Malaysia's digital banking sector is undergoing a transformative phase, driven by strategic initiatives aimed at enhancing financial inclusion and regional economic integration.
Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) has granted licenses to several digital banks, including Ryt Bank - with each bringing unique value propositions to the market.
NIAGA SPOTLIGHT features Melvin Ooi, Chief Executive Officer, Ryt Bank and Foon Chee Mun, Chief Product Officer, Ryt Bank discussing leveraging technology and data analytics as part of Malaysia’s first AI-powered digital bank.
Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) has granted licenses to several digital banks, including Ryt Bank - with each bringing unique value propositions to the market.
NIAGA SPOTLIGHT features Melvin Ooi, Chief Executive Officer, Ryt Bank and Foon Chee Mun, Chief Product Officer, Ryt Bank discussing leveraging technology and data analytics as part of Malaysia’s first AI-powered digital bank.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Hello and welcome to Nyaga Spotlight with me, Tamina Kausty.
00:11Nyaga Spotlight takes us through the week in economic analysis and future affairs.
00:15Now this week on future affairs is all about AI meets ATM and the digital banking revolution.
00:21So, perhaps let's connect the dots between markets, policy and the people that they serve.
00:26We're tapping into the beating heart of Southeast Asia's fintech transformation,
00:30Malaysia's digital banking revolution and how artificial intelligence is not just a disruptor,
00:36but now a quiet architect shaping the future of financial inclusion across ASEAN.
00:41So, let's dive into a couple of numbers first.
00:44Q1 of 2025 saw Malaysia's digital banks, five of them which have been fully operational since mid-2024,
00:51hit a combined 1.2 million active accounts.
00:55That's a 45% quarter-on-quarter growth.
00:59But it's not just about uptake, it is about impact.
01:03Now, according to Bank Nagara Malaysia, nearly 30% of new accounts were opened by previously unbanked
01:10or underbanked Malaysians, particularly in Sabah, Sarawak and the Northern Peninsula Belt.
01:17So, what's powering all this?
01:19One word, AI.
01:20We're seeing the rise of predictive credit scoring, behavioral risk refiling and even emotion-sensitive customer service bots
01:28speaking in Bahasa Malaysia, Mandarin and Tamil.
01:32This is fintech with a local soul.
01:34Zooming out to the ASEAN perspective, Malaysia is setting a benchmark.
01:38While Singapore leads in digital asset regulation and Indonesia dominates in digital payments volume,
01:45Malaysia is pioneering AI and media compliance as well as Sharia-compliant neo-banking,
01:52making the country a unique testbed for ethical, inclusive finance.
01:56We also have the recently signed ASEAN Digital Finance Accord ratified in February, underscoring regional interoperability.
02:07And Malaysia is front and center in the Task Force on Cross-Border EKYC and AI Governance Frameworks.
02:14Right.
02:15So, basically, moving on into the discussion, this leaves us at a very interesting crossroads.
02:20So, in Malaysia, on that note, it's an absolute pleasure to welcome Melvin Uy, Chief Operating Officer, RightBank,
02:27and Fung Chimun, Chief Product Officer, RightBank, to the studios for this discussion.
02:32A very good morning, gentlemen.
02:33How are we doing?
02:35Good.
02:35Good.
02:36Thanks for having us.
02:37Fantastic.
02:37Chimun, can I get started off by you telling us a little bit about the upcoming RightBank launch?
02:43Tell us all about what's been happening insofar.
02:45Let's get the discussion started.
02:47Thanks for having us, Thiamina.
02:48And, yeah, we are very excited for the launch.
02:52And we will be the first text-to-action AI-driven bank potentially in the world.
03:03And what that means is that in the world of generative AI, where unlike the previous generation of computing,
03:11where you have to learn the computing language to make the computer to do something for you,
03:15this with the generative AI revolution, what we can do is that we use human natural language
03:22to talk to a computer, and the computer will do something for you.
03:25And this is exactly what we are going to bring to banking,
03:29where the user get to interact with their languages.
03:34In this particular case, we'll start with Basel, Malaysia, and English to be able to instruct the agent within the banking app to do a banking transaction for you.
03:45Exactly.
03:46So it's actually all about RightBank leveraging AI, not only personalizing offers, as is quite common these days,
03:52but in a sense anticipating life transitions.
03:55So how do you actually see this shaping up for the incoming and future customer base of RightBank?
04:03The truth is that within the computing industry, the personalized software era is over.
04:12What personalized software is, is generic applications sprinkled with, configured with certain data, personalized data,
04:23so that the generic software can work better for you.
04:27However, in this day and age, in the age of AI agent software,
04:36it is more about your relationship with the software and less about personalization.
04:42So what that means is that the agent will be sort of your friend, and it exists because of you,
04:50and it exists, and it becomes better because of your interaction with the agent.
04:58So we are moving on to a more personal software era rather than personalized software era.
05:05Case in point is that you don't call your best friend your personalized human being.
05:09It's a relationship with your friends.
05:12Fair enough. Fair enough.
05:12Great example.
05:13And this is how, I think from now on, the era of AI will bring to certain personalized software revolution.
05:24Fantastic.
05:25Thanks very much for that introduction, Chiman.
05:27Melvin, from there, so RightAI is your chat GPT-like chatbot.
05:33Tell me what that means, because I'm sure so many of us are very, very familiar already.
05:37It's become an essential part of our life to be using chat GPT per se.
05:41Now there's RightAI.
05:43Tell me more.
05:44It's actually quite interesting because think about it.
05:47I mean, a few years ago, you are using Google, you are keying keywords,
05:52and you try to find something, search for something.
05:54But nowadays, even my kids, they no longer use Google anymore.
05:59They use chat GPT equivalent, DeepSync, others.
06:02And that becomes very natural, very, very intuitive.
06:06And when we think about it, then we're like, hey, do we still go back to like five years ago?
06:11Or do we really reimagine and rethink how we should do things?
06:16And that is where, thanks to Chiman and the team, we have this RightAI,
06:22where it becomes a lot smarter, a lot more intuitive, a lot more convenient.
06:26Because at the end of the day, you want to bring value, you want to bring convenience,
06:31you want to bring personalizations to your customer.
06:33And in that sense, when we rethink, we redo it, then it becomes a lot convenient,
06:39a lot easier, a lot more natural, like talking to a friend.
06:43And just a very simple thing where, for example, if you have a party coming up this weekend,
06:49the caterer sends you an invoice asking you, hey, can you pay it up?
06:52The typical case is, you can log into your phone, you can go to the app,
06:58you can make a key into your bank account, look for the bank, key in the account number,
07:04it's like eight, ten steps to it.
07:06Yes, sure, it takes at least a few minutes out of your day.
07:08You've got to have 100% focus, make sure there's no mistakes,
07:11or you've got to go back and do it all over again.
07:13And that's painful.
07:14Sure.
07:15So others may think that, huh, I have ten steps, why don't I bring it down to eight,
07:19bring it down to six.
07:20It's incremental, but to us, we're like, hang on, hang on, hang on.
07:24Is that what our customer wants?
07:26So we're like, can we do it in three steps, for example?
07:30Can we do it differently?
07:31And that's where the achievement comes in, and we then say,
07:36can we take a picture?
07:38Can we upload it?
07:39And the information extracted is correct, press a button, confirm, done.
07:44It's literally three steps.
07:46Snap a picture, upload it, make a payment.
07:48That's it.
07:49Fantastic.
07:50So it's actually, it's not so much it's the UI preference anymore,
07:53it's like a co-created digital identity.
07:55Exactly.
07:55And it really helps you, and in a sense, it's also using other pretty familiar templates, right?
08:01Actually, it's less so than that.
08:02It's usually the relationship with the AI agent within the app.
08:06So, for example, right?
08:08So you can instruct, you can talk to the agent saying, can you repeat the transaction to Melvin for lunch?
08:17And it will be able to do that, rather than going to a user interface.
08:20So it's less about the amount of steps, but it is more about how naturally you can interact with the computer system in this day.
08:28Exactly.
08:29And I think it's talking about the way in which connected banking is becoming more of an important table stakes in 2025.
08:37We know, of course, that the market is a little competitive.
08:41So RightBank is also turning these API integrations, open data ecosystems, how are you actually leveraging on that
08:48to help the predictive intelligence, which your right AI is going to be able to capture, and then, of course, make life easy on a daily basis?
08:58The advancements of generative AI makes integration work a lot easier, up to like 10 times easier than what it used to be before.
09:08So in this day and age, it's less about having access to certain APIs or data.
09:15It's more about how do you detect the underlying behavioral changes with all the data that you have?
09:24And what do you do about this?
09:26So it's essentially, again, I repeat this word a lot, it's essentially more agentized type of computing,
09:34where the software has more human-like cognition power, be able to understand, okay,
09:41there is a certain change in your behavior, and this is how I should advise you,
09:47or even do certain actions for you, such as, you know, chasing some of your groceries ahead of time,
09:55or suggesting some of the insurance that you might need to have given potentially certain changes in your life.
10:04So it's less about accessing to data in this day and age, it's about the cognition power of behavioral changes.
10:11Exactly. What I'm hearing is that it's not just about aggregating accounts,
10:14but perhaps the right AI might even evolve into a sort of a life integrator, you know,
10:20trying to harmonize the different moving parts of an average, especially urban, fast-paced working life,
10:27which also includes so many decisions that have to be made across, let's say, insurance on one hand,
10:33health, and perhaps travel allocations.
10:36How do you see that sort of a scenario, which could be something very standard for the average user
10:41who might be excited and wanting to sign up for right, and how that would work out for them?
10:47So essentially, you can think of the system as a multi-agent system.
10:51You have certain agents that is responsible for and good for your transferring money,
10:59and some agents that are good for potentially booking a restaurant for you,
11:03and there's certain agents, for example, you can have, say, a Shopee agent,
11:07where through the bank app, you will be able to potentially purchase something on Shopee
11:14that you have purchased before.
11:15So these are the kind of differentiation in the bank app in this day and age,
11:22where how the agentized version of software is so different from the previous versions of software in banking.
11:33Exactly, and it's all about, it sounds like, based on the financial signals, right,
11:38AI is the one that's able to perhaps guide even career planning
11:42and other major big-ticket financial purchases.
11:45Going forward, it might even be more than financial signals.
11:49It could be your health signals as well, and it could be your other signals,
11:53such as, you know, like potentially your education-level signals,
11:56and what do you do on a daily basis, what time do you wake up kind of signals,
12:01can be used to...
12:03Can be integrated all in.
12:04So rather than having a bunch of different apps,
12:07as I'm sure more and more of us are having,
12:09but rather than convenience over time, it can actually lead to absolute overload, right?
12:14Great. Okay, fantastic. Thanks very much.
12:17Melvin, so let's think and expand our imagination now.
12:22Can a digital bank balance the communal with the individual?
12:26There's a lot of focus on the individual,
12:28very important for us to stay organized, stay on track with finances,
12:31but what about creating digital spaces where financial goals may be even pursued collectively?
12:38Any thoughts around that?
12:40Good questions.
12:41If you think about it, human beings, we are quite a social being.
12:47Yes, absolutely.
12:48And in this day and age in the digital space,
12:51our everyday life is literally on the digital space.
12:54What we eat, who do we go out to, which trip we do we go to.
12:58But if you then look back into the financial side,
13:02a lot of times you realize that, hey, that's not quite the case.
13:06It's very individualistic.
13:08Maybe it's a bit like a place of anxiety
13:11where you don't want to share too much about your information.
13:15You very carefully crafted your financial well-being.
13:20So we think about it, and then we're like,
13:22what can we do differently?
13:24How do we marry the two together?
13:26How do we humanize the financial part?
13:29How do we segmentize, understand our customer a bit better
13:32and do something very different?
13:34Without giving up too much about what is coming up,
13:38imagine if you have the capability of grouping it together.
13:42Imagine that three of us, we play badminton on a weekly basis.
13:48As it is now, sometimes he pay for the court,
13:51then he'll be like, oh, I pay for this, divide by five of us or ten of us.
13:55This is how much each of you have to pay me.
13:58Then you have to pay each other, do it now.
14:00Then he has to check whether Melvin paid up or Melvin didn't pay up.
14:04Then what's going on after that.
14:06So it's still a very disjointed, very fragmented way of doing things.
14:11Sure, you kind of have to self-organize a little bit amongst your social groups
14:15using the app.
14:16And put up your calculator to kin.
14:17Oh, this is how much it can cost.
14:18Sure, sure, sure. We've all been there.
14:20So the question then is like, what can we do differently?
14:24It's a very simple thing, but what can we do differently?
14:27Imagine if you can group it together in the banking app itself.
14:31Imagine you can select the friends that you have that you want to share the cost with.
14:38Imagine that you can track every single transaction,
14:40whether someone has paid, someone has yet to pay.
14:43And imagine you can even add the fun social element to it.
14:47Maybe Chee Man forgot to pay and Melvin being a bit worried.
14:52Thanks.
14:52Like, hey, Chee.
14:54Which happens all the time.
14:55Emoji of money and a shark.
14:58Or emoji of red paint splashing over.
15:00I think there's a lot of things that we can do.
15:03And we haven't humanized it.
15:06Exactly.
15:06And we haven't really bring everyone together.
15:08And that is something that is very core to our heart,
15:11how we reimagine how we want to do it differently.
15:15Exactly.
15:15And because you mentioned the social aspect of things, right?
15:18Now, Vinat immediately made me think of something which is quite traditional to our culture
15:22when it comes to saving collectively.
15:24Kutu, as we call it, right?
15:26Now, what if it could be possible to somehow digitize this using maybe even blockchain smart contracts?
15:35So that would perhaps lead to digital presence where your social circle,
15:40which might have formerly saved, you know, just in person,
15:44storing it with one machi or one pachik or one, you know, leader, nominated leader of the group.
15:49But now this could be online, living on an app, perhaps.
15:52And that could be the way forward because you can also then actually manage
15:56automatically group transactions, withdrawals, and keep track of everything
16:01in a manner that's not only transparent but gives everyone an insight
16:06into where we go from here financially.
16:09Very interesting.
16:10Thanks very much for that.
16:12So lots of group goals and moving finance from individual to a little bit more personalized as well.
16:18Chiman, I want to come back into talking about the fact that banking-wise,
16:22the expectation is that it's going to continue on 24-7 and the access is, you know, real-time
16:28and you need to have that kind of decision support.
16:31So how does RightBank use and want to be using the human and AI sort of synergy to define presence?
16:39Tell me more.
16:39So we always want the AI to be able, the agents to be able to serve humans as much as possible
16:47in such a way that it can even predict the need before the users need it.
16:55However, we do have, whenever there is a need for it, our users will be able to call our number
17:04and be able to reach a real human being for more empathy type of support as well.
17:12And we also built a whole bunch of tools, a whole bunch of AI as well to help our operations people
17:22to be able to more, to better serve whenever there is someone calling in with certain trouble.
17:28And hopefully with not just AI serving people, it's AI serving the operations that serve people.
17:36And with that, I think hopefully we'll reinvent how a bank can serve a human being in general.
17:43Exactly.
17:44So the focus then would be on not so much only speed, but also emotional intelligence and guidance, right?
17:50Correct, correct.
17:51And most of us have, especially when it comes to finance, a lot of us have different needs.
17:58And sometimes some of the long tail needs might not be met.
18:03And those are something that a lot of users might be able to call into our call center.
18:09And hopefully with AI, they will be able to aptly serve the users.
18:16Because as we all know, as we all experience most of the time, calling in and manage to get a person might not be the end of the story.
18:24The person might not be able to help you very well.
18:27So that's something that we seek to improve upon significantly.
18:31True, exactly.
18:32So making a good case for actually doing away with the human interaction,
18:36but perhaps AI that's actually able to build a sort of a trusting relationship then, right?
18:42So I think with trust also comes emotional contextuality.
18:45Do you foresee it be possible for right AI to be perhaps trained in a sense to detect maybe hesitation,
18:54doubt from what the feedback is coming in from the user?
18:59Because that could perhaps help, especially because I go back into the incredible statistic that we have.
19:0630% of digital banking accounts are actually been opened by underbanked or previously completely unbanked Malaysians.
19:13It's a good question.
19:15And I think AI, for the longest time, are viewed as robotic and generally more intelligent than a lot of human beings.
19:26However, I think AI can actually out-EQ human beings simply because it has an infinite amount of patience.
19:37Fair enough, unlike a human operator who may reach the end of their...
19:43Correct, correct.
19:43Yes, yes.
19:44And from our experience, surprisingly, not just that, when you declare a certain agent as AI agent,
19:52the users tend to be more patient with the AI agency because there's no reason to yell at an AI agent.
20:00It's also, it checks our cues and our feedback.
20:04Correct, correct.
20:05So I do think eventually we will arrive at a point that AI will be a lot more understanding of human condition than human themselves.
20:19And the case in point is that if you look at the trend all around the world, a lot of people are starting to use AI as their therapists.
20:27And ChatGPT specifically, that's something that is changing.
20:32Yes, exactly, and I think because you mentioned that, that also is going to lead overall to greater feedback available as a database for tailoring live interactions
20:43based on the fact that a lot of human emotions are being articulated, aggregated, and analyzed.
20:50Exactly, and this leads to the fact that I think going forward, banks are generally known as slow-moving,
20:59but I think in the age of AI agility, AI bestows the agility to almost any organization that wants to adopt it.
21:11And this is what Rite AI will be attempting to do very well as well, which is what we want to do is to be extremely agile
21:21because one of our tenets is to be extremely user-centric.
21:28And the needs of users evolve across time.
21:32So what we want to do is to be very quick on our feet to be able to deploy features that we think that will serve our users better as they evolve in their life.
21:43Absolutely, and as they evolve.
21:44Speaking of that, Melvin, tell me more about Rite's designs for financial longevity
21:51because we're not just talking about, you know, quick transfers that help your daily life.
21:56We're also talking about future planning, future-proofing.
21:59I think that's where our core belief is, where we always believe that in our organizations, banking is a long game.
22:08And how do we help our customer every stages of their life?
22:14How do we, to Chiman's point, evolve with their changes, with their requirements, with their demand?
22:21And how do we cater to each and everything of this?
22:24I think it's always very tempting to be very transactional.
22:27It's always very tempting to be very tactical, do something new, do something different,
22:32do something attractive to get the customer in and think about it later.
22:35I have a product that I need to sell.
22:38Let me get the customer in.
22:39Let me sell that product to them.
22:41This is the part where we want to be a lot more user-centric city.
22:46We want to understand their goals in life.
22:50We want to understand their behavior, their preference, and even their purpose.
22:55What do they want?
22:56What do they look for in an organization?
22:59So to us, that is very, very essential.
23:01And how do we help them along the way?
23:05And that's something that every product that we have, how do we link it up together?
23:10So that there is a very natural flow to every single persona of the customer base,
23:16that we can do it differently.
23:19And case in point, we were talking about this earlier.
23:22In my previous organizations, Alipay, they even have a different screen,
23:30different skin for different segments of customer.
23:34So for example, if you are a senior citizen, you can change the whole thing,
23:39the look and feel, the format, where the font size is bigger, the buttons is bigger,
23:43the things that are relevant to you, shown to you.
23:46And this to us is, hey, it's a digital space.
23:49It's no longer a piece of form that has to be the same, because it's physical form.
23:53Everyone fill up the exact same form.
23:56How do we do it differently?
23:57How do we understand them differently?
24:00Whether it's the language, whether it's the layout, whether it's the flow,
24:05whether it's the way we tell it to them, share it with them.
24:08And this is the essential part.
24:11So in short, RightBank, we want to be the right hand for our customer,
24:16so that we can help them to build the lifetime financial companion.
24:21Exactly. It's a financial journey.
24:23It's not just about tomorrow or next year even.
24:26So from there, Chi Man, I'm really interested for us to touch a little bit on a huge topic,
24:31green banking.
24:32Tell me about your thoughts on operationalizing this beyond just, you know,
24:36the usual carbon offsets and also ESG reporting,
24:40but also how about actually embedding sustainability into core operations.
24:46So obviously, I think like a general digital bank do already expand a lot less carbon
24:53than a traditional bank.
24:55Sure.
24:55In the sense that we don't have the footprint with the air conditioning
25:02and computing that is needed for each of the branch, right?
25:06And so, and with a purely digital bank,
25:10we also don't use as much paper being printed out simply because we have less offices
25:15and we don't send out paper statements as well.
25:18On a regular basis.
25:19So, but beyond that is that we use a lot of AI and AI is known for being reasonably power hungry.
25:30And however, our AI is used, is being deployed in our data center.
25:36And our data center is a 500 megawatt data center powered by a 500 megawatt of solar panel.
25:44So, which is, I think, one of the first green data center in Southeast Asia.
25:52So, this is how we try to be as green as possible on multiple fronts.
26:00Exactly.
26:00So, I think it's not just about, you know, talking the talk and, you know, being okay
26:04just because you're already a digital bank,
26:06but really embedding that sustainability all in and all through.
26:10It's been a really interesting conversation.
26:11I could definitely go on, but all in, of course, wishing Right Air, Right Bank, actually, all the best.
26:20And when will actually it be open for actual subscriptions?
26:25Is there a wait list, Melvin?
26:27The wait list is already there.
26:28So, anyone, everyone can download the app, can literally put it in.
26:33We are very, very excited.
26:34As much as I want to say it, I always tell my colleague that it's soon, but not soon enough.
26:42So, look out for the space.
26:44We are coming up pretty soon.
26:46All right.
26:46So, Q2, what a way to get started.
26:48Gentlemen, thanks very much for your time today.
26:50So, that was, of course, Melvin as well as Chiman from Right Bank.
26:53And that's all from Niagara Spotlight today.
26:55Join us again next Friday, and there will be an exclusive interview featuring MCMC
26:58and their ongoing efforts to curb digital financial scams.
27:02I'm Tamina Kauzji signing off, reminding you that in this era of smart banking,
27:06it's not just systems that need to be intelligent, but policies, partnerships, and people too.
27:12See you next time.