As the rewards platform pushes into unfamiliar markets, its senior team taps communities like IMDA’s Singapore Digital Leadership Accelerator to pressure-test decisions, broaden perspectives and build the next generation of talent
Published Wed, Mar 25, 2026 · 05:50 AM
IN THE early 2010s, when Singapore’s e-commerce scene was taking shape, ShopBack set out with a simple idea: help shoppers save while also driving incremental growth for merchants – by returning part of every purchase as cashback.
What began as a six-person start-up team is now a regional platform operating in 13 markets with 550 staff, around 150 based at its regional headquarters in Pasir Panjang – a three-storey, 88,000 sq ft space opened in 2022.
Today, it facilitates more than half a million global transactions daily. In January this year, the loyalty platform crossed $1 billion in cashback to users since the platform started in 2014.
In many ways, ShopBack’s trajectory mirrors how Singapore’s digital and technology scene has matured: from a landscape that relied heavily on imported know-how to one that produces local leaders and builds home-grown companies with global ambitions.
“Ten years ago, the digital scene was really in its nascent stage in Singapore,” says chief product officer Justin Lee. For many graduates at the time, he adds, the default career paths were still banking, law and medicine.
Today, the baseline has shifted. “The expectation now would be that most people in the workforce would need to be digitally-literate and digitally-savvy,” says Lee.
As ShopBack’s own infrastructure became more sophisticated, it became clear that they had the capabilities to expand beyond Asia-Pacific and into markets in Europe and North America, where consumer behaviours, competitive dynamics and regulatory requirements are markedly different.
Co-founder and head of expansion Josephine Chow knew expanding into Western countries called for a different playbook. She was the one who led ShopBack to penetrate into multiple Asia-Pacific markets including Taiwan, Australia and South Korea.
“We were at this very special and different phase of growth when we were looking to go beyond Asia-Pacific, and the transition to becoming a global leader was a little bit harder for me,” she says.
Chow and Lee joined the first cohort of the Singapore Digital Leadership Accelerator (SGDLA) as SG Digital Leaders, launched by the Infocomm Media Development Authority.
“SGDLA came at a time when I needed to broaden my mental models, when I needed to figure out how to not just scale faster but scale differently,” says Chow.
SGDLA: A leadership network built for Singapore’s digital future
Launched by the Infocomm Media Development Authority in 2022, the Singapore Digital Leadership Accelerator (SGDLA) is a 1,500-strong community, spanning corporate leaders, product innovators and start-up founders across the economy.
It brings together digital leaders at different career stages so they can learn from one another and grow as a community.
Broadening perspectives
For Chow, SGDLA’s value lies in the quality – and candour – of the conversations it brings about.
“I met people who were there not to talk about a growth matrix or flex about their success stories; the conversations went straight into things like trade-offs, blind spots, tensions within the team and how to deal with them,” she says.
Through SGDLA, she was matched with a mentor, Allen Shim, board director and audit committee chair at financial super app Toss, who helped her reframe how she made decisions as a leader.
“He didn’t just give me answers but made me think about things that gave me better questions, and that has really stuck with me,” she says.
In turn, as SG Digital Leaders, she and her colleague Lee also get the opportunity to connect with the next generation through mentoring.
Lee was paired with nine mentees through 2024. These mentorship ties matter because Singapore’s digital scene is approaching another inflection point, with artificial intelligence (AI) poised to reshape how products are built, how teams work and what good execution looks like.
“There’s AI looming on the horizon, and that is going to amplify expectations across the industry and the ecosystem,” Lee says.
Lee has continued investing in his own leadership outside of ShopBack too. With co-funding by IMDA’s SG Digital Leaders programme, he took part in the Stanford Executive Program at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
He says the biggest takeaway was the peer mix – hearing how leaders in different sectors tackle similar trade-offs, and bringing those mental models back to ShopBack’s next phase.
Chow notes that meeting new industry expectations will depend not just on products and markets, but also on leadership – including whether companies can retain leaders through non-linear career paths.
The mother of three children aged three, one and five months says the gap is not women’s ambition, but “exposure, sponsorship and continuity”.
“It is comforting for me to know that a lot more companies are shifting their organisational structures to support women in a completely different way so that women don’t have to leave their careers because of family responsibilities,” she says.
She was pleased to learn how the SGDLA reinforces that shift by treating leadership as gender-neutral – focusing on capability and progression rather than labels.
A decade ago, ShopBack’s founding team was building the platform in a windowless room. Today, its global ambitions are taking shape in a more mature and connected ecosystem.
A Singapore success story: How ShopBack grew into a regional leader
ShopBack started with a straightforward idea: give shoppers cashback while merchants get incremental sales.
A decade later, that bet has paid off. The Singapore-born company now operates across 13 markets and has built a base of over 60 million shoppers – making it one of the more compelling homegrown tech stories to come out of the city-state.
The growth has been well-funded. In 2022, ShopBack closed an oversubscribed US$200 million (S$256 million) Series F round, and today more than 20,000 online and in-store partners rely on the platform to drive sales, collectively moving over US$5.5 billion annually.
More recently, the focus has shifted from growth-at-all-costs to a more sustainable footing. In 2025, ShopBack posted three consecutive quarters of adjusted EBITDA profitability alongside a 13 per cent revenue rise in the financial year of 2024, reaching $133 million. By early 2026, the company had crossed $1 billion in total cashback paid out since 2014.
Behind those numbers are leaders who built different parts of the business in parallel.
Justin Lee, now chief product officer, has been part of the executive team since the early days – overseeing product managers, designers and data analysts, helping expand into 11 Asia-Pacific markets, and setting up tech hubs in Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam and Shenzhen.
Josephine Chow, co-founder and head of expansion, has been the one to actually go into new markets and make them work – starting as general manager for Singapore, then launching Thailand, Australia, Vietnam, South Korea and Hong Kong, owning both the growth and the financials for each.
Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2018, she is the kind of operator who turns a regional platform’s ambition into on-the-ground reality – most recently reinventing the playbook to take on the US in 2025.
For its next chapter, ShopBack is focused on building operational discipline, governance and sustainable growth so the company can pursue the right strategic opportunities in the future.
“People don’t think about growth in a linear way anymore – a lot of things are happening at the same time,” Chow says.
In that environment, the value of a community like SGDLA gives leaders a sounding board for their ideas and decisions.
Learn how the SGDLA can be your launchpad for global-ready leadership.
