This decade is shaping up to be the most disruptive one banks have seen. Stablecoins, central bank digital currencies, real-time cross-border payments, and agentic commerce are all forcing banks to move fast, and to do it with scarce budgets.
The financial industry has had a vivid reminder of what happens when it bets on the wrong technology, albeit from a different sector.
The metaverse, briefly crowned the next big thing, absorbed more than $100 billion from Meta alone before the company redirected its attention and spending towards AI.
For banks deciding where to focus on the most disruptive decade they’ve faced, the hard part is working out which bets actually deserve money and attention, especially when every vendor is selling the future.
That opener set the tone for the recent Malaysia Banking CxO Roundtable, co-hosted with OneConnect, where digital bank CEOs and incumbent leaders sat down to discuss where the sector is headed.
OneConnect Sets the Bar for AI at Full Scale
Matthew Chen, Chief Executive Officer of OneConnect International, shared the numbers behind Ping An’s approach, noting that within the financial industry, for banking and insurance, the group ranks among the top companies for AI patents.
He elaborated, saying that roughly 30% of coding at Ping An Bank was done by AI last year, with a target to hit 50% in 2026.
His larger point is about discipline; the bank does not tolerate a model that invents answers, so the work goes into the data that trains it.
“We started the journey at the same time as Sam Altman and OpenAI, but we took a very different path, because in banks you can’t allow any sense of hallucination. To me, AI is about using data to train AI to become a specialised banker.”
Chen said the group had converted its banking data into what it calls knowledge maps, and was opening these up to partner banks so they did not have to build from nothing.
“The heavy lifting is done, so you don’t need to start from scratch. Use our models. That is why we are opening up.”
Maybank on Developing an Allergy to Innovation Theatre
For Alexander McFaull, Head of AI Transformation and Adoption at Maybank, one of the most encouraging shifts in banking right now is a new attitude.
Across his own institution and among peers at other banks, he’s noticed a rising impatience with “innovation theatre,” which he thinks is long overdue.
Most banking leaders have sat through the same parade of consultants and vendors promising the moon: decks that look alike, pledges of ROI within six months, and assurances that a single platform will solve every problem.
After enough of those presentations, McFaull says, the mood in the room changes to what he calls ‘constructive scepticism’. He sees that as a healthy correction on two fronts.
“There’s been a shift from zeal and enthusiasm to almost a constructive scepticism, and I think that’s very healthy.”
The first is a sharper focus on value. Banks are not applying AI because it’s interesting or because everyone else is doing it. They’re asking whether a given project delivers returns.
Given the cost involved, the logic is simple: if it doesn’t generate value, why bother?
The second, and deeper, realisation is that AI is just the surface. Whether the goal is fixing a broken customer journey or improving an operational workflow, McFaull explains that it is important to go all the way down to the foundations and fix them.
This can involve many layers, from thinking through the data products the AI consumes, to the platforms it sits on, the infrastructure it needs, and beyond, the harder questions around governance, and training.
“AI is maybe the first thing you pull on the thread, but as you get deeper, it always comes back to reimagining the whole customer experience.”
Malaysia’s Open Finance Pilot Gets Past the Talking Stage
Open finance has been on Malaysia’s agenda for so long. Thankfully, a pilot group of banks is now building with PayNet as the central standardising platform.
Cyrene Kong, the Chief Digital Officer at RHB, shared that the long wait may work in Malaysia’s favour. Local banks get to study a decade of open finance experiments abroad, keeping what worked and skipping what did not.
“Malaysia, I think, has the luxury of seeing how other countries have done it and learn from what has gone well and what has not gone well,” Cyrene said.
In other markets, open finance has stalled against a familiar set of challenges: banks are reluctant to share data that gives them a competitive edge, consumers are wary of granting access, technical and compliance costs are high, and regulation is fragmented.
Cyrene points to a recent PayNet incentive programme that, she says, pays banks to be data providers while charging fees on the consumer side.
“It’s opened the playing field to be a bit more innovative in how you want to create new revenue streams. There are fees as a data consumer, and also incentives to be a data provider. But what I like is that we are really putting the decision into the hands of the customer. Our customer is central to us.”
Nishant Sharma, Chief Technology Officer, GXBank, sees the incentive differently. Payments and fees may get banks through the door, but they are a short-term lens on what open finance is actually for.
The real prize comes once data flows freely through open APIs and a wider set of organisations can build on it. At that point, banking starts turning up embedded in all kinds of places, spawning use cases nobody has designed yet.
“Longer term, you have to look at those innovative use cases, making banking accessible to everyone through different types of channels. That’s going to be the real thing, in my view,” Nishant said.
CIMB Treats AI as a Portfolio
Chris Chew, Head of Strategy for Malaysia at CIMB, shares that the bank manages AI as a book of work, an approach that lets it absorb failures without punishing the people who took the risk.
“We think of AI innovation as a portfolio, a book of work,” Chew said. “The portfolio must deliver a hurdle rate or whatever hurdle rate we can give, but the individual use case may not.”
The logic follows from there. If the unit economics of a given use case shift, you shouldn’t penalise the person who put forward the business case. This is provided that the portfolio as a whole is still delivering.
“Out of 10 (use cases), maybe one or two are home runs, 10X the cost or effort we put in. The rest may be on par or fall short. But that’s the nature of innovation, and we’re willing to treat it as a bucket of opportunities.”
When pressed on whether one or two home runs justify eight other use cases that may not pay off, Chris pointed to the importance of watching the indicators and the red flags.
“Do you stop because you don’t get anything? Or do you try, innovate, see where the value is, and then iterate from there?” he shared. “We take that position, as much as possible.”
For Chew, the discipline is also about spending deliberately. When capital is scarce, the winning move also lies in choosing what not to do.
“Capital is scarce, so you have to choose where to put your dollars. That means choosing what not to play.”
RHB on Wealth Evolving Faster Than the Servicing Model
Ryan Teoh, Group Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at RHB, spoke about wealth, specifically on how it is sold and serviced here, and who it now belongs to.
“A real practical change we are keeping an eye on was the evolution of how you sell and service wealth in Malaysia. The democratisation of wealth into the younger generation that wants private banking services without paying for it, but also where the transfer of wealth is going in that direction, which, for me, begs a different type of operating model.”
For Teoh, that shift forces a rethink of the operating model itself, from how teams are structured to how they are skilled and equipped.
The hard part seems to be servicing wealth clients effectively as the number grows. Serving more clients with a human relationship manager only stretches so far, and Teoh notes that Malaysian ratios are already pushed close to their limit.
“It’s already (at a ratio of) 1:200, and we’re trying to stretch even more, which we know is not possible,” he said, calling it a tough nut to crack.
That raises the obvious question of whether this new generation of wealth wants the same treatment as the previous generation did.
“I don’t think it’s so much white glove, but I think they still value advisory and access,” he said.
Agentic AI Hinges on Trust and Ethics
Next, the conversation landed on a topic that surfaces at nearly every industry gathering; agentic commerce, and whether customers actually want AI shopping and paying on their behalf.
For Andrew Jong, the Managing Director of Personal Financial Services at Hong Leong Bank, the hesitation is part structural and part human. Enabling agentic commerce depends on multiple parties across a network, he said, along with the security and trust protocols that hold it together.
“It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. When you don’t have that use case in front of you, you don’t quite know what it is that you like or don’t like about it. It’s no different from tokenisation or AI. We’ve got to learn to live with it, but be very clear about what we’re testing, who we’re testing with, and the controls we operate in.”
That mix of curiosity and caution turned the panel to tomorrow’s stakes: what banks should focus on to win in the coming decade as Malaysian banking trends and AI accelerate.
Chen admitted that the future is hard to predict. Even on his way to the session, he’d been reading about the more unsettling edges of AI, including systems formalising their own language and evolving in ways that are difficult to anticipate.
His conclusion was to lean into the technology.
“We need to embrace AI as much as we can, so as to stay on the ‘good’ side of AI. At the end of the day, it comes down to AI as a good corporate social responsibility. Guiding AI in the right direction to help humans, rather than the so-called ‘evil’ side.”
Over the session, the leaders also dug into open banking pilots and owning customer relationships too. Watch the video below for more insights on the roundtable.
Featured image by Fintech News Malaysia
