the company and its shareholders,” wrote Lewis in a declaration published Monday.
Daniel Lewis
Better Home & Finance
The lender is suing Garg for securities violations, alleging his shareholder solicitations were improper, and that his Securities and Exchange Commissions filings are still incomplete. They’re seeking a 30-day pause on Garg’s efforts, and have meanwhile enacted a “poison-pill” plan to defuse his shareholder powers.
Garg responded in court Tuesday, refuting the securities violations claims and explaining Better’s fault for his “administrative error” in previously pledging a majority of shareholder support he garnered. He also shared screenshots of his text messages with board members and Lewis, which suggest their contradictory actions following Garg’s removal.
The founder is seeking to remove board members and embark on a comeback strategy he says will help recoup the over $200 million in lost market value shareholders have suffered since his Aug. 3 ouster.
Better’s mixed messaging
Following his removal, Garg says Better offered him a lucrative vice chairman role to advise Lewis, which he turned down because of its limited scope and responsibility to address wider concerns.
Days later he said he met with two of Better’s directors, who said they regretted hiring Lewis. The board members told Garg that they and two additional directors would resign from the board to aid Garg’s return plan if he could demonstrate a majority of shareholder support via a requisition letter.
The ex-CEO then gathered support representing 51.65% of Better’s voting power, which he represented to the company and the media earlier this month. However, Garg explained that turned out to be an administrative error from Better’s in-house securities and regulatory counsel.
In reality, some of Garg’s shares were convertible options that couldn’t be voted on, he said. However, the company didn’t explain the discrepancy to Garg’s attorneys when they asked about it last week, and the company sued him for his alleged securities filings violations a day later.
Former Better CEO Vishal Garg
Garg suggests his updated SEC filings render Better’s motions to block his solicitations moot. In a renewed proxy statement Tuesday, the ex-CEO said his group currently represents 13.7% of the company’s outstanding shares of voting stock.
The Garg-Lewis relationship
In a separate filing Tuesday, Garg included screenshots of dozens of alleged text messages from Lewis, which portray the former hedge fund boss and investor as supportive before turning a cold shoulder.
One March text simply read “I actually love you,” with no context; another shows Lewis commiserating with Garg on the demands of the CEO role, with Lewis allegedly writing, “I don’t want to be an operating CEO because I know the toll it takes on me.”
While Garg shared Lewis’ alleged texts on the day of his firing offering comfort, a final message on Aug. 11, shortly after Garg’s first attorney letter to Better, took a different tone.
“Vishal. Remember, every move you make — I have planned for it in advance,” the interim CEO allegedly wrote.
Lewis acknowledged the texts to the New York Post Tuesday, while Better declined to comment. Vishal Garg also did not share a comment beyond his legal filings.
Next steps
Better is also seeking a preliminary injunction on Garg on top of a potential temporary restraining order, although Judge Garnett will only weigh the TRO. Garg in court filings argued that the injunction would block aggrieved shareholders from taking action against Better’s board.
The sides have traded barbs in recent weeks, with both sides raising concern over Better’s past and current performance. While Better has pointed to $1.5 billion in net losses under Garg since 2022, the ex-CEO has pointed to the company’s stark stock price decline since his firing.
Garg is pitching a return plan including a $30 million stock buyback, and a $5 million personal investment as part of a 10b5-1 stock plan. He’s also pledged to work for a $1 salary until the company becomes profitable, and embark on a search for a long-term CEO.
“Prompt action is needed to reverse the substantial decline in the company’s stock price that followed the Board’s installation of Lewis as the Interim CEO,” he wrote in a filing. “To restore confidence among the Company’s capital markets counterparties and business partners, and to put the company on a path to recover the losses that common shareholders have already sustained.”
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
Chasing your “fair share” of the market is a comfort trap that guarantees mediocrity — real growth comes from defining your company by the unmet needs of your clients, not the boundaries of your industry.
The biggest threats to breakout growth aren’t your competitors but five internal drag factors — complacency, fear of failure, giant intimidation, legacy reflex and the illusion of exhaustive effort — that leaders must actively dismantle.
If you watch a NASCAR race, you’ll see a tight pack of cars traveling at 200 miles per hour, rubbing paint, turning left and fighting over inches of asphalt. To the casual observer, it looks like intense, cutthroat competition. But in the business world, a dangerous parallel occurs when every company mirrors its competitors’ offerings, operates on identical terms and chases the same core customers. Leaders frequently mistake this frantic, localized activity for true market competition — it isn’t. It’s just a high-speed traffic jam where they’re seeking refuge in industry homogeneity, misinterpreting sameness as safety and viewing genuine disruption as an unnecessary risk.
I addressed this corporate complacency during my recent keynote address at CIBC’s Global Corporate and Investment Banking Offsite in Detroit. The summit operated under the banner of “Full Throttle” — the precise mindset required to break free from a crowded field. During the presentation, my goal was to upend a deeply entrenched business concept: the polite, passive pursuit of your “fair share.”
In high-performance environments, fighting for your fair share is a guaranteed recipe for mediocrity. Average leaders comfort themselves by settling for a market slice that matches their historic footprint. Yet, an elite sports team never aims to finish the season with a mediocre record just to remain comfortable in the middle of the standings. Instead, high-performing leaders focus on a dominant season and a definitive spot on the podium.
Moving beyond the homogeneous herd
The underlying problem stems from how organizations view their core identity. Most companies define themselves strictly by the products they sell or the traditional boundaries of their legacy industry. This narrow focus forces them into a baseline where they look and act like everyone else.
The remaining few choose a completely different strategic orientation: they define themselves by an unyielding commitment to solving the unmet needs of their clients. By dedicating themselves entirely to the client’s problem, these market disruptors naturally venture outside traditional industry boxes. They step away from conventional playbooks to deliver solutions that more conservative competitors consider impossible.
Lessons from a billion-dollar growth run
When I assumed leadership at my last CEO role, the company was a regional player sitting at eighth in their industry. The sector was growing at a sleepy 2% a year, but our team wanted to grow at 100% a year. To achieve that, we had to stop running the same race as everyone else. We shifted from being a service provider of last resort to the most innovative brand in the space, transforming the business from a $500 million operation into a $2.7 billion national leader, culminating in a historic billion-dollar-plus exit.
This level of exponential scale requires building a fundamentally different vehicle from the ground up. We crafted a simple, powerful story that aligned everyone from the first-year receptionist to the vice president, anchoring it with three non-negotiable client promises: service, flexibility and innovation.
We executed our commitment to service so intensely that clients openly wished they could replicate our responsiveness within their own organizations. Flexibility meant saying “yes” to a client’s complex request right there in their boardroom, then spending the entire flight home figuring out the operational mechanics of how to deliver. Innovation allowed us to completely modernize an old-world, slow-moving industry that had resisted structural change for decades.
But as any seasoned executive knows, the real challenge lies in the execution. Throughout my career leading organizations through rapid transformation, I’ve found that the greatest obstacles rarely originate from external competitors. Instead, internal drag factors routinely stall championship teams before they even arrive at the standing grid.
The 5 institutional speed bumps
That’s why, in order to get an organization operating at full throttle, leaders must systematically diagnose and eliminate these five institutional speed bumps:
Historic success complacency: Strong financial performance can trick a team into assuming yesterday’s momentum guarantees tomorrow’s survival. A glance at the Fortune 100 list from a decade ago proves how quickly dominant giants vanish when they stop evolving.
Fear of failure: When an environment penalizes missteps, employees instinctively choose safe, homogeneous paths. True disruption requires an ecosystem where calculated failure is embraced as a necessary step toward innovation.
Giant intimidation: Mid-market companies often look at massive competitors and assume the industry hierarchy is permanent. In reality, giants fall regularly because legacy infrastructure makes them slow and rigid.
The legacy reflex: Organizations naturally develop deep muscle memory that fiercely resists change. Overriding this default behavior takes fearless leadership to empower teams to challenge old processes and forge a new path
The illusion of exhaustive effort: When teams claim they have “tried everything,” they have typically only exhausted options within their traditional playbook. Real innovation hinges on looking entirely outside your immediate industry sandbox to discover what the client actually needs.
Recognizing these limitations represents a diagnostic victory, but eliminating them requires a fundamental shift in leadership behavior. Corporate drag is subtle, frequently disguising itself as prudence, tradition or risk mitigation. When leaders actively dismantle these internal barriers, they unlock a latent capacity for speed and agility, allowing the team to stop looking over its shoulder at competitors and focus entirely on the open track ahead.
Play for the podium
In the end, sustaining a full-throttle trajectory is simply an intentional choice to reject a mediocre finish. It means refusing to settle for a comfortable spot inside the pack. Leaders must commit to a clear corporate narrative, fiercely protect their core customer promises and systematically clear the institutional drag holding their people back
Because the grid is crowded, and the stakes are high. So when the green flag drops, remember: average goals yield average results. But true market leaders play for the podium.
Key Takeaways
Chasing your “fair share” of the market is a comfort trap that guarantees mediocrity — real growth comes from defining your company by the unmet needs of your clients, not the boundaries of your industry.
The biggest threats to breakout growth aren’t your competitors but five internal drag factors — complacency, fear of failure, giant intimidation, legacy reflex and the illusion of exhaustive effort — that leaders must actively dismantle.
If you watch a NASCAR race, you’ll see a tight pack of cars traveling at 200 miles per hour, rubbing paint, turning left and fighting over inches of asphalt. To the casual observer, it looks like intense, cutthroat competition. But in the business world, a dangerous parallel occurs when every company mirrors its competitors’ offerings, operates on identical terms and chases the same core customers. Leaders frequently mistake this frantic, localized activity for true market competition — it isn’t. It’s just a high-speed traffic jam where they’re seeking refuge in industry homogeneity, misinterpreting sameness as safety and viewing genuine disruption as an unnecessary risk.
I addressed this corporate complacency during my recent keynote address at CIBC’s Global Corporate and Investment Banking Offsite in Detroit. The summit operated under the banner of “Full Throttle” — the precise mindset required to break free from a crowded field. During the presentation, my goal was to upend a deeply entrenched business concept: the polite, passive pursuit of your “fair share.”
In high-performance environments, fighting for your fair share is a guaranteed recipe for mediocrity. Average leaders comfort themselves by settling for a market slice that matches their historic footprint. Yet, an elite sports team never aims to finish the season with a mediocre record just to remain comfortable in the middle of the standings. Instead, high-performing leaders focus on a dominant season and a definitive spot on the podium.
This clip dramatically illustrates the power of “compound interest” and its impact on “debt”. What began as a $10,000 loan escalated to over $43 million in just 46 months due to a 20% monthly interest rate. This serves as a stark lesson in “financial education” and the importance of understanding “personal finance” and “math” in managing your money.
Setting total return targets (TR) is tempting. It sells because humans hate variance but love targets. A target return looks like control. Combining target returns with a confidence corridor, that is, a promise that annual excess returns will stay within a narrow band (e.g., ± 3%) around the target (e.g., 4%) most of the time, looks like discipline. A calendar year looks like a horizon. None of these are economics; they are psychology and reporting conventions, conflating measurement with control. The goal of this short note is not to moralize about optimism. It is to do the unpleasant arithmetic that converts a verbal TR objective into an implied Sharpe ratio requirement. Once that conversion is made, most “TR” claims can be recognized for what they imply: an attempt to smuggle a hedge-fund-like promise into a long-only balanced wrapper.
The taskforce will inform our long-term approach to harmonising transaction and post-trade reporting requirements across UK Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation (UK MiFIR), UK European Market Infrastructure Regulation (UK EMIR) and UK Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (UK SFTR).
The taskforce comprises 3 separate working groups: a main Policy working group, supported by a Strategy working group and an Architecture working group. The objectives of the working groups were set out in the terms of reference.
The Policy working group is chaired by Helen Packard (head of market oversight data & intelligence at FCA) and Julia Giese (head of financial markets infrastructure analytics at the Bank). The members of the Policy working group are:
Giulia Pecce (head of secondary capital markets & wholesale investor protection at AFME)
Adam Jacobs-Dean (managing director, global head of markets, governance and innovation at AIMA)
Andy Leonard (regulatory reporting lead SME at Barclays Bank PLC)
Hussain Abdullah (director, data & regulatory operations at Citigroup)
Karen Stretch (partner at Dechert LLP)
Emma Kalliomaki (managing director at ANNA & DSB)
Paul Sedgwick (head of DDRL at DTCC)
John Graham (senior director of regulation at Futures Industry Association)
Greg Stevens (reporting operations director at ICE Futures Europe)
Andrew Bayley (senior director, regulatory reporting transformation at ISDA)
Tony Holland (director of market practice & regulatory reporting at ISLA)
Stuart Cosgrave (operations director at J.P. Morgan Chase)
Tim Hartley (global head of SME team & director, EMIR reporting at Kaizen Reporting Ltd)
Zach Johnson (director at Kroll)
Mark Burnal (managing director, head of fund regulatory reporting and infrastructure at Man Group)
Ayo Fashina (executive director, shared services compliance at Morgan Stanley)
Rav Saidha (director at Retail Derivative Forum)
Will Williams (director, regulatory services at RBC Capital Markets)
Rajan Mawkin (senior manager, compliance advisory, credit & equities at TP ICAP Group)
James Southwick (trade & transaction reporting senior specialist at Vanguard Asset Management Ltd)
Richard Young (industry affairs, regulation and symbology strategist at Bloomberg LP)
The Strategy working group is chaired by Dominic Holland (director, enforcement & market oversight and wholesale sell side at FCA) and Nicholas Butt (head of market based finance at the Bank). The members of the Strategy working group are:
Adam Conn (director, head of trading at Baillie Gifford Overseas Ltd)
Alison Vickers (global head of trade and transaction reporting at BlackRock)
Michelle Bedwin (group chief compliance officer at Capula Investment Management)
Dawd Haque (market initiatives, regulatory transformation and strategy at Deutsche Bank)
Mike Hsu (advisor, speaker, former acting comptroller of the currency at Independent)
Luke Taylor (managing director, global banking and markets head of regulatory reporting at Goldman Sachs International)
Suzanne Calcagno (global head of regulatory response and oversight, MSS operations at HSBC Bank Plc)
Jonathan Armitage (head of regulatory reporting at LCH)
Susan Heinrich (EMEA head of non-financial regulatory reporting at Macquarie Group Ltd)
Gary Chia-Hsing Li (head of regulatory affairs, EMEA & APAC at MarketAxess)
Sana Houari (head of UK compliance, technology and operations at Societe Generale)
Dan Chambers (head of regulatory operations at Standard Chartered)
Uwe Hillnhütter (regulatory affairs at Tradeweb Europe)
Karen Miles (head of non-core legacy regulatory services at UBS)
The Architecture working group is chaired by Richard Cutress (manager, data engineering & technology at FCA), Khalid Ledgister (manager, regulatory, business, enterprise & technical architecture team at FCA) and John Aveson (senior data scientist, financial market infrastructure data team at Bank). The members of the Architecture working group are:
Andy Hughes (head of technical services at Derivatives Service Bureau)
Mihir Trivedi (head of global regulatory change at Deutsche Bank)
Alexander McDonald (CEO at EVIA)
Eric Odotei (group head of regulatory reporting at Finalto Group)
Stephen Mogie (director, business intelligence & regulatory reporting at ICE Clear Europe)
Zeynep Shields (global regulatory reporting product owner at J.P. Morgan Asset Management)
Michelle Zak (founder & CEO at Qomply)
Christopher Hall (head of operations, technology AI strategy at Morgan Stanley)
Miguel Munoz Royo (domain architect at SIX Group)
Ashish Karandikar (director, regulatory change management at CIBC Capital Markets)
Sumeet Agarwal (global lead of trade and transaction reporting technology at Citadel Securities)
Pierre Khemdoudi (CEO & co-founder at Gentek AI)
Catherine Ahnoff (product director, LSEG regulatory reporting at London Stock Exchange Group)
Leo Labeis (founder & CEO at REGnosys)
The working groups are supported by the Transaction & Position Reporting Team at the FCA and the Financial Market Infrastructure Data Team at the Bank.
Members have been appointed in a personal capacity. Some of the firms listed above are authorised and/or regulated by the Bank, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and/or the FCA. Please see the Financial Services Register for further details.
So says Prem Kumar Nair, CEO of Asia’s largest private health group, IHH Healthcare, as he grapples with an Asia that’s wealthier, longer-lived, and far more willing to spend money on the finer things in life. “As populations grow more affluent and people indulge in good food and wine, we’re seeing a rise in lifestyle diseases: diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol,” he points out in an interview with Fortune.
Asia is getting older. One in four people in the region will be older than 65 by 2050, according to the Asian Development Bank. Asians generally have longer life expectancies than those outside the region—but longer lives aren’t the same as healthier ones. A Stanford study published in April found that population aging accounted for 33.6% of the increase in disease burden across mainland China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.
IHH is stepping in with “Healthspan”, a new preventive health and longevity program launched in July. Unlike the aesthetics-driven wellness industry, IHH’s Healthspan is built around clinical intervention. Though the program is now only offered in Singapore, Prem eventually hopes to bring it to IHH’s nine other markets, which include India, Turkey and Greater China.
“For many people, longevity means aesthetics: coloring your hair, and taking a whole lot of vitamins and supplements. But for a healthcare provider like us, longevity is anchored very strongly in clinical science,” Prem says.
Take sarcopenia, the age-related loss of muscle mass. “We’ll encourage older patients to do resistance training, not for them to build biceps, but to make sure that their muscles can hold them up and they don’t fall and sustain knee or hip fractures,” Prem explains.
IHH’s Healthspan program also leans on GLP-1 drugs, the class of medications (including Ozempic and Wegovy) that has become, in Prem’s words, “the poster boy of longevity”. Yet these drugs are tapped not for cosmetic weight loss, he stresses, but to prevent obesity-driven arthritis and metabolic disease.
As Asia’s population ages, IHH is also building more ambulatory care centers—smaller, community-based facilities that handle procedures like endoscopies and total knee replacements without a hospital admission—in dense, rapidly graying cities like Singapore and Hong Kong. For example, the group’s Parkway MediCentre, which is located in Singapore’s Woodleigh district, offers chronic disease management services and consultations with dermatology and obstetrics and gynaecology specialists.
This marks a larger shift in how healthcare is administered globally, with many aging societies transitioning from hospital-centric care to more personalized and accessible options which are embedded in neighborhoods and communities.
“We have transitioned from being a mega hospital player to a healthcare ecosystem player in all the countries that we are in,” Prem says. “That’s going to be the future of healthcare.”
Dual-listed in Singapore and Malaysia
IHH Healthcare was incorporated in 2010, as a holding company for Malaysian sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional Berhad’s healthcare investments, which included Singapore-based Parkway, India-based Apollo, and Malaysia-based Pantai and IMU Health.
The entity was converted into a public company in 2012, and went public via a dual IPO on Malaysian bourse Bursa Malaysia and the Singapore Stock Exchange (SGX). IHH’s $2 billion IPO was the third-biggest listing globally that year, after Facebook and Malaysian palm oil firm Felda Global Ventures Holding.
IHH shares are up by more than 20% over the past 12 months.
Today, IHH Healthcare has expanded to 89 hospitals across 10 countries; the firm, with 2025 revenue of approximately $6 billion, ranks No. 58 on Fortune’s Southeast Asia 500 list.
IHH’s early growth came primarily through acquisitions. In 2015, the firm acquired India-based Globe Healthcare; three years later, it took over Fortis Healthcare, another Indian brand.
That approach changed when Prem joined IHH in 2020, following 27 years at competitor Raffles Medical Group, when he instead redirected the company to focus on organic growth within its existing markets and businesses. (Since he took the helm, IHH Healthcare has added a total of 4,000 beds to its hospitals.)
“A lot of investors were asking us whether M&As were an efficient way to grow, since each time we grow inorganically, we have to integrate the different entities,” Prem says. “Eventually, we decided that the best form of growth is growing within our existing markets and clusters… organic growth is always better since the operational efficiency is there, as we’re leveraging existing businesses and already have hospital executives in the country.”
COVID: ‘All hands on deck’
The most significant event in Prem’s tenure—at least in his eyes—came right as he started the job, when the COVID-19 pandemic landed in Singapore. He was then IHH’s Singapore CEO, and the global health emergency didn’t lead to a “normal transition.” Between 2020 and 2021, Singapore enacted several rounds of “circuit breakers”: nationwide partial lockdowns which banned social gatherings, shuttered physical offices and mandated the donning of masks outdoors.
“It was crisis management from the start,” he recalls. During the early days of the pandemic, Prem and his team dispatched medical staff to Singapore’s checkpoints for virus screening, as well as to foreign worker dormitories to care for workers who fell ill. (The purpose-built residences, where 10 to 24 construction workers share a living space, became the epicenter of the nation’s outbreak, accounting for nearly 90% of cases.)
Yet the pandemic affirms Prem’s view that the public and private sectors need to work together in a health crisis. “During peace time, we have our respective roles: The public sector works to provide affordable, accessible healthcare, while the private sector looks after patients who prefer quicker response times, more privacy and have the means to pay a premium,” he explains. “But when you’ve got a pandemic? It’s all hands on deck.”
IHH is a global player, with a presence in multiple countries both in Asia and beyond. That’s been a hedge against volatility in any one particular market.
“Being diversified has helped us a lot… there were times when Turkey faced macroeconomic issues like inflation, but Malaysia, Singapore and our other markets buoyed our economic performance,” Prem says.
Apart from deepening its presence in existing markets, IHH is also considering expanding into adjacent countries, though Prem admits that no concrete plans have yet been made.
“All of the countries we’re in will at some point become saturated; competition is a given, so we have to look at new markets,” Prem concludes. “Other players like Thompson and Raffles Medical have gone into Vietnam, and we’re also looking at Indonesia, which has changed its regulations to allow foreign doctors to practice and private hospitals to be fully owned by internationals.”
Future of healthcare
Now four decades into his career in healthcare, Prem thinks the mix of specialties in Asia’s healthcare institutions is changing. Just ten years ago, cardiology was the biggest speciality in most hospitals. But rates of cardiac disease have fallen in recent years, as the medical community pivots to managing cholesterol levels, hypertension and diabetes—all risk factors for heart disease. (A recent study found that from 1990 to 2021, the age-standardized mortality rate of cardiovascular disease in Asia fell by 26%.)
“Cancer is now becoming the biggest subspecialty in all our hospitals,” Prem says. “We’re investing a lot in cancer testing, genomic medicine and precision medicine.”
In 2019, IHH led a $20 million Series A funding round for Singapore-based genomic medicine firm Lucence, which makes ultra-sensitive blood tests called liquid biopsies that can detect over ten types of cancer at an early stage. IHH also invests in proton therapy machines, which provide a more precise form of radiation treatment using accelerated proton particles rather than traditional X-rays, and is often used to treat complex cancers like those in the head, neck, brain and liver.
“We’re a strategic investor, not a financial investor,” Prem explains. “So whatever we invest in, we actually use and validate.”
In February, IHH launched a program called IHH Catalyst, which brings together healthcare entrepreneurs, clinicians and operational leaders to identify and nurture promising health start-ups. The inaugural edition took place in India, and selected a crop of businesses focusing on India’s priority health domains like oncology, chronic disease management and preventive care. IHH will soon bring the initiative to North Asia, led by Gleneagles Hong Kong and Parkway Shanghai.
IHH is also bullish about AI. A few years ago, IHH converted its data and digital department into an AI transformation team, focused solely on identifying AI-enabled healthcare solutions.
Its most tangible success so far, NurseShift.ai, automates hospital rostering—a task that once consumed roughly 51% of nursing supervisors’ time, according to Prem—and has won a health innovation award from Singapore’s Ministry of Health. It is being rolled out beyond Singapore to Malaysia and Hong Kong.
IHH is also working on a new project to build AI-enabled clinical pathways, where models analyze the symptoms and risk factors of each patient, then suggest a treatment plan which doctors can consider, edit and approve.
“One of the key reasons behind resource wastage is variation in healthcare,” Prem explains. “Different specialists are trained differently, so they all do things differently. Some specialists may keep you in the hospital for two days, while others could opt for a week, but AI can help in standardizing this by giving clinicians a framework to build upon.”
Still, Prem thinks there’s still room for human medical judgment in the hospital. The medical staff are ultimately the ones performing the procedure, so there must be consensus,” Prem says. “We must also allow for exceptions, since the profiles of patients can be quite different.”
“Healthcare and medicine can be complex in that way.”
In Fortune’s “Asia Agenda” column, released at least twice a month, we speak with Asia’s top business leaders about how they are building for the future and the lessons they’ve drawn from leading companies in one of the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic regions. Explore all of our profiles here.
“Figure Connect coming in at 65% when we only launched that platform two years ago reflects that the market is really interested in what we’re offering there,” he said. “There’s a lot of pull into that marketplace.”
The Kiavi deal adds the business purpose lending market, where roughly 25% of US housing stock is investor-owned, and Kiavi holds approximately 10% market share while the next largest competitor sits at around 2%, according to Tannenbaum.
The combination of Figure and Kiavi opens new doors for both companies. Figure’s home equity product is capped at around 85% loan-to-value, while Kiavi’s technology allows loans to go above 100% of the current home price based on a post-renovation valuation, creating a valuable product for home improvement borrowers.
“Forty percent of home equity is home improvement,” he said. “Think about how many people would be interested in borrowing against the pro forma — borrowing 100% of today’s value or more for renovation. Kiavi is not doing the HELOC, but we have the HELOC technology, and we can add their post-renovation valuation. That’s a really valuable connection point.”
What brokers need to know
Tannenbaum said the $35 trillion in available home equity, a Federal Reserve figure tracked quarterly, is where the action is for mortgage partners right now, and brokers without a home equity strategy are leaving business on the table.
During a recent fireside chat, the songwriter reflected on creativity, collaboration, and why discipline matters more than waiting for the perfect idea.
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