Ng Kok Song, currently managing director and group chief investment officer of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, pioneered the establishment of the first financial futures exchange in Asia, the Singapore International Monetary Exchange. He was a key member of the team that conceived and expanded the trading of gold futures to include financial futures at the Gold Exchange of Singapore. The Gold Exchange was renamed SIMEX, and Ng became its first chairman from 1984 to 1987. SIMEX subsequently merged with the Stock Exchange of Singapore in 1999 to form the Singapore Exchange.
Together with CME chairman Leo Melamed, Ng created the mutual offset arrangement between the two exchanges in 1984, one of the earliest and most successful exchange linkages in the history of the derivatives industry. It was also under Ng’s leadership that SIMEX launched its Nikkei 225 futures contract – the world’s first Nikkei futures contract and still the flagship futures contract in the exchange’s comprehensive suite of Asian derivatives product offerings.
