Few pitches at the 2026 Sohn Hong Kong Conference opened with a deliberate misdirection, but Andrew Limond, CIO of Singapore-based Seraya Investment Management and manager of the Panah Fund and Pasiwali Fund, is not a conventional presenter. After teasing the crowd with a mention of AI, he pivoted to a company whose ticker, NIS, and whose name, NICE Information Service (KRX:030190), made the pun intentional, as well as the pitch: NICE is the dominant South Korean consumer credit bureau, trading at less than half the valuation of its global peers, with a net cash balance sheet, strong returns on capital, and several emerging growth drivers the market has so far ignored.
Limond graduated from Oxford University with a First Class Honours degree in Oriental Studies, speaks and reads Chinese and Japanese, and has spent his career focused on Asian equities. He established the Panah Fund in 2013 and became CIO at Seraya Investment in late 2022. The Panah Fund won The Hedge Fund Journal Performance Award for Best Performing Fund over the two years ending December 2024 in the Asian Equity Long/Short – Discretionary category. Earlier in his career, Limond worked at Ballingal Investment Advisors and at Lloyd George Management (later BMO Global Asset Management) in Hong Kong.
What NICE Information Service Actually Does
NICE Information Service has been listed on the Korean Stock Exchange since its IPO in May 2000 and sits within a larger conglomerate under parent company NICE Holdings. With a market cap of around half a billion US dollars, the company is, in Limond’s words, an asset-light data and analytics firm embedded within the Korean financial system. NICE is a credit bureau: it collects financial and non-financial data, scores potential borrowers on behalf of lenders, and maintains credit histories like FICO. It does not lend and takes no credit risk.
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