Malaysia is moving towards a cashless society. But inside many businesses, finance still runs on paper, patience, and personal favours.
Every Malaysian business owner knows the drill. An employee needs supplies. He heads out, buys what he needs, collects the receipts, submits a claim, waits for approval and eventually gets reimbursed. Days later, if he’s lucky.
That’s just one part of the problem. Somewhere else in the same company, someone is chasing a missing invoice. Another person is manually reconciling accounts. A founder is personally approving every single payment, often late at night. In many teams, finance decisions bottleneck at the founder’s inbox.
“According to KPMG, the hidden cost of manual finance processing is the structural inefficiency baked into every step of the process.”
And nobody has a complete, real-time view of where the money is actually going.
For most Malaysian companies, this has long been accepted as the cost of doing business, but this takes out a chunk of time and bandwidth that could be repurposed towards growth.
A Problem Everyone Accepted, And No One Was Fixing
For Kalyana ‘Mohan’ Teagarajan, the Co-Founder and CEO of Swipey, the disconnect was impossible to ignore.
After almost two decades abroad, he returned to Malaysia with a clear picture of what modern financial infrastructure looked like. He was greeted with a stark contrast.
“We started sharing notes on our experiences in Malaysia,” Mohan says, referring to conversations with Rouvin Thiruchelvam, a longtime friend, fellow General Electric alumnus, and eventual Co-Founder and CFO of Swipey.
Why is it so bad? Why is it so challenging? They went looking for solutions to their own problems. There wasn’t one that fit their needs.
The duo set out to validate the issue. To be sure, they spoke to more than 100 digital-first businesses in Malaysia, and the answer was the same everywhere. Pretty much everyone was dealing with the same problem.
What struck them most was that many businesses had simply stopped expecting things to get better. They had accepted it as the cost of doing business here.
“In Southeast Asia, not just Malaysia, digital-first businesses are among the fastest-growing in this space. But the ecosystem to support payments, expenses and finance still felt like it was stuck in the 1980s.”
They refused to accept it as the norm, and Swipey was their answer.
Enterprise-Grade Financial Resourcing, Minus the Price Tag
For years, the financial tools that truly worked were built for companies that could afford a 100-person project team to run them.
When Mohan was at General Electric, he helped the organisation digitise and achieve greater efficiency, profitability, and growth. They were effective, but came with eye-watering costs. Implementations could run as high as $23 million a pop and require a 100-person project team to implement.
Large corporations could afford enterprise resource planning models (ERPs) that integrated with their banking solution, like SAP and Oracle. But what about other businesses?
That question became Swipey’s blueprint, built on what Mohan had seen work inside some of the world’s biggest companies, and stripped down to what growing businesses needed.
The platform now helps businesses digitise how they spend, control, and track money without the cost of enterprise tools.
An account can be opened in about 20 minutes. In under 35 minutes, a business can begin digitising expenses and payments. Swipey estimates this helps businesses close their books up to 12 times faster and save as much as RM100,000 annually.
But speed wasn’t the only breakthrough. In most Malaysian companies, business owners still personally approve every payment, consuming up to 20% of leadership bandwidth every month, Mohan divulges.
Swipey replaces that with a risk-based approach. High-risk transactions are flagged for human review while routine transactions move automatically.
One F&B client reduced their monthly contractor payment process, which once took three full days, to under four hours.
For business owners, the change isn’t just about efficiency. It’s also about growth.
Where DuitNow QR Meets Business Spending
DuitNow QR built the rails that changed how Malaysians pay, and what businesses like Swipey can leverage to run on.
DuitNow QR has already proven itself as one of Malaysia’s most widely adopted payment tools. With over 3 million touchpoints nationwide, it accelerated how consumers transact.
Swipey’s partnership with Fasspay, supported by PayNet Fintech Hub, builds on that foundation and extends it to the other side of the transaction. For the first time, businesses in Malaysia can use DuitNow QR to collect and to pay.
“The money is digital. Once the spend is done, there’s no ‘here’s the balance, here’s the receipt’ process. That all goes out the window.”
It’s also a move that aligns with the Malaysia Digital Economy Blueprint target of 30% productivity increase across all business sectors through digital adoption.
Swipey is already embedded across a diverse range of industries, running from retail and grant management to media and entertainment. Names like ZUS Coffee, Baskin-Robbins, Invoke, TGV Cinema, TIME dotCom, and Trinity are on its client roster.
The result realigns how businesses can now spend, receive, and reconcile on a single platform through Swipey, with every transaction tracked, categorised and audit-ready.
With the Right Fintech Ecosystem, Ideas Come to Life
Building the platform was the first part of the challenge. Finding the right resources and expertise was next.
“We don’t see fintech versus banks,” Mohan says. “We see fintechs with banks, enabling each other to better serve Malaysian customers.”
That view shapes Swipey’s participation in the PayNet Fintech Hub. It’s not just a programme; it’s live infrastructure. When Swipey needed a connection it didn’t have, the Hub delivered.
Sometimes with direct technology solutions. Other times, a warm introduction to the right bank or partner. In a world where a cold email tends to disappear into a black hole, those introductions change trajectory.
The Hub also enabled something less visible yet consequential: an AI initiative that paired Swipey with an industry expert in AI to build a conversational AI agent for business customers.
The goal? To give business owners CFO-level insights. To answer questions like: Where is my money going? What’s my biggest spend category this month?
“As a startup, you have nothing but ideas and the founders to execute them. Talent, expertise, or customers are a resource conversation. The PayNet Fintech Hub gives you different types of resources, so you can focus on what you actually need to grow.”
CATALYST-Driven Insights That Shaped Swipey’s Next Moves
Sometimes the sharpest shifts in thinking don’t come from inside the business space.
For Mohan, Swipey’s shift came into greater focus through the PayNet x Imperial CATALYST Programme.
The 10-week programme at Imperial College London challenged founders to think beyond local markets, building for regional scale from day one, and sharpening how they raise and deploy capital. For Mohan, two sessions stood out.
@paynetmalaysia Our startup founders are gaining invaluable insights at the PayNet Fintech Hub x Imperial College London CATALYST Programme. One-on-one sessions with mentors and industry leaders offer founders an up-close, unfiltered view of the entrepreneurial journey, from key decisions to unexpected pivots. With Kuala Lumpur emerging as a hub for building and scaling businesses, the PayNet Fintech Hub is proud to support our COMMUNITY every step of the way. Nine weeks of virtual mentoring under the Imperial programme are left before Demo Day in March, and we can’t wait to see what they achieve next. 🚀 #PayNet #PayNetFintechHub #PayNetxImperial #FintechMalaysia #ImperialCollegeLondon
♬ original sound – Payments Network Malaysia – Payments Network Malaysia
The first was cybersecurity. The message was blunt: if you’re in this space and you’re not thinking about how AI is changing the threat landscape, you’ve left your business exposed. That session prompted Mohan to fundamentally rethink Swipey’s security approach.
The second was fundraising.
“Most founders tend to default to venture capital,” he shared. “But seeing how little VC money actually flows into Southeast Asia compared to the other regions changed how we think about building sustainability. These are insights you can only gather from sessions like that. It changed the way we’re (Swipey) thinking about fundraising.”
Programmes like the PayNet x Imperial CATALYST Programme are, in essence, sharpening the questions founders ask of their own businesses. And when that mindset changes, the trajectory often follows.
Malaysia First, The Region Next
The mindset extended to where Swipey was always heading: regional.
“We didn’t want to build a business just for Malaysia,” Mohan says. “But Malaysia was the right place to start. The opportunity to grow into a regional business is very much there.”
And according to Mohan, building Swipey in Malaysia first was a deliberate strategic choice, not a stepping stone.
While many startups default to Singapore as their launchpad, Mohan sees Malaysia as the real stress test.
“The Malaysian buying behaviour is closer to the Filipino buying behaviour. Singapore is different. So, if you can prove it in Malaysia, you’re one step or two steps closer to the rest of the region.”
The payment data from the Global Payments Report 2026 supports the comparison. Both Malaysia and the Philippines built their digital payment ecosystems on QR infrastructure and local wallets, unlike the card rails that dominate Singapore. Cash still coexists with digital in Malaysia and the Philippines and local platforms lead adoption.
Mohan’s thinking has been weaving its way across Swipey’s infrastructure. The PayNet Fintech Hub, from infrastructure connections to the AI initiative, is a stepping stone towards a platform that can follow its customers as they grow, across borders and into new markets.
When the time comes to expand regionally, the foundation is already in place. For Swipey’s customers, that means a switch-on, not a rebuild.
What began as frustration over a broken system has grown into a platform trusted by thousands of businesses. For Swipey, the story is still unfolding.
For fintechs at any stage of their journey, the PayNet Fintech Hub offers more than access. It offers a foundation to build on.
Click the banner below to find out what’s possible when you have the right resources behind you.
This article is part of an ongoing series spotlighting Malaysian fintechs building the future of finance through the PayNet Fintech Hub. Discover the Hub and more fintech startup journeys from IIMMPACT, InsureKu, Janjilah, CashKu, Kapitani, Blox, and Moby.
Featured image edited by Fintech News Malaysia based on image by Swipey
