APAC retail investor acquisition has become harder in every measurable way since the early 2000s, despite dramatically better technology: that was the central message from PR strategist Tony Cross at the FM Singapore Summit 2026, held 12–14 May at Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre.
Cross, who has advised brokers across Europe and Asia since the early 2000s and is co-founder of PR firm Prezco, addressed a packed session titled ‘Beyond Reach? Retail Investor Acquisition Across APAC.’ His argument: fragmentation, performance-marketing addiction, and a collapsing attention economy are squeezing margins on client acquisition just as the APAC opportunity looks largest.
Why Trust, Not Tech, Defines APAC Retail Investor Acquisition
‘Trust was so much easier to build’ when clients visited physical offices, Cross told the audience. Personal relationships and visible counterparty presence once reduced friction organically. Today, he said, ‘everyone is a publisher’ and the explosion of content has made discoverability and credibility scarcer, not more abundant.
His sharpest observation concerned AI and content costs. ‘If everyone can generate infinite content at almost zero cost, does trust become the real scarce asset at the moment? Absolutely,’ he said. Large language models (LLMs, the AI systems that power tools like ChatGPT) are now shaping what surfaces in search, and Cross argued they increasingly favour uniquely authored, credible content over mass-produced output. ‘If you haven’t got the trust in the LLM, or the LLM hasn’t got trust in your brand, you’re never going to be able to populate,’ he warned.
For UK investors who hold shares in listed brokers or trading platforms with APAC exposure, that is a direct commercial risk: a brand that fails to rank in AI-driven search faces higher cost-per-acquisition (CPA, the amount spent to win each new client) indefinitely.
Introducing Brokers and the Limits of Performance Marketing
Introducing brokers (IBs, independent agents who refer clients for a fee or revenue share) remain the dominant acquisition channel across much of Southeast Asia. Cross explained why: regulatory fragmentation across APAC paradoxically helps large brokers, because it allows them to maintain an arm’s-length relationship with local markets while IBs build tight communities and serve as the interface with retail clients. Brokers get access; IBs absorb the local regulatory and reputational risk.
Cross also criticised the industry’s fixation on traceable, short-term metrics. ‘They feel quite annoyed that we can’t drill back to the same level of detail to say that has cost X and given a CPA of Y,’ he said, arguing for longer-term investment in brand, public relations, and financial education to build durable trust. That is a harder sell internally when quarterly targets dominate, but Cross positioned it as the more defensible strategy over time.
He pointed to Thailand as an illustration of the crowding problem: more than 100 brokers are operating there through IB networks. In that environment, competing on CPA alone is a losing game, and Cross’s first-dollar recommendation for a founder with a limited budget was consolidation. Acquisition or merger, he suggested, is a faster route to differentiated scale than outspending established players on performance channels.
Gen Z, Localisation, and What Brokers Keep Getting Wrong
Cross pushed brokers to ‘look bigger’ than product features when building local profile. Corporate social responsibility initiatives, financial education programmes, and media-friendly campaigns can build brand recognition without triggering sensitivities in controlled media markets. ‘If you do that, they’re not talking about your product. So you move away from the regulation issue,’ he said.
On localisation, he was direct: simple translation is not enough. ‘There are so many nuances, what lot size they want, what base currency they want to use,’ he said. Payment rails, media ecosystems, and trading habits vary so widely across APAC that a campaign built for one market can actively alienate clients in another.
His read on Gen Z was measured. Younger investors enter markets earlier and are more open to challenger brands, but they are also exposed to low-quality financial content (‘Fintalk’) on short-form social platforms. ‘They see the potential,’ Cross said, while noting that information quality is uneven and carries real risk for brokers whose brand gets associated with it.
Cross closed with a forward-looking point on blockchain. As financial infrastructure moves on-chain, verifiable provenance and security could help restore trust at scale, he suggested: ‘As things move more onto the blockchain, you’re going to get that security. It’s about trust.’ The Finance Magnates report on the summit’s final day confirmed that digital asset infrastructure and AI adoption featured prominently across sessions, signalling the industry is already wrestling with these questions at the institutional level.
For brokers competing in APAC, the binary choice Cross laid out is now live: keep optimising short-term CPAs through IB networks, or invest in the slower-burning reputation work, education, community, and distinctive PR, that may prove decisive when market conditions tighten and client loyalty is tested. Cross’s biographical grounding in both London and Asian markets, detailed on his Tony Cross LinkedIn profile, lends practical weight to that diagnosis. Finance Magnates positions the summit’s host city, Singapore, as APAC’s hub of capital, and if Cross is right, whoever solves the trust equation first will have a structural advantage that cheaper CPAs cannot easily replicate. The next test will come when volatility returns and retail clients decide which brand they actually stayed with.
The summit was hosted at Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre, bringing together CIOs, portfolio managers, heads of trading, and retail investing executives from across the region.
