August 7, 2026, Singapore—The annual Asian Banking & Finance Fintech Awards (ABF Fintech Awards 2026) announced the latest list, with Longbridge Securities Singapore, headquartered in Singapore and regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), winning the 'InvestTech Initiative Award – Singapore.' What the evaluation committee valued was the company's continuous investment in artificial intelligence over the past year and its pioneering positioning as the 'world's first AI-native broker'—in combining AI with investment, it is trying to do not 'addition' but a bottom-up reconstruction.
From 'AI Assistant' to 'AI-Native': A Paradigm Shift in Investment
In the past two years, almost every securities firm has stuffed chatbots or smart stock selection functions into its own App, but Longbridge's path is obviously different. According to Longbridge's own definition, 'AI-native' means 'AI reshaping the product itself, not just optimizing product efficiency.' In other words, AI is no longer an external tool attached to the securities firm's system, but the underlying infrastructure running through the entire investment journey—from opportunity discovery, market interpretation, investment decision-making, to order execution after investor confirmation, every link is driven by the AI intelligent layer.
The core supporting this concept is Longbridge AI, which plays the role of 'smart hub': continuously interpreting market dynamics, understanding each investor's portfolio structure, and instantly pushing personalized insights. Public data shows that since its launch in 2024, Longbridge AI has generated 57.3 million portfolio updates; in 2025 alone, it responded to over 557,000 investment-related inquiries and analyzed more than 28,000 listed company financial reports. This set of numbers reveals a trend: AI is transforming from an 'occasionally used assistant' to an 'always-online investment brain.'
Four-Product Suite Matrix: Conversational Investment and Agent Ecosystem
Behind this award is Longbridge's globally first AI-native investment platform, launched in Singapore in July 2025. The platform consists of four products working in synergy:
- Longbridge App—Supports multimodal natural interaction including voice, text, and images, allowing investors to complete queries and transactions without being familiar with the cumbersome operation processes of traditional securities firms; they can directly 'speak' to complete tasks.
- Longbridge AI—As the platform's intelligent layer, it continuously outputs market analysis and portfolio insights, serving as the central nervous system of the entire system.
- Longbridge Skill—Opens Longbridge's market intelligence, investment research capabilities, and trading functions to mainstream AI platforms, allowing investors to access securities firm-level services in their daily AI ecosystems.
- Longbridge Agent Platform—Investors can use natural language to create, customize, and deploy exclusive AI investment agents (Agents). The platform has built-in compliance guardrails, transparent disclosure mechanisms, and community rating systems, defining clear boundaries for 'autonomous agents'.
In the business sector, Longbridge's expansion is equally rapid: launched 16 versions with over 110 new functions in 2025, covering US stock fractional share investment, multi-leg option strategies, etc.; user assets grew by 450% in 2024 and grew by another 220% in 2025, with global user scale expanding by 120%, cumulatively processing 55.7 million orders with a nominal trading volume of $1.5 trillion. In addition, Longbridge also pioneered pre-market trading for US stock options in 2025, repeatedly standing at the forefront of securities technology innovation.
Industry Depth: The Trust Gap Between Investors 'Using AI for Research, Relying on Humans for Decision'
In the same week that Longbridge won the award, a survey released by HSBC at the Asian Banking & Finance Summit in Singapore恰好勾勒出 the realistic picture of robo-advisor implementation: 73% of global investors have used AI to handle financial and investment tasks, but only 8% use it for major investment decisions. In Singapore, 76% of investors use AI, but only 12% believe AI is the most important factor affecting their final investment decisions; 62% of investors said that the information source for their last investment decision was still financial professionals or institutions.
The interpretation of HSBC's relevant business head is quite insightful: Singaporean investors are very savvy and have high financial literacy, able to digest large amounts of AI information, so 'information itself is no longer the differentiator, interpretation is.' This explains why 58% of Singaporean investors clearly prefer the 'AI + human advisor' hybrid model—AI is responsible for large-scale research, information preparation and organization, while humans are responsible for judgment, error correction, and final decision-making. In other words, the real threshold that robo-advisors need to cross is not technical capability, but trust and responsibility attribution: machines can give answers, but the one who bears the consequences is always human.
Singapore Ecosystem: Regulatory Transparency and Talent Competition
Longbridge's choice of Singapore as the base for its AI-native strategy is not accidental. MAS's clear and transparent supervision of licensed institutions' capital and behavior provides a compliance testing ground for AI financial innovation; and as an Asian wealth management center, Singapore has gathered a large number of high-net-worth and mass affluent customers, with the acceptance of digital wealth tools ranking among the highest in the world. A series of recent movements also confirm this: HSBC announced in late July that it will hire more than 100 AI experts and 100 wealth managers in Singapore and plans to launch a new AI center in the second half of 2026; OCBC Bank launched a 'virtual human bank' platform in late June, providing 24/7 wealth consulting services through two AI avatars. Securities firms, banks, and asset management institutions are competing on the same stage, making Singapore one of the markets with the highest concentration of AI wealth technology in Asia.
Outlook: Human-AI Collaboration is the Endgame for Robo-Advisors
Gavin Chia, CEO of Longbridge Securities Singapore and Southeast Asia, said when accepting the award: 'Our vision has never been to recreate an AI assistant, but to embed trustworthy investment intelligence into the AI experiences people already use.' This sentence points out the essential difference between AI-native robo-advisors and old-fashioned ones: the former pursues the 'investment as conversation' seamless experience, while the latter is still the traditional form of 'tool + advice'.
Of course, the maturity of AI-native robo-advisors still takes time. Investor education, algorithm interpretability, data privacy, and division of responsibility are all issues the industry must face head-on. What is certain is that as the Agent platform, multimodal interaction, and compliance governance framework gradually improve, the role of AI in investment will evolve from 'advisor' to 'companion'—and ultimately, every investment decision is still made by humans themselves. This may be the most anticipated picture of the 'AI-native' era: machines are responsible for computing power and scale, while humans are responsible for judgment and temperature.
