CapBay, a Malaysian P2P supply chain financing platform, has acquired a 49% stake in Kenanga Capital Islamic, a subsidiary of Kenanga Investment Bank Berhad, forming a joint venture with the latter to create an Islamic Supply Chain Finance fintech firm.

Kenanga Capital Islamic was established as a subsidiary of the group in 2013 and is registered with the Ministry of Finance to finance government contracts and orders for companies that supply to the government and government-linked companies.

This news follows their partnership announcement recently to digitise the factoring market for SMEs in Malaysia. With this acquisition, CapBay’s co-founder Ang Xing Xian will be appointed as the CEO of Kenanga Capital Islamic and will report directly to Kenanga Investment Bank’s Group Managing Director, Datuk Chay Wai Leong.

With this exercise, they also announced the appointment of Dato Sri’ Mohd Mokthar Mohd Shariff as the Chairman of their holding company, Bay Group Holdings Sdn Bhd. He served in the Royal Malaysia Police from 1977 to 2018, holding key senior positions.

CapBay has developed proprietary technology to ease the onboarding of SMEs and credit evaluation, which according to them enables the company to keep default rates low while financing the underserved SME markets. They added that their scoring model utilises machine learning to assess thousands of data points such as historical relationships, payments, quality of contracts and other patterns.

“KCI is known for providing thorough and reliable SME financing in the government sector. We’re excited to enhance our service offering with a larger team of experts at CapBay and are now able to provide high quality financing services to both the government and private sectors.”

said Datuk Chay,Group Managing Director, Kenanga Investment Bank

“We have always been committed to offering our customers the solutions they need to advance the growth of Malaysian businesses of all sizes. I am confident that this partnership with KIBB will allow us to grow as an organisation and better serve our customers as we invest in our infrastructure and service offering,”

said Ang Xing Xian, Co-founder of CapBay and CEO of KCI.