SGX Group

What can you achieve in 20 minutes? Last week, that was all the time Karen Ngui , Head of DBS Foundation, Ismail Gafoor , Chairman of PropNex, and I had at the IAA B2B Brand Summit 2026 to plant a few ideas... and perhaps unsettle a few assumptions. One truth kept surfacing. Markets don't just price performance. They price belief. Over the years, I’ve become clear on this: brand and investor relations may speak different languages, but they pursue the same outcome - belief. Yet in many organisations, they sit on opposite sides of the ledger. • Brand and marketing are treated as discretionary costs. • Investor relations, by contrast, is almost always seen as value‑critical. That framing is outdated. And it is costly. As we hosted 150+ senior B2B leaders at SGX Group , it was apparent this connection is still underexplored across the industry. Brand is often confined to storytelling and preference creation. IR to results and disclosure. When belief is coherent, markets listen. When it isn’t, even strong performance struggles to travel. Despite their very different vantage points, both Karen and Ismail spoke about trust and belief as something built patiently - through consistency, governance, action and communication. This conviction underpins SGX’s Value Unlock programme. We encourage companies to engage markets more deliberately because value creation is about more than running a business well. The market needs to believe it. For those who couldn’t join us, the IAA team has captured the Summit’s strongest themes in a short reflections paper. From the strategic role of brand and the rise of Buyability, to AI used with judgement, and the human work technology cannot replace. To echo Wendy Walker ’s line: B2B has never been boring. It has simply been underloved. If this resonates, and you’d like to be part of the conversation, ping me. 🙂 #B2BLeadership #BrandTrust #ValueCreation #SGXGroup IAA Singapore DBS Bank PropNex Realty Pte Ltd