HSBC’s latest survey of wealthy entrepreneurs contains an awkward finding for the men who still write most of the cheques. Their own confidence is slipping, while the confidence of the women they rarely fund is rising.
The Global Entrepreneurial Wealth Report 2026 polled more than 3,000 business owners across 17 markets. Over the past year, the share of male entrepreneurs who call themselves “very positive” about their business prospects fell nine percentage points to 47 per cent. Among women, it rose three points to 54 per cent.
The gap widens on money. Forty-nine per cent of female business owners expect their personal wealth to grow substantially, up a point. Male expectations dropped 10 points to 42 per cent.
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Before anyone puts that on a pitch-deck slide, there is a caveat. Every respondent holds at least US$2 million in investable assets. These are established and often large businesses, not a pre-seed founder in Manila juggling payroll.
The report also offers no Southeast Asia-specific gender split, so any regional reading is an extrapolation. What the numbers can show is how women who have already made it think about the next wave of technology. That is where it gets interesting.
Self-belief, with receipts
Asked why they feel good about their prospects, women cite self-belief more often than men do (31 per cent versus 26 per cent). Thirty-nine per cent say they have what it takes to ride out economic uncertainty, against 33 per cent of men. The report points to long-run economic research suggesting women earn disproportionately more running their own firms than in salaried jobs, which may explain why the conviction holds.
That conviction contrasts sharply with the capital that reaches them. Female-only founding teams secured just 2.3 per cent of global VC funding in 2024. In Southeast Asia, only 16.5 per cent of venture investment went to female entrepreneurs as recently as 2020. Confidence, evidently, is not the bottleneck.
Trust in AI, pointed at the front office
AI is the main engine of this optimism. Fifty-eight per cent of female entrepreneurs name AI and broader technology advances as their top reason for feeling positive. Fifty-one per cent place “a great deal” of trust in AI to support their business, seven points ahead of men (44 per cent). The pattern carries into personal finance: 86 per cent of women trust AI tools for portfolio analysis and wealth planning, against 83 per cent of men.
That trust stands out in a region where tech leaders are learning to trust AI agents, but not with production. More telling is what the women plan to do with it.
Both sexes rank employee productivity as AI’s main job. Men, however, lean harder on AI as a cost lever. Forty per cent want fatter profit margins (37 per cent of women), and 27 per cent want a leaner workforce (24 per cent of women). Women tilt towards revenue. Thirteen per cent use AI to improve customer service and experience, versus 8 per cent of men. Ten per cent use it to mine consumer insights, versus 7 per cent.
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The usual health warning applies. These are single-digit shares, and a five-point gap on a base of 13 per cent is a nudge, not a revolution. Still, the direction matters in markets where winning customers is expensive and loyalty is fickle. An AI deployment that keeps a customer is worth more than one that trims a salary line, provided it actually works. That proviso is why SEA’s retailers are being urged to protect AI-powered customer experience with proper monitoring.
The scepticism that cuts both ways
Higher trust does not mean blind faith. Women are twice as likely as men to worry that AI will erode critical thinking and decision-making, although the figures are 8 per cent versus 4 per cent. They are also more anxious about falling behind rivals on AI adoption (13 per cent versus 10 per cent).
Both worries are rational. The first echoes a debate already running through the region’s talent pipeline. The junior developer dilemma has employers asking who will audit machine output once entry-level grunt work disappears. The second is a reminder that ambition alone does not ship products. Singapore SMEs are discovering that messy data keeps AI pilots stuck.
What the survey cannot tell us is why male sentiment fell so sharply. The cause may lie in the sectors men dominate, the size of their firms, or their exposure to a turbulent geopolitical year. The report presents the divergence without explaining it, which leaves a gap worth closing in next year’s edition.
What investors should take from it
Strip away the cheerleading, and three practical points survive.
First, women founders appear more inclined to deploy AI where it touches customers. Investors weighing AI-era startups should therefore look harder at retention and lifetime value, not just headcount savings. That lens happens to favour the founders the industry has historically overlooked.
Second, guardrails are not a sign of timidity. Founders who worry about AI degrading judgement are more likely to set policies before a customer finds the problem. The same logic explains why Singapore’s SMEs need rules, not bans, as staff bring their own AI tools to work.
Also Read: AI could redefine women in the workplace, and companies must act now
Third, the confidence data undercuts one of the industry’s laziest explanations for the funding gap: that women simply don’t pitch boldly enough. On this evidence, at least among owners who have already built wealth, women are the more optimistic half of the room.
Whether that optimism turns into term sheets is a question for the people writing them.
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