Applying digital technologies across financial services in Malaysia

Hong Leong Bank Berhad (HLBB) has announced a 24-months initiative to transform and digitise its wholesale banking offerings, with Intellect Design Arena Limited (Intellect), a specialist in applying digital technologies across the financial services industry.

The transformation project; which is a holistic and end-to-end endeavour using Intellect’s iGTB Suite; comprises of a digital omni-channel delivery platform and related applications in digital cash management, liquidity management, domestic and foreign payments, trade finance and supply chain financing.

MD/CEO of Hong Leong Islamic Bank, Raja Teh Maimunah said,” Following the digitisation of our personal financial services, HLBB is now turning its attention to the corporate banking space with a focus on the development of real-time payment offerings in order to better support its Malaysian corporate clients both domestically and globally.”

She also shared about how HLBB had focused on lending to clients, but now wants to be there for their customers during their entire journey experience with the bank.

This is in line with the central bank’s mandate to drive electronic payments in the country.

Raja Teh explained, “Cheque processing is a costly affair and managing cash in this economy becomes expensive.”

She gave the example of cash management in a country like Sweden being less than 1-percent of the country’s GDP, and something that Malaysia could try to emulate.

Digital

According to CEO of iGTB at Intellect, Manish Maakan, “Digitalisation and mobility has changed the way businesses run. Local banks are seeing more non-banking players crowding into their space as their customers want more flexibility, multiple-channel payment options and the ability to do all this in a secure and fast manner.”

He shared a Bank Negara statistic that only 25-percent of payments are done digitally, and described that local banks driving more usage of digital payments gives significant advantage to local SMEs to compete with foreign multinational corporations (MNCs).

Intellect itself has helped to power the transformation of four global banks in this region, and extended its expertise to two other local banks via modular solutions. HLBB is Intellect’s first client in Malaysia to adopt an end-to-end implementation of its offering.