Every comparison site promises to find you a better deal. Jonathan Honig thinks it’s time MoneyHero found one for itself.
On 29 September, the investor, who says he owns about 9 per cent of MoneyHero’s Class A shares, published an open letter asking the board to hire an independent adviser and explore a sale.
Honig’s list of complaints is long and hard to dispute. There is still no permanent CEO six months after Rohith Murthy’s exit. Revenue slid from US$80.7 million in FY2023 to US$73.4 million in FY2025, against a promised US$100 million. And the share price of US$0.675 is down more than 88 per cent since the October 2023 debut.
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But open letters are theatre, and theatre depends on who’s in the audience. At MoneyHero, only one seat really counts, and it belongs to Richard Li.
The market has already priced the business at almost nothing
Start with the arithmetic, because it explains everything else. MoneyHero has about 44.08 million shares outstanding. At US$0.675, that puts its market value at roughly US$30 million. At the end of June, the company held US$28.2 million in cash.
Put differently, investors are valuing SingSaver, Seedly, Moneymax, 10.1 million registered members and a web of bank and insurer partnerships at roughly the price of a decent Singapore condominium. That is not a valuation. It is a verdict.
The second quarter explains why. Revenue fell 13 per cent year on year to US$15.8 million. Cash rewards paid to users jumped 77 per cent to US$5.1 million, which means MoneyHero is increasingly renting its demand rather than earning it. Monthly unique users fell 30 per cent, partly because the company began filtering out bot traffic in April without restating earlier periods. The first-half net loss widened to US$7.95 million.
Honig’s letter changes the tempo. It forces the board off the fence before his 5 October deadline. Silence will read as complacency, and a rushed CEO appointment will read as panic. Either way, the one asset an aggregator cannot afford to lose is now in play: the confidence of the banks and insurers who decide where their acquisition budgets go. Partners rarely rush to sign multi-year deals with a company that might have a new owner by Chinese New Year.
What does Honig actually want?
Look at how he built his position. In October 2025, his filings showed 1,117,401 Class A shares held individually and 496,604 held by a trust controlled by his wife. By April 2026, that had grown to 2,941,000 Class A shares, or 9.631 per cent of the class. He nearly doubled his stake while the stock fell.
That is not a man looking for the exit. It is a man betting there is a floor, and the floor is the cash. If the operating business is worth anything above zero, a sale at his proposed US$1.50 a share, roughly US$66 million for the company, would more than double his money. At today’s price, his entire stake is worth about US$2 million.
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So his endgame could take three forms. The first is a sale at a premium, the outcome he is openly demanding. The second is more modest: a buyback, tender offer or capital return, anything that closes the gap between the share price and the bank balance. The third is a seat at the table, or at least a board that answers his calls.
There is one wrinkle. Honig has reported his stake on Schedule 13G, the short form for passive investors. In April, he certified that the shares were not held for the purpose of changing or influencing control of the issuer. A public demand for a sale is not what most people mean by passive. Watch whether he switches to a Schedule 13D, the disclosure for shareholders seeking influence. If he does, he is settling in for a longer fight.
The 81 per cent problem
Here is where the drama meets its limits. As of September 2025, Li’s sponsor entity beneficially owned 38.3 per cent of MoneyHero’s equity and 81.1 per cent of its voting power, since each Class B share carries 10 votes against one for a Class A share.
Honig’s 9 per cent of the Class A shares therefore carries a sliver of the vote. He can embarrass the board, but he cannot outvote it. His letter is effectively addressed to one man: the tycoon who controls Pacific Century, which has indirect majority ownership of the FWD group, and who chairs PCCW.
That makes the real question strategic rather than procedural. Does Li still want a sub-scale comparison platform fighting a cash-reward arms race in Singapore and Hong Kong? Or does it now make more sense in someone else’s hands? Honig also notes that no director or executive has bought shares on the open market. That silence speaks louder than any investor-day slide.
What if the board buckles?
Caving is not automatically good news for minority shareholders. There are three ways a pressured sale can go wrong.
The first is a take-under. A strategic review launched from weakness attracts bargain hunters who price off the cash, not the franchise. If no credible bidder emerges, the stock can fall further than where it started.
The second is a break-up. MoneyHero already sold its Malaysian CompareHero business to Jirnexu in 2024. Selling SingSaver or Seedly piecemeal to rivals would concentrate Southeast Asia’s comparison market into fewer hands. Consumers who rely on these sites for supposedly independent advice on credit cards and insurance would then have fewer places to check whether they are being sold the best product or merely the best-paying one.
The third is the quiet one. The buyer with the most certainty is the controller itself. Minority protections exist, but negotiating leverage is thin when the other side holds four-fifths of the votes.
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Then there are the people. MoneyHero cut 80 jobs in 2024. Another stretch of limbo is exactly when good engineers and partnership managers update their LinkedIn profiles.
Precedents: The Bridgetown family album
Southeast Asia has seen this film before, with an almost identical cast. PropertyGuru listed in 2022 via a merger with Peter Thiel and Li’s Bridgetown 2 SPAC, in a deal valuing the combined company at US$1.78 billion. Two years later, EQT agreed to pay US$6.70 per share, a 52 per cent premium to the last unaffected price, and TPG and KKR, holding a combined 56 per cent, signed voting agreements backing the deal.
The lesson cuts both ways. A premium is possible when controlling holders want out and the asset is a category leader. But PropertyGuru dominated property listings with real pricing power. MoneyHero is paying users to show up.
Singapore also has a small but persistent activist tradition. Swiss fund Quarz Capital has spent a decade writing open letters to local boards. At Sunningdale Tech, it accused the company of shareholder value destruction and pushed for a higher dividend payout, and the board replied that it preferred to focus on fundamentals. That is the standard Asian boardroom response, and it often buys time rather than results.
Globally, Toshiba is the cautionary tale. It spent years resisting activist funds before agreeing in 2023 to a buyout led by Japan Industrial Partners, then delisted after more than seven decades on the Tokyo exchange. Resistance did not change the destination. It only lengthened the journey while value leaked away.
The board’s real choice
Public markets do not grade on backers. Thiel and Li’s names got MoneyHero onto Nasdaq. They cannot keep it there on reputation alone.
The board should do what MoneyHero asks its own users to do: compare the options honestly. One option is a credible permanent CEO with a plan to stop buying traffic with cash. The other is a transparent review that gives minority shareholders a real voice. What it cannot do is keep everything interim.
For a company whose business is helping people make better financial decisions, the least it can do is make one of its own.
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