Digitalisation is enabling businesses to connect to suppliers and clients in new and more direct ways, while customers are demanding more of a real-time experience.
This challenges firms to come up with faster and more efficient ways of delivering products and services, within the business-to-consumer (B2C) as well as the business-to-business (B2B) space.
Banks are also using technology to help raise their clients’ competitiveness and facilitate trade and investment in Malaysia.
CIMB Group Holdings Bhd will focus on investments in key digital businesses and grow these ventures as digital disruptors.
It aims to pursue new capabilities in technology, data and analytics to deliver differentiated services, value propositions and customer experience that are value accretive.
CIMB will also focus on long-term growth and create strategic hedges for the future, in terms of platform economics (where economic activities are facilitated by platforms), new revenue streams and valuation upside.
In terms of its Asean footprint, CIMB aims to provide wide access to its clients through its strong Asean presence.
For small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs), the micro-financing programme to catalyse digital agriculture technology includes the adoption of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) and big data optimisation to increase crop yield and quality.
To help local businesses, Alliance Bank Malaysia has collaborated with several e-commerce partners such as Shopee and Pybli under its SupportLokal inbitiative.
SupportLokal has reached more than 17 million Malaysians online and helped to drive close to 80,000 digital traffic to the web stores of the bank’s SME clients.
The BizSmart Solution portal helps business owners access business solutions, training and resources as well links them to other businesses, based on five critical needs.
These cover operational costs, digitalisation, higher online sales, the development of employees and access to new markets.
Under the halal-in-one programme, halal businesses can list their products on halal e-commerce platforms such as eJazmine, one of the partners in the programme.
Alliance Bank has adapted its BizSmart Challenge programme to provide financial and non-financial support to start-ups. Products and services of the finalists are listed on the SupportLokal online bazaar and featured on the bank’s social media sites through, among other things, Instagram takeovers to cross promote content.
In the next five years, Bank Islam Malaysia Bhd plans to launch digital banking, enhance its GO mobile banking features, launch GOBiz mobile banking for business customers and introduce SMExpert to improve SME businesses.
The mobile banking app GO by Bank Islam has recorded more than RM4bil in transactions since the movement control order (MCO) 1.0.
GO is updated to include Tabung Haji fund transfers, DuitNow QR code, remittances, cardless withdrawals, request to pay services and includes a personal financial management tool.
A data science and analytics team was set up to accelerate the bank’s journey in reaping benefits from data; the data analytics implementation project has started to procure Tableau and Alteryx tools to deliver a series of dashboards across key business divisions. A business dashboard is an information management tool to track, among other things, key performance indicators.
“Bank Islam aims to bring together vast communities of customers and partners to create an enormous scale and efficient markets, ’’ said Bank Islam CEO Mohamed Muazzam Mohamad.
Launching its digital bank through its centre of digital experience (CDX), it plans to introduce its “digital only” proposition this year.
This division focuses on experimenting with NextGen technologies and delivering financial solutions to the un-served and under-served segments.
It had completed a prototype last year and tested it with a target segment.
The digital bank is working with several technology partners to provide digital infrastructure and capabilities in the build stage.
Through a deeper understanding of its clients, their risk rating may be enhanced, translating into a lower cost of financing.
Through a digital marketplace, the bank can have better visibility of its customers and in turn, their customers along the value chain, provided they are on the same digital marketplace.
The bank can then also offer a preferred rate of financing.
Standard Chartered Malaysia is embracing application programming interfaces (APIs), digitising its processes, joining market platforms and either partnering fintechs (that deliver financial services through technology) or developing new fintech services of its own.
APIs connect bank and corporate systems to support the instant processing, reconciliation and settlement of transactions.
SC Ventures, the bank’s innovation, fintech investment and ventures arm, was set up to invest in fintechs and other start-up companies, promote rapid testing and implement new business models.
Standard Chartered’s joint-ventures with Assembly Payments and nexus, allow digital platforms and ecosystems like e-commerce, social media or ride-hailing companies to offer products co-created with the bank to their clients.
Assembly Payments is a leading payments solution provider to deliver next generation solutions for the global e-commerce industry, while nexus is a banking-as-a-service provider.
“Such partnerships will continue to play a critical role in executing our strategy to accelerate growth and truly drive digital transformation, ’’ said Standard Chartered Malaysia managing director and CEO, Abrar A Anwar.(pic above)
To help raise its clients’ competitiveness, Standard Chartered is building a state-of-the-art, single scalable payment engine.
This is a global payment platform that supports B2B and B2C domestic and cross-border payments.
Investing heavily in the e-commerce space, Standard Chartered is providing consistent and scalable solutions for online collections, escrow accounts, QR codes and real time direct debits.
At OCBC Bank Malaysia, over 90% of its consumer financial transactions are now performed digitally, with significant growth in the number of digital transactions by corporate customers.
“As we head into the second half of 2021, we continue to serve and support business community, and emphasise on digitalisation, so that our customers can reach out far beyond the homeland to a wider customer base globally, ’’ said OCBC Bank Malaysia CEO Datuk Ong Eng Bin.
In retail banking, OCBC had introduced a secure chat service called OCBC RM Chat that enables its premier banking and private clients to communicate, and place daily banking and wealth trade instructions with their relationship managers.
OCBC’s stronghold in cash management solutions has seen insurance companies managing their high volume of collections more seamlessly through payments.
In transaction banking for business clients, the OCBC OneCollect app promotes cashless transactions, locally and cross border, through QR code, enabled through a mobile application.
As part of its involvement in the e-commerce space, OCBC was appointed the main bank for Paynet, for its direct merchant settlement initiative.
Paynet is the national payments network and shared central infrastructure for Malaysia’s financial markets.
While helping its clients in this period of time, OCBC is pushing forward its strategic priorities in sustainable energy and supply chain financing.
Banks are on expansion mode when it comes to digitalisation, especially following up on the footprint of their large client base, locally and overseas.
Expect more innovations and exciting times ahead.
Yap Leng Kuen is a former StarBiz editor. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
Source: https://www.thestar.com.my/business/business-news/2021/05/10/insight---banks-roll-out-new-digital-tools