Michelle Tang | Luxury Fertility Concierge & Fertility Governance

The Bank Counter That Changed Everything

I want to tell you a story I’ve never shared publicly before.

It starts in a bank. Not in a boardroom, not in a corner office — behind a teller’s counter, on a summer job when I was a university student.

I was fast. My line moved quickly, and because of that, my branch manager would constantly redirect customers to me. I didn’t mind. I liked helping people. I liked the feeling of solving a small problem for someone and sending them on their way with less stress than when they walked in.

But something else was happening around me that I didn’t fully understand at the time.

The other staff — the full-timers — were busy. Very busy. They were selling investment

products. Products with names I didn’t recognise, pitched with confidence to customers who trusted them completely. I was young. I assumed this was just how banking worked.

Then one day, a middle-aged man walked up to my counter with his mother — a woman in her 70s or 80s. She stood quietly beside him while he did the talking. He wanted to get her out of whatever investment product she had been sold — and get her money back.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t fully understand what the product was.

But their faces stayed with me.

Witnessing the Human Cost of Financial Failure

A couple of years later, the financial world collapsed.

Lehman Brothers. The mini-bond scandal. Billions in losses. Ordinary people — retirees, families — discovering that the “capital protected” products they had been sold were anything but. The language had been marketed to sound safe. The reality was the opposite.

And suddenly, that man at my counter made complete sense.

I had witnessed the tail end of it, without knowing what I was seeing.

Why Governance Became Personal

By then, the job market had dried up. I found myself at a Big 4 accounting firm — a pragmatic choice in a downturn, but one that turned out to be far more meaningful than I expected.

Learning From the Complaints of Real People

My first assignment? Reading through complaints filed by victims of the mini-bond mis-selling. Hundreds of them. Real people, real losses, real devastation.

In my third year, I moved into Regulatory Advisory. My project: helping a bank redesign its internal controls to prevent the same thing from happening again.

The circle closed.

Everything I had witnessed, everything I had read, everything I had studied — it all connected.

I became obsessed. I researched consumer psychology. I studied the history of financial regulation. I thought deeply about how systems fail people, and how better design could protect them.

This wasn’t just a career for me anymore. It was personal.

I thought about that woman — standing quietly beside her son at my counter — and all the others like her.

I wanted to do right by them — even if only in the form of better systems going forward.

I wouldn’t call myself an expert. But I cared more about this than almost anything else in my life at the time — and that care drove everything.

From Financial Governance to Fertility Governance

Fast forward to today.

I’m no longer in finance. I now run a boutique luxury fertility concierge and white-glove surrogacy firm alongside my husband and Co-Founder, Ron Sonnenberg.

On the surface, it looks completely different.

But recently, sitting across from a potential client during an initial consultation, something unexpected happened.

I felt it again — that same feeling. That same pull.

The desire to protect someone navigating something complex and emotionally charged. To make sure they are treated with integrity. To ensure that the system works for them — and not against them.

It stopped me in my tracks.

I realised:

I’ve never actually changed careers.

I’ve always been in the same business.

The business of protecting people.

The Philosophy Behind IMA ART Fertility

At IMA ART Fertility, this philosophy quietly shapes everything we do — from how we structure our processes and guide our private clients, to the way we think about discretion, governance, oversight, and white-glove support throughout the fertility and surrogacy journey.

A White-Glove Approach Built Around Trust

When people place their trust in you during one of the most intimate chapters of their lives, that responsibility should never be taken lightly.

That belief became one of the foundations of IMA ART Fertility Beverly Hills — and remains central to how we support private clients today.

Coming Next: The Origins of Fertility Governance

In the next issue, Michelle Tang shares how her background in financial governance became the foundation for the systems, philosophy, and white-glove approach behind IMA ART Fertility Beverly Hills.