Why Amy Lee, the niece of Singapore’s first prime minister, helped launch a crypto-friendly bank

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.” The SGB is also betting on digital assets, branding itself as “the world’s first fully integrated bank” where users can make transactions around the clock in both fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies. In 2025, it recorded over $4 billion in deposits and $12 billion in transaction value. “If commerce is 24/7, banking shouldn’t be limited,” Lee says. “Increasingly, family offices, individuals, corporations and even governments are starting to take on digital currency—so how relevant are you going to be if you don’t?” Why Bahrain? Though the team had consid