A bowl of hand-pulled noodles just did more for (my own) cross-border Islamic finance than most summits. This is Muhammad Ridhwaan Radzi, CSAA, he runs Islamic Finance Singapore (IFSG Ltd.), a platform he and his team built from the ground up to serve a community that one of the world's most sophisticated financial centres had largely overlooked. Not a bank. Not a regulator. A group of practitioners who saw a gap and started filling it. We sat down in Singapore. What struck me was how similar the starting conditions are in Singapore and in Switzerland: strong financial infrastructure, a local Muslim populations that want credible options, and almost everything still to be built. Singapore has speed and depth, Switzerland has other things. Neither side has the full picture alone. The bridge between hubs is what turns local expertise into global infrastructure. In islamic finance, one can see more and more ecosystems doing excellent work in parallel. It needs connectors; people willing to sit across a table from someone building in a different geography and ask: what are you seeing that I am not? More about Swiss Islamic Finance in South-East Asia in the next newsletter. hashtag#IslamicFinance hashtag#Switzerland hashtag#Singapore