Author: Annette Rowena

Synthetic identity fraud is one of the fastest-growing fraud types globally, where fraudsters fabricate a person who never existed. They typically stitch together a blend of real, stolen, manipulated and invented attributes until the composite is convincing enough to enter through the front door. Source: Stopping Synthetic Identity and Deepfake Fraud, LexisNexis Risk Solutions This shift moves away from years of defensive fraud management thinking. Fraud prevention has almost always focused on stolen credentials. Now, attackers no longer need to steal an identity, as they can manufacture one. Research from LexisNexis Risk Solutions backs this, indicating that more than one…

“It’s like a drug.” That’s how a Redditor described their descent into the Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) rabbit hole. As a fellow BNPL user myself, I get where he’s coming from. BNPL is everywhere now, tucked into your checkouts, flashing at your payment page, and dropping innuendos that splitting a payment into three or more helps stretch your bank balance. It’s a convincing illusion, and for a lot of Malaysians, that’s exactly where it starts to unravel. The fine print never announces itself, and the effective interest rates don’t come with a warning label (yet, at least). Don’t forget…

In 2024, Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) imposed penalties of over RM5 million on CIMB Bank and Maybank for breaching requirements on service availability and operational resilience. Maybank’s repeated outages disrupted its mobile banking platform and MAE app. CIMB was penalised for lapses in response and recovery that turned incidents into prolonged service loss for customers and counterparties. BNM’s Risk Management in Technology policy document leaves little room for interpretation. It states: Cumulative unplanned downtime affecting user interfaces must not exceed four hours on a rolling 12-month basis, with a maximum tolerable downtime of 120 minutes per incident. In simpler terms,…

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…

AI has outgrown the role of an assistant, now moving money, approving transactions, and carrying out multi-step tasks with little to no human input in every loop. These agents now behave more like participants in the business. Now, when a person makes a decision, accountability is obvious. But when an AI agent makes thousands of decisions a day on your behalf, your organisation has to answer three things. What did the AI do, why did it do it, and who is answerable for the outcome? Today, especially for compliance, risk, and fraud leaders who ultimately answer to a regulator when…

Nearly three out of four Malaysian consumers now lean on AI to shop. Most, however, stop short of letting it pay. 52% of respondents are uncomfortable allowing an AI to complete a purchase for them, according to the Adyen Index 2026 Malaysia Retail Report. Agentic commerce, where AI agents browse, choose and complete a purchase on a shopper’s behalf, is the next step beyond the AI shopping assistants. The report suggests that step could be where Malaysian consumer trust runs out. The report, commissioned by Adyen and carried out online by YouGov, draws on responses from Malaysian consumers and senior…

Recently, in an attack dubbed “Jade Puffer,” researchers documented what they’re calling the first end-to-end cyberattack run by agentic software. A large language model is said to have orchestrated the intrusion from start to finish, according to Sysdig. The LLM’s behaviour was self-narrating. It reasoned with natural language, prioritised targets, and did so with detailed annotations that human operators don’t usually write. More unsettling still is that the LLM adapted the attack in real time. It retried failed steps with refined parameters, going from a broken login to a working fix in 31 seconds. The reality landing on cybersecurity teams…

Malaysia has become one of the most QR-reliant economies in the world. Just last year, we ranked second globally for QR code payment adoption, at 66.1%. We’re only behind China, which leads at 67.4%. Now, BNM’s Interoperable Fund Transfer Framework is set to change how all of that connects. DuitNow QR, which runs on PayNet’s infrastructure, is a critical juncture for this trajectory. For context, the nationwide total for registered DuitNow QR touchpoints has crossed 3 million. Despite all these achievements, what’s been lacking is connectivity across QR codes. The new BNM Interoperable Fund Transfer Framework (IFTF) sets a 30…

Just open any online banking app in Malaysia, and you’d most likely see the same grid and similar user interface: account balances, icons, transaction lists, and, for those with extra features, perhaps a graph or pie chart offering a glance at where your money went. Useful, certainly, but the user experience mostly ends there. You can see what you spent, but rarely why it matters, what it signals, or what actions can be taken to be more Ringgit-savvy and budget-conscious. Now that is a common pain point that most of us have. experienced. But fret not, AEON Bank has introduced AI…

I rarely interact with AI customer service chatbots in Malaysia, but when I do, I notice that most of the time, I’m being given the runaround and fixed answers that don’t solve my problem. The repeated ordeal for every new enquiry I have peeves me at times, enough to drive me to barge through the chatbot flow in search of a human. Turns out I’m not the only one. “100% of my interactions have been escalated to a human agent. And the worst part is, I have to re-explain everything.” Those were the words of another Malaysian user describing an…

Malaysia’s online marketplace has a shady secret. Every day, hundreds of micro-entrepreneurs complete deals on social media, Carousell, and digital storefronts, armed with nothing but messages and hope. But when something goes wrong, trust breaks down just as quickly. When a buyer ghosts or a seller disappears, those screenshots rarely qualify as proof in the eyes of the local authorities. The collective cost for scams here is a bitter pill to swallow. Malaysians lost RM542 million to scams in 2025, with only RM34 million ever recovered. Steve Rao, the founder and CEO of Janjilah, experienced this “trust deficit” firsthand during…

Consumers today hold high benchmarks for their digital experiences. Every app, platform, and service they touch resets the baseline for what “good” looks like, and that standard follows them into every interaction, banking included. Islamic banks are not immune to this shift. With Islamic banking now contributing 48% of total Islamic financing, the segment has quickly outgrown its origins as a niche serving a value-driven segment. It is now mainstream, with customers that expect what they receive everywhere else: seamless onboarding, instant transactions, intuitive interfaces, and digital tools that match or exceed what they use elsewhere. But one underlying question…

Malaysia still imports roughly 60% of its food. The agriculture minister confirmed this in a written Dewan Negara reply, citing factors like limited farmland, an ageing farmer workforce, and rising production costs that make local produce increasingly uncompetitive. The government has also set a target of 80% rice self-sufficiency by 2030, though experts say that achieving even 75% by 2025 is increasingly unlikely. The farmers who could change this bleak picture, sadly, have the system working against them on both fronts. Payment terms of 79 to 90 days from hypermarkets, for example, mean farmers miss planting windows, struggle to pay…

Almost every Malaysian who has tried to invest in a unit trust knows exactly how this goes. You find an agent’s number, submit a form, and wait. You follow up and wait some more. Sometimes, there’s no reply. Sometimes the response comes weeks later, after you’ve given up, as most people in your position would. What feels like a personal frustration is in fact a predictable outcome. The system was never designed to serve the everyday Malaysian. Looking at incentives, the reason becomes clear. A sales charge of 3% to 5% on your RM2,000 investment earns an agent RM60 to…

The ICD-LSEG Islamic Finance Development Report 2025 indicates that the Islamic finance industry is forecast to touch US$9.7 trillion by 2029. Malaysia’s position within that growth story is well documented, earning the first rank among the Top 10 countries for Islamic finance development, even outpacing Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and UAE. Our country also commands an estimated 33.9% share of the global sukuk market: as of end-July 2025, sukuk accounted for RM1.402 trillion or 63.6% of Malaysia’s total bond and sukuk outstanding. Plans are underway to explore the tokenisation of sukuk next, under BNM’s oversight. A meaningful share of Islamic finance…

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 Securities Commission of Malaysia (SC) unveiled its SC Malaysia Annual Report 2025 today, sharing its key outcomes for the year. Malaysia’s capital market hit a record RM4.3 trillion in 2025, up 3.2% from 2024, on the back of higher corporate bond issuances and stronger fund management inflows. In his message accompanying the SC Malaysia annual report 2025, Chairman Dato’ Mohammad Faiz Azmi shared that “it was a fulfilling year marked by Malaysia’s leadership of ASEAN and its various platforms, including the ASEAN Capital Markets Forum (ACMF), an established mechanism to advance regional capital markets.” Alternative Fundraising Key Financing Drivers…

Atome launched its very own BNPL card, dubbed the Atome Card, a couple of months back, and since then, most eyes have been trained on it. Given that Malaysia now has 7.5 million active BNPL account holders, the segment seems to keep adding products that blur the line between instalment financing and everyday purchasing. The Atome Card sits squarely in that grey zone: it works at any merchant that accepts Visa, and comes with zero annual fees. Yet it is also not a credit card, and runs BNPL instalments. What is the Atome Card? The Atome Card is a BNPL-based…

RM2.8 billion is how much Malaysians lost to scams last year, according to BNM’s fresh-off-the-press 2025 Annual Report. The report doesn’t shy away from the human toll either, recounting the plights of retirees being wiped clean and families watching emergency funds vanish overnight. The Malaysian scam cases keep on piling up, like a recent one where a 55-year-old assistant manager from Bentong lost RM1.3 million in a phone scam. The modus operandi involved a single call from someone claiming to be from a delivery company and a quick chat with a fake “police officer”. Within days, she’d transferred her entire…

There’s a scene in Crazy Rich Asians where Rachel Chu, the female lead who’s an economics professor, is in conversation with Princess Intan, and the conversation steers towards microloans. One line stood out for me. “Microloans help women, and women lift up economies.” It’s a small idea built on big dreams. Give women access to capital, and watch what follows. The film presents it as self-evident. Reality, however, spells a different tale, especially in the venture capital world. Despite years of noise around diversity in venture capital and louder championing of female founders across Southeast Asia, the share of early-stage…