Over the past few years, online business outweighs offline channels in most of the industries. Not only are there a lot of start-ups growing their online platforms quickly, many traditional corporations are investing much more on digital transformation. HKUST alumnus Lawrence Chau has digital transformation solid experience in both start-up and traditional corporation environments. 

Lawrence was one of the founding members of MoneyHero.com.hk, a comparison website for financial products. After graduating in 2010, he started out working at one of the big consulting firms, then as a trader, but felt that he could make a bigger impact working with a start-up. In 2014 he took a leap of faith and joined MoneyHero.com.hk, and grew the business to become market leader within a year. His mission was to reduce information asymmetry between banks and customers. The company soon picked up momentum and expanded to 7 countries in Asia, in less than a year, it had already closed a USD $40 million Series A and closed a USD $50 million Series B in 2017 from Goldman Sachs, Alibaba, Jardian, IFC (World Bank), etc. 

Lawrence later took a bigger challenge to join Midland, (01200.HK, the largest listed real estate agent company that relied on offline agents heavily) as Head of Marketing Communications in 2019. He has two major missions – growing the online platform and integrating the different businesses under the Midland Group, including mReferral mortgage, Immigration, Global houses, Finance, etc. During the first year of his stay, he led the team to launch the revamped website and application for Midland property, Hong Kong Property, mReferral, mortgage calculator and so on. He also utilizes the big data to create the brand-new Midland Confidence Index (MCI) to forecast future property prices. In order to enhance the customer journey and make the brand younger, Midland also started partnerships with some leading start-ups including ZA Bank, Bowtie, Carousell, etc. In the future, Lawrence hopes to create an ecosystem of different services for the customers to grow their wealth through different stages in their lives.