How GB Helios escaped the lender’s ivory tower

Money, in its most traditional institutional formulation, is an exercise in geometry. It requires square corners: pristine balance sheets, predictable collateral, and historical credit ratings that fit neatly into underwriting software. For decades, the financial sector operated on the assumption that if an emerging business lacked these rigid shapes, it simply did not warrant the capital.

When Alex Chua founded what is now GB Helios in 2015 — then operating under the utilitarian moniker of Goldbell Financial Services — he did so to exploit the systemic blind spots left by this rigid architecture. The company’s beginnings were firmly tethered to the material realities of its parentage, the Goldbell Group, a name long synonymous with commercial vehicles, industrial leasing, and heavy fleet logistics.

It was a world of steel and concrete, where risk was measured by an engine’s life cycle or a flatbed truck’s resale value.

Yet Chua has spent the last decade quietly and radically reshaping the corporate form. It is a transformation that earns him a place on this year’s Power List under the banner of A New Form — a recognition of leaders who refuse to abandon the core conviction of their work but recognise when the old vessel has reached its operational limits. He has not abandoned financing; instead, he has completely altered how value is created around it.

The alchemy of context

In the enterprise’s early days, the mission was straightforward, almost transactional. As Chua recalls, the objective was simply “to improve access to financing for businesses, particularly in commercial vehicle and business financing”. Emerging SMEs and family-owned operations routinely found that traditional financing channels required “substantial collateral or extensive credit ratings, which many small family-owned businesses and emerging SMEs simply didn’t have”.

To bypass legacy banks’ rigid metrics, the firm engineered a more flexible diagnostic framework. “Taking a more flexible approach,” Chua explains, “we developed a financing model that looked beyond traditional balance sheet metrics and recognised the true value of a business through its operational performance, cash flow patterns, and industry-specific growth potential”.

Yet, a funny thing happens when a financier spends enough time looking past the balance sheet into the engine room of a client’s business: the definition of the problem begins to mutate. The classic capitalist premise assumes money is the ultimate solvent — that if you inject enough cash into an ambitious company, operational frictions will naturally dissolve. Chua, however, began to question this fundamental assumption.

“We realised that access to capital was only one part of the equation,” Chua observes, noting that most businesses were rarely short on ideas or ambition. Instead, their trajectories were consistently shackled by “execution challenges, cash flow cycles, timing mismatches, operational complexities, and fragmented support systems”.

This conceptual pivot altered the firm’s trajectory. It was no longer enough to sit on the sidelines as a passive lender collecting interest. The insight pushed GB Helios “to evolve from a traditional lender into a growth enabler who tailors solutions to help businesses scale”.

This meant moving aggressively into “venture debt, embedded financing, and deeper operating partnerships that go beyond that of providing capital”. Chua points to their infrastructure partnership with Tesla as a case in point, in which GB Helios manages the underlying operational enablement so the automaker can focus strictly on localised distribution and the consumer experience.

The operator’s baptism

A sceptic reading GB Helios’ corporate ledger today might wonder whether the company is experiencing a midlife identity crisis. The firm has expanded far beyond logistics into an eclectic constellation of internal ventures, including Pilon (supply chain finance), GB NXT (tech asset leasing), and even Helios Fitness. To a traditional financier, this looks dangerously close to erratic diversification.

To the traditional financier, this looks dangerously close to corporate overreach — a lender trying to play at being a fitness guru and lifestyle curator. Can an institution truly maintain underwriting discipline when it is simultaneously trying to understand the capricious nature of consumer wellness?

Chua sees this not as erratic diversification, but as a deliberate strategy to break the financial sector’s ivory-tower insulation. “Looking back, the best decision was giving ourselves permission to evolve beyond the category we started in,” he maintains, adding that too many companies become “trapped by the business model that originally made them successful”.

Instead of asking how to become a larger financing company, his team asked how to create more value.

By building and operating these disparate businesses from scratch, Chua argues that his team undergoes an operational baptism. “While these businesses operate in very different sectors, they serve a common purpose,” he argues, explaining that they allow the firm “to understand growth from the perspective of an operator, not just a financier”.

This ecosystem provides “first-hand exposure to the realities of scaling teams, navigating uncertainty, and making critical growth decisions”, yielding a “much deeper appreciation of what entrepreneurs face every day”. It also informs their rebranding; the “GB” acknowledges the trust of their heritage, while “Helios” represents a commitment to empowering external growth.

The architecture of slack

This philosophy has required a parallel deconstruction of Chua’s view of his own role. In 

the hyper-efficient vocabulary of modern business, leadership is often treated as an optimisation problem — maximising hours, streamlining pipelines, and eliminating slack. Chua contends that this relentless pursuit of corporate tightness stifles institutional reinvention.

“The hardest part of growth was not scaling the business. It was learning how to scale myself as a leader,” he reflects, recalling how he had to transition from a highly “execution-focused” startup mentality to building systems where teams “could make good decisions without me”.

He challenges the modern gospel of total optimisation with a counter-intuitive lesson on institutional capacity. “The natural assumption in building a business is that growth comes from doing more and pushing harder,” he posits, which drives an instinct to “maximise everything: time, resources, and team capacity”.

Over time, Chua realised that this mindset actually limits growth. “Some of the best opportunities are not planned,” he notes; they emerge unexpectedly and demand rapid experimentation. “When every person and every resource is already fully committed, that flexibility disappears”. If an organisation is entirely consumed by existing obligations, it loses the breathing room required to invent its own future.

Ultimately, the transformation of Goldbell Financial Services into GB Helios argues against treating capital as a bloodless commodity. Chua is explicitly critical of an industry that assumes financing is purely a transaction driven by interest rates. “Too often, businesses focus on interest rates when evaluating financing options,” he notes, but “the right financing structure can have a much greater impact on business outcomes than a marginal difference in rates”.

In an ecosystem increasingly dictated by algorithmic risk assessments, Chua’s New Form insists on a stubborn retention of human context. “Technology can help us process information faster and improve decision-making, but it cannot replace judgement, context, and relationships,” he concludes. “The numbers tell us what is happening. Relationships help us understand why.”

Art direction: Ashruddin Sani
Photography: Lawrence Teo
Styling: Dolphin Yeo
Grooming: Angel Gwee, using Chanel and Davines

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