One of the leading figures in the Asia jurisdiction's banking and financial world has passed away at the age of 85.

One of the luminaries of Singapore’s banking industry, Lee Seng Wee, the former chairman of Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp., has passed away at the age of 85.

He had been a board member of OCBC – owners of the private bank, Bank of Singapore – for five decades and was reappointed in April this year.

Lee, who featured among Singapore’s richest and was recently ranked at number 16 with a net worth of $1.6 billion (source: Forbes), had stepped down as the bank’s chairman in 2003.

The Lee family own a minority stake in OCBC. Lee Seng Wee was the youngest of three sons of late rubber magnate Lee Kong Chian who went on to co-found and chair OCBC.  The patriarch was a prominent philanthropist of his era through the family’s Lee Foundation, set up in 1952.

Educated in Canada, Lee Seng Wee joined the family’s rubber business before moving to the bank. He became OCBC’s chairman in 1995, a position he occupied for eight years. In 2007, Lee became the founding chairman of the Temasek Trust, Forbes reported.