When Amy Lee retired from a four-decade-long career in law and finance in 2020, she felt it might be a chance to relax. Instead, she found herself getting antsy.
“For my whole life, I thought I would enjoy retirement,” she tells Fortune at her home in central Singapore. “To my horror, I developed insomnia because there was no structure in my life.” Her boredom sent her in an interesting direction: When Singapore lifted its COVID movement restrictions in 2022, Lee recalls she put on a face mask “and sat through an eight-hour course on blockchain.”
Lee, who is also the niece of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, now chairs the global advisory board of the Singapore Gulf Bank, a fully licensed, Bahrain-based digital bank which offers investors access to both traditional and digital assets. The bank comes from a partnership between the Whampoa Group, a multi-family office Lee had co-founded, and Mumtalakat, Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund.
SGB hopes to tap increasing trade between the Gulf and Asia, which hit $516 billion in 2024, according to a November 2025 analysis from Asia House, a think tank. The Middle East’s trade with Asia is now larger than its trade with the West.
“Under this geopolitical climate, the Asia-Middle East corridor is growing in significance and importance,” Lee explains. “Trade and weapon flows are increasing between the two regions, especially with the U.S.-China bifurcation.”
