Maybank announced the launch of their new digital financial planning tool on it’s online banking website, Maybank2u. The new tool is geared at helping their customers plan their savings, monitor their insurance and keep updated on their financial situation. Commenting on the new features, Dato’ John Chong, Group CEO, Community Financial Services Maybank, said “The introduction of the new features are a natural extension of our commitment in creating services that put our customers’ needs first. It is an ambitious but simple objective of wanting to create the most user-centric and friendly financial platform for our customers.” The financial planning…

Between the 9th and 10th of August, key fintech players flew to Langkawi for Fintech News’ inaugural Fintech Barcamp—where the beach shorts come on, and the strict event agendas are thrown out the window. We strived to make that point clear by hosting the event in Holiday Villa, Langkawi with its own private section of the Langkawi beach, and drinks by the pool. Not Another Beach-Side Conference Based on my own experiences running events in the past, unconferences have always been a personal favourite. Organisers take a step back, and instead hand over the reigns of the event to participants. Discussions…

Note: We’ve update this report, the 2019 edition of the Fintech Report can be found here Following last year’s report, our second edition Fintech Malaysia Report 2018 intends to clearly outline the state of play for fintech in Malaysia. The year 2018 marks a new dawn in Malaysia, with our historic democratic change in government for the first time in over 60 years, with that hopefully a new dawn will follow for the Fintech Malaysia landscape. Malaysia’s economy has shown significant growth as our GDP gap with Singapore narrows further this year. The IMF has also reported that Malaysia…

Several years ago when the fintech wave began hitting the shores of Malaysia, several Malaysian banks like Maybank, RHB, and CIMB each launch their own accelerator programmes to partner up with fintech companies. Some time around last year, the banks began to open up their program to non-fintech digital players in the market. The shift from partnerships between banks and fintech companies to banks and other digital companies are made even more apparent in 2018, where in this week alone both Hong Leong Bank and RHB announced a series of partnerships. Hong Leong Bank’s Partnerships Hong Leong launched their “HLB…

Malaysia’s Credit Guarantee Corporation (CGC), a government and commercial enterprise joint venture, has used FICO’s decision management technology to improve its ability to judge the creditworthiness of small businesses so it can provide them with loans. This direct lending is an expansion of CGC’s usual role of providing loan guarantees to businesses, many of which lack the collateral and track record to obtain regular financing. Since its deployment of FICO® Blaze Advisor® decision rules management system and custom analytic models in August 2016, CGC has reduced non-performing loans to just 3 percent of the loan book and has had only…

BBazaar Malaysia today announce that its website is fully live in Malaysia. BankBazaar, BBazaar Malaysia’s parent company, is among the leading financial comparison sites in India. They boast over 300 million visitors to its site and has facilitated over 1.5 million transactions in the last 12 months on its platform. Commenting on its operations, Vipin Kalra, CEO of BankBazaar International said, “We have a unique offering in Malaysia. We see that there are a lot of comparison websites that offer information and allow consumers to compare various financial products, but no one does what we do, which is to provide…

CapitalBay, a FinTech company, offering solutions for Supply Chain Finance in Malaysia has announced that it has received two separate awards from the  Asian Bankers Awards in Beijing, alongside top international transaction banks such as Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and Mizuho Bank. Also present at the awards, was Tan Sri Zeti Aziz, former bank governor of Bank Negara Malaysia. The first award CapitalBay managed to bag was “The Best Fintech Platform – Digital Supply Chain Finance” under the Asia Pacific Frictionless Transaction Awards programme. Supply Chain Finance is a fast-growing space, especially in Malaysia and Southeast Asia as more…

As Malaysians go to the polls tomorrow to decide the fate of the country, the election fever runs high. So much so that the election fever has seeped into the subject of blockchain. Earlier this week, a candidate of the political party Malaysia Chinese Association (MCA) Ryan Ho, claimed that if he is elected as a member of Parliament he would push for blockchain to be deployed for the purposes of eradicating corruption from the government. He said in a statement to the local media that, blockchain technology, like Ethereum, had been proven to eradicate corruption in government departments. We…

Digital transformation is something that should be happening across the organisation, not just the consumer facing fronts. However, when scanning the news, one might be tempted to think that much of the industry’s digitisation focus is limited to the latter. In recent news, Hong Leong Bank introduced HALI, an artificial intelligence (A.I.) powered chatbot that is geared towards serving the internal employees. We figured it’d be a good idea to reach out to the Hong Leong team and get a sense of how a bank like Hong Leong would go about digitising their workforce. Removing Redundant Workload I’ll be the…

Southeast Asian fintech firm HelloGold has secured Series A funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firm 500 Startups. The funding will be used for the integration and testing of blockchain elements on the HelloGold mobile app. Providing a Shariah-compliant platform to buy, store and sell physical investment-grade gold for as little as a fraction of a dollar, HelloGold is migrating its platform to Ethereum smart contracts in the second half of 2018 to enable greater transparency and security of gold transactions. The funding amount was not disclosed. Robin Lee, CEO and Co-founder of HelloGold, said, “We’re honoured to have…

AXA Affin announced their insurtech play AXA eMedic, which focuses on offering low barrier to entry e-medical cards targeted at young professionals and families. According to its CEO, Rohit Nambiar, much of the insurance sector currently focuses on roughly 6 million overpenetrated market, while there’s a segment the size of 10 million young professionals and families that are currently being underserved. In launching this new product, AXA Affin has partnered with various companies ranging from insurtech startups, telcos and digital health companies namely; PolicyStreet, Digi, BookDoc, and Naluri. AXA Affin claims that the entire process of signing up for the…

Malaysia’s ICO scene seems to be maturing following a successful ICOs by the likes of HelloGold, and large players like Air Asia mulling their own ICO. The latest to join the game is Malaysia’s very own digital marketplace for the gig economy, ServisHero, which boasts over 200,000 users, 4,000 service providers and over 12,000 monthly jobs. The company currently operates in Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore. What really caught our attention in this ICO is the board of advisors, which featured Dr. Karl Ng, Director of Digital Economy, MDEC, which, to our knowledge we’ve not observed the agency to be part…

Just a couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the Money 20/20 conference at Singapore, seeing as I was attending a fintech conference and in need some Singaporean Dollars I figured it was the perfect time to test and review the currency exchange service by MoneyMatch, who incidentally was the winner of the Fintech Startup of The Year at the inaugural Malaysia Fintech Awards, just a week prior. It may seems strange for a fintech advocate to be talking about cold hard cash instead of the myriad of digital wallets available at our disposal, the unfortunate reality is that,…

Bank Negara Malaysia has issued the Interoperable Credit Transfer Framework (ICTF) on 20th March 2018, which has taken into account feedback received during the public consultation period on the Exposure Draft released on 7 December 2017. This new policy document has far and wide implication to Malaysia’s payments landscape beyond just QR codes and to understand what the implications are for a cashless Malaysia, the Fintech News team decided to take a dive into what BNM’s ICTF entails. What Is The Purpose of The ICTF? Bank Negara Malaysia’s ICTF seeks to foster an efficient, competitive and innovative payment landscape in…

Tan Sri Ranjit Singh announced that the Securities Commission Malaysia will be widening access to alternative based investing avenues like Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending and Equity Crowdfunding as a part of their continued effort to democratise access to investment and fostering market inclusiveness Commenting on the opening up the license to players, Tan Sri Ranjit Singh said that much like any other segments regulated by the Securities Commission there are no limits on the number of players, he emphasized that the key is that new applicants must be able to meet the requirements set out by the regulator and that the…

Following Grab’s previous announcement on GrabPay and acquisition of Kudo, Anthony Tan, Co Founder and Group CEO announced the company’s ambitions to further strengthen their play in the fintech ecosystem through Grab Financial during his keynote at Money 20/20. Grab Financial will encompass all of Grab’s fintech offerings, including payments services, rewards and loyalty services, agent network services and micro-loans. Grab Financial Services Asia was announced as a joint venture between Grab and Credit Saison one of Japan’s largest financial consumer lending companies. The joint venture is set up with the aim to  to provide loans and lending services to millions…

It’s been a great journey being part of Malaysia first Fintech Award we’re proud to have been one of the 4 judges appointed to help recognize the achievements and the progress of the fintech industry in Malaysia, the award was first announced on the 16th October 2017 and was open to public voting from 17th October 2017 till 26th January 2018. During that period 89 nominations, 15,000 public votes were received for the 13 categories. While during the judging process there were some clear winners, many of the shortlisted finalist were neck in neck in terms of the scoring. Here are the winners…

Malaysia’s fintech scene is becoming increasingly active, it is sometimes difficult to keep track of all the important events, here’s February’s edition of our news roundup featuring the top 10 stories in the Fintech Malaysia scene. If you’re interested to check out January’s new’s round up you can read more here Bank Negara Malaysia Issues Cryptocurrency Regulation The central bank has announced the official cryptocurrency regulation in Malaysia under the policy paper “Anti-Money Laundering and Counter Financing of Terrorism Policy for Digital Currencies (Sector 6)”. In essence the policy states that exchanges are subject to reporting obligations and must put…

Following the public consultation issued by Bank Negara Malaysia in December, the central bank has announced the official cryptocurrency regulation in Malaysia under the policy paper “Anti-Money Laundering and Counter Financing of Terrorism Policy for Digital Currencies (Sector 6)”. The regulator emphasises once again that cryptocurrencies are not a legal tender in Malaysia and reminds the general public that they should still conduct their own due diligence when dealing with cryptocurrencies since there are no established avenues for redress for losses and damages incurred by parties dealing in cryptocurrencies. It is important to note that according to this policy paper…

With the wave of new fintech companies entering Malaysia, a question that often pops up in conversation is whether the banks are asleep on the wheels or are they actively beefing up their tech portfolio in response. The Fintech News Malaysia reached out to executives within the top 5 banks in Malaysia to understand their views on fintech and what they’re doing in response. Hong Leong Bank Thoughts on Fintech Malaysia Domenic Fuda, CEO and Group Managing Director, Hong Leong Bank feels that the fintech landscape has really been flourishing this past 3 years with both homegrown and regional players…