The first pawnshop on Orchard Road

Stigma is not the obstacle. It is why the business is still available.

One man in Singapore sells you your wedding ring. The same man lends you cash against it.

Lee Hwa, in the mall. Maxi-Cash a few doors down. Yellow signboard. Glass front.

Same owner. Both ends.

His name is Koh Wee Seng. Few people have heard it.

It starts on Circuit Road, in MacPherson.

November 1970. His mother opened a goldsmith. She called it Lee Hwa.

One shop. Yellow gold, mostly. Chains and bangles.

You bought it by weight, as savings rather than jewellery.

Koh was in that shop from the age of eleven.

Not a good business. It only began to break even in 1994.

He took over that year.

Four years later, turnover had gone from about S$23 million to S$72 million. Then he took it public. First jeweller listed in Singapore.

That is the part of the story that gets told.

Here's what I didn't know until recently.

The jewellery is not where the money is.

Remember what a Singapore pawnshop looked like before 2009.

Metal bars, visible from the street. Giant pillars either side of the door, Chinese lettering down them.

When a character walked into one on a Channel 8 serial, it was gangsters. Or gamblers. Usually both.

Growth was glacial. Fifty pawnshops in 1978. Sixty-nine in 1998.

Twenty years. Nineteen shops.

Koh incorporated Maxi-Cash in 2008. The first one opened in Ang Mo Kio Central. Bright. Air-conditioned. Glass instead of a grille.

Six months later he opened one on Orchard Road.

Nobody had ever put a pawnshop on Orchard Road. Not once. Not in the street's history.

He put a place to hock your watch in the middle of it.

You do not advertise a business people are ashamed of.

In 2012 he listed it. Singapore's first publicly listed pawnbroker.

This is a trade built on nobody wanting to be seen.

Now the mechanics.

A pawn loan here is capped at 1.5% a month. Six months to redeem, or you renew by paying the interest.

Miss it and it's forfeited. In Maxi-Cash's own words: "no surplus from disposal will be due to pawner."

The gold is theirs now. Since 2015 it does not even have to go to auction.

So where does it go?

Same mall. Same owner. Both counters.

Which one do you think makes the money?