Jean Low

Jean Low is former CEO at 1880. She is excited about building a community that drives courageous discourse and is unafraid to change the world for the better. Her current obsessions are around the topics of holistic hospitality and compassionate leadership.

She has more than 25 years of financial and operational leadership experience across the real estate, education, and co-working sectors and has served as board member in not-for-profit organisations focusing on gender equality and the arts.
She is Singaporean and holds a BSc in Economics from London School of Economics and an MBA from London Business School. She trained as a chartered accountant at KPMG in London and is a Fellow at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and the Institute of Singapore Chartered Accountants.
She has extensive experience in operational finance, most recently as the Head of Finance at United World College of South East Asia, the largest not-for-profit international school in Singapore with over 6,000 students. In the corporate world, she was part of the listing team for Mapletree Greater China Commercial Trust which comprises a portfolio of commercial and retail properties in Hong Kong and China, and post-listing, was the CFO of the REIT. Prior to this, she was Head of Risk Management and Performance Measurement for the Mapletree Group, a Temasek owned real estate group. In this role, she was responsible for setting up and building the Group’s risk management processes and capabilities and implementing the performance and incentive framework for the Group. Over the 11 years, she was an integral part of the management team which saw the Group scale from $2.7bn to $25bn assets under management.

Outside of finance, she has acquired diverse experience as a shareholder value and strategy consultant in London with large multinational clients across the US, UK and Europe. She also has experience in start-ups where she led business development in an internet payment company in London and more recently, was the CFO of a co-working company which just raised Series C financing in Singapore.

Adding to her diverse perspective, she was Head of Marketing and Communications for PricewaterhouseCoopers and was responsible for integrating the marketing teams of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand post-merger and helped to drive business development following the implementation of Sarbannes-Oxley in Singapore.

She was formerly serving on the Board of AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research), a not-for-profit that focuses on gender equality and on the Board of SGIFF (Singapore International Film Festival).