Fintech

Inside Noah’s Black Diamond Summit: How AI Is Rewriting the Future of Global Wealth

As global financial landscapes shift, Noah outlines a new AI-first approach to helping families protect and grow their wealth.

Updated

December 11, 2025 11:33 PM

Noah’s Black Diamond Summit. PHOTO: ARK WEALTH

Noah Holdings, one of Asia’s leading wealth management firms serving global Chinese high-net-worth families, hosted its annual Black Diamond Summit in Macau from December 7–11. The city has become a significant gathering place for Noah’s community, where clients, partners, and experts converge each year to explore how global trends are transforming wealth and family life. This year’s theme, “AI Together, Co-Generating the Future”, set the tone for a conversation about how modern wealth management must adapt in an age defined by artificial intelligence.

More than 3,000 attendees joined discussions that connected technology, global mobility, and long-term family planning. The Summit built on earlier sessions held in Shanghai, creating a continuous dialogue around one central question: how can families prepare for a world that is becoming more digital, more complex and more interconnected?

A major moment came when Noah introduced “Noya”, its new AI Relationship Manager. Noya is now part of the upgraded iARK Hong Kong and Singapore apps. It is built to support licensed human advisors, not replace them. The goal is simple: combine human judgment with AI intelligence to help clients understand their wealth more clearly and manage it across borders. Noya offers real-time insights, deeper personalisation, cleaner access to global financial information, smoother coordination between regions, and end-to-end execution through Noah’s global booking centres.

The Summit’s tone shifted toward long-term thinking when Co-Founder and Chairwoman Norah Wang delivered her keynote, “From Chaos to Clarity: Building a Global Operating System for Wealth Management”. She reflected on twenty years of serving more than 400,000 clients and explained that families today face new pressures. As she put it, “The real pain point for Chinese families today is not investment performance, but navigating the growing complexities of a global lifestyle”. Her message was straightforward: wealth is no longer just about returns. It is about managing uncertainty in a world where technology, geopolitics, and mobility collide.

Wang described how two major shifts have shaped modern wealth—first the Internet Era, which changed how people built wealth, and now what she calls the AI Civilisation Era, which is changing how people must protect it. She outlined the forces that influence today’s decisions: geopolitical shifts, persistent inflation, the rising importance of security and supply-chain technologies, the spread of AI, and the need for stronger family governance across generations. Each of these factors adds complexity, and families need tools that help them see the bigger picture.

To respond to this reality, Noah presented its integrated global wealth infrastructure. It is built on three pillars:

  • Olive, which focuses on asset management and global investment growth
  • Glory, which supports families in governance, succession planning, and legacy architecture
  • ARK, the company’s global booking and execution centre, which enables cross-border wealth operations

Together, these pillars function as an AI-supported system designed to simplify global complexity and help families preserve long-term stability.

One of the most discussed conversations featured Noah’s CEO, Zander Yin, and Tony Shale, Co-Founder & Chairman of Asian Private Banker China. They spoke about how AI is transforming private banking in Asia. Their view was that wealth management is moving from a product-centred model to one led by insight, trust, and human-tech collaboration. AI may accelerate analysis, but human expertise will continue to guide judgment, relationships, and long-term strategy.

The closing message of the Summit centred on redefining what prosperity means in an AI-driven age. For Noah, wealth is no longer a destination. It is an ongoing journey through a world that is increasingly fast-moving and unpredictable. As Wang noted, “With AI reshaping the very foundations of civilisation, wealth and financial freedom represent not a static endpoint, but a continuous journey. Here, we find our purpose: to help global Chinese investors navigate an increasingly complex world and achieve true prosperity, supported by resilient wealth management infrastructure and deep human expertise”.

The Summit ended on that note—a reminder that the future of wealth is not only about financial assets, but about clarity, confidence and the ability to adapt as the world transforms.

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Biotechnology

How a Teen-Founded Startup Is Using AI to Reinvent Pesticide Discovery

Bindwell is testing a simple idea: use AI to design smarter, more targeted pesticides built for today’s farming challenges.

Updated

November 28, 2025 4:18 PM

Researcher tending seedlings in a laboratory environment. PHOTO: FREEPIK

Bindwell, a San Francisco–based ag-tech startup using AI to design new pesticide molecules, has raised US$6 million in seed funding, co-led by General Catalyst and A Capital, with participation from SV Angel and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham. The round will help the company expand its lab in San Carlos, hire more technical talent and advance its first pesticide candidates toward validation.  

Even as pesticide use has doubled over the last 30 years, farmers still lose up to 40% of global crops to pests and disease. The core issue is resistance: pests are adapting faster than the industry can update its tools. As a result, farmers often rely on larger amounts of the same outdated chemicals, even as they deliver diminishing returns.

Meanwhile, innovation in the agrochemical sector has slowed, leaving the industry struggling to keep up with rapidly evolving pests. This is the gap Bindwell is targeting. Instead of updating old chemicals, the company uses AI to find completely new compounds designed for today’s pests and farming conditions.  

This vision is made even more striking by the people leading it. Bindwell was founded by 18-year-old Tyler Rose and 19-year-old Navvye Anand, who met at the Wolfram Summer Research Program in 2023. Both had deep ties to agriculture — Rose in China and Anand in India — witnessing up close how pest outbreaks and chemical dependence burdened farmers.  

Filling the gap in today’s pesticide pipeline, Bindwell created an AI system that can design and evaluate new molecules long before they hit the lab. It starts with Foldwell, the company’s protein-structure model, which helps map the shapes of pest proteins so scientists know where a molecule should bind. Then comes PLAPT, which can scan through every known synthesized compound in just a few hours to see which ones might actually work. For biopesticides, they use APPT, a model tuned to spot protein-to-protein interactions and shown to outperform existing tools on industry benchmarks.

Bindwell isn’t selling AI tools. Instead, the company develops the molecules itself and licenses them to major agrochemical players. Owning the full discovery process lets the team bake in safety, selectivity and environmental considerations from day one. It also allows Bindwell to plug directly into the pipelines that produce commercial pesticides — just with a fundamentally different engine powering the science.

At present, the team is now testing its first AI-generated candidates in its San Carlos lab and is in early talks with established pesticide manufacturers about potential licensing deals. For Rose and Anand, the long-term vision is simple: create pest control that works without repeating the mistakes of the last half-century. As they put it, the goal is not to escalate chemical use but to design molecules that are more precise, less harmful and resilient against resistance from the start.