Ask Shawn Yan what has shaped Cregis over the past nine years, and he is unlikely to begin with technology.
Instead, he talks about the environment in which the company was built: a market where infrastructure providers had to move quickly, adapt constantly, and earn trust through execution.
As the founder and CEO of Cregis, and a serial entrepreneur who has spent more than a decade building businesses across fintech and digital assets, Yan has learned that lasting infrastructure is rarely defined by innovation alone.
It is defined by whether that innovation can support real businesses, complex workflows, and the operational demands of institutions.
That perspective has become increasingly relevant as digital assets move from niche applications into mainstream financial operations, bringing a new set of expectations around governance, resilience, and operational control.
Today, Cregis serves more than 4,000 enterprise clients across more than 50 countries. Although the company has always operated in a global market, Yan believes many of the principles behind its infrastructure were shaped through years of serving customers in Asia-Pacific (APAC), where digital-asset businesses often developed at exceptional speed and complexity.
“APAC didn’t simply give us our first customers,” he said. “It forced us to build for the most demanding ones.”
From Curiosity to Infrastructure
Yan is self-taught. Long before computing became a career path, he was already teaching himself how software worked, driven less by formal training than by curiosity about how complex systems function.
That curiosity later became a habit of looking beneath the surface: understanding not only how technology works, but why certain systems succeed while others fail when exposed to real-world pressure.
He later found his way into finance almost by accident, through an early exposure to the region’s rapidly evolving fintech ecosystem.
What stayed with him was not simply the excitement of a fast-growing industry, but the realization that financial systems operate under fundamentally different expectations.
Unlike consumer software, financial infrastructure has little tolerance for failure. Reliability is not an enhancement; it is the foundation on which trust is built.
As Yan continued building technology businesses, this distinction became increasingly clear. Technologies would inevitably change, but the expectations around security, resilience, and operational discipline would remain constant.
That conviction eventually became the foundation on which Cregis was built.
Built Through Market Complexity
That philosophy was not developed in a boardroom. It was shaped by years of working alongside enterprise customers whose businesses depended on infrastructure performing exactly as expected.
When Cregis was founded in 2017, enterprise digital-asset infrastructure was still an emerging category. Institutional wallet solutions were still developing, and there was no established blueprint for helping businesses manage digital assets at scale.
From the beginning, Cregis served global customers, but much of its early product development took place in Asia-Pacific, one of the most active and competitive digital-asset markets globally.
The region was home to some of the industry’s most sophisticated digital-asset businesses. Exchanges, payment services providers(PSPs), asset managers, OTC platforms, and quantitative trading firms were often expanding simultaneously, each with different operating models and infrastructure requirements.
For an infrastructure provider, every customer presented a new challenge. One customer needed more flexible transaction controls. Another required customized approval workflows. Others were expanding across multiple jurisdictions and expected infrastructure that could evolve as quickly as their own businesses.
As a result, many of the capabilities that later became core parts of Cregis were never planned as standalone features. They emerged from solving one operational problem after another.
“The market was our customer,” Yan said. “But it was also our product manager.”
By 2021, Cregis had built a strong position in the APAC market, accumulating not only technology capabilities but also the operational experience and customer trust needed to support enterprise digital-asset businesses.
For Yan, this became the company’s foundation for wider global expansion. Technology opened the door. Understanding how enterprises actually operate was what allowed Cregis to keep walking through it.
Taking APAC-Built Capabilities Global
Seen from Yan’s perspective, Cregis’ expansion beyond APAC was less a change in direction than a natural continuation of what the company had been building from the start.
“Digital assets have always been global,” he says. “Our customers operate across jurisdictions, time zones, and financial systems. The infrastructure has to do the same.”
The experience built in APAC became the foundation for Cregis’ expansion into new markets. Rather than reinventing its approach, the company carried the same operating principles into markets with different regulatory frameworks and commercial environments.
Cregis has since expanded across the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and Africa. Yan believes the company was able to scale internationally not because different regions became more alike, but because the core needs of enterprise customers proved more consistent than many expected.
Whether serving a broker in Dubai, a payment provider in São Paulo, or a fintech company in Europe, institutions ultimately look for the same qualities: secure infrastructure, operational reliability, and systems that fit existing financial processes.
That has already translated into measurable progress in the Middle East, where Cregis has built a stable base of around 200 long-term paying enterprise customers and achieved sustainable regional growth and profitability.
The company’s evolving product architecture reflects that shift. What began with secure wallet infrastructure has expanded into a broader enterprise platform, supporting fund operations, custody, compliance, and the wider workflows that institutions increasingly expect to manage in one place.
For Yan, this is not a departure from Cregis’ original vision. It is a response to how enterprise adoption has matured. As digital assets become part of everyday financial operations, infrastructure has to support more than assets alone. It has to support the businesses behind them.
“Innovation matters,” Yan said. “But institutions ultimately choose the infrastructure they can trust to run every day.”
Looking back, Yan believes that may be the most valuable lesson Cregis learned from building in Asia-Pacific. The region did not shape the company because it moved fastest, but because it demanded operational discipline early, forcing infrastructure providers to solve real business problems rather than simply build new technology.
Technology will continue to evolve, and enterprise requirements will evolve with it. But for Yan, the fundamentals remain remarkably consistent: reliable infrastructure is built not by chasing every new innovation, but by earning trust one operational challenge at a time.
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Featured image by Cregis
