GX Bank, one of Malaysia’s first digital banks, is 100 days into operation. In these 100 days, the digital bank has crystalised its brand purpose and goals to champion financial inclusivity and literacy in Malaysia’s B40 and the underserved. To that end, GX Bank has unveiled Impian GIGih, an initiative targeted at uplifting Malaysia’s B40 class and empowering Malaysia’s Gig workers.
From left to right: Hildah Hamzah, Chief of Staff, GXBank, Fadrizul Hasani, Chief Technology Officer, GXBank, Datuk Wira (Dr) Haji Ameer Ali Mydin, Managing Director, MYDIN, Pei Si Lai, Chief Executive Officer, GXBank, [From GoBarakah] Azrin Ajib, Audri Zin, Firdaus Mohamed (centre, back), Irhzan Mohd Nor
The new Impian GIGih programme takes a sharp focus on Malaysia’s Gig economy, Gig workers and the B40 segment. Through the initiative, GX Bank wants to provide tailored, equitable and inclusive access to financial services to these segments. It also looks to ensure educational accessibility by alleviating the cost of education for underserved families and the B40. It will also work to empower more Malaysians to make better informed financial decisions and planning through financial literacy initiatives.
The programme’s pilot was undertaken in February 2024 with partners MYDIN and GoBarakah. GX Bank and its partners distributed physical and virtual bursaries to the underprivileged. Together with this, GX bank also distributed 500 back-to-school kits to children of B40 families and Grab drivers in Kelantan and Johor Bahru respectively. GoBarakah allowed the “digital” in digital banking to be realised through e-vouchers through its platform. These vouchers could then be used to buy school essentials year-round. GX Bank has also pushed the bar further with scholarships for tertiary studies. These scholarships were offered to children of gig workers and B40 homes. It’s hoped that these scholarships will help uplift these families from poverty.
These efforts are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the efforts that are being put forward by GX Bank. The digital bank has also put out a brand video, “Sepoket Impian” to help communicate its brand purpose and its efforts to uplift and empower the underserved, gig workers and Malaysia’s B40 segment.
The digital bank will also be championing financial literacy at its upcoming “Singgah di Semua Bersama GX Bank” happening on March 23, 2024, at Semua House in the nation’s capital, Kuala Lumpur. GX Bank will also be partnering with Euronet, Idemia, Mastercard, Onfido and PayNet for the event. The event takes place from 2 pm to 7 pm.
Curlec, a full-stack payments solution provider under Razorpay, has become a member of Payments Network Malaysia Sdn Bhd (PayNet). This a significant move set to promote real-time payment adoption across Malaysia. Being the first new PayNet member since 2019, Curlec’s inclusion empowers them to drive wider adoption of real-time payment processing which aligns with Bank Negara Malaysia’s (BNM) vision for a cashless society.
From left: Zac Liew, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Curlec; Gary Yeoh, Chief Commercial Officer, PayNet; Rahul Kothari, Chief Business Officer, Razorpay
With this membership, Curlec will adopt PayNet’s DuitNow product suite This will allow its customers to conduct real-time payments from bank accounts and e-wallets. This will bolster the services it offers its merchants including renowned brands such as Tune Protect, CTOS, Mary Kay, and The National Kidney Foundation.
Curlec brings valuable insights and expertise from the Razorpay Group, which pioneered India’s Unified Payment Interface (UPI). UPI is the world’s largest digital payments market having processed 74 billion transactions in 2022 alone. The success of UPI in India, growing at an average of 380% since its launch in 2016, positions Curlec to drive the adoption of DuitNow payments in Malaysia effectively.
Zac Liew, Co-Founder & CEO of Curlec by Razorpay, emphasized the momentum they are building with their “Payments Uncompromised” approach. Curlec’s Payment Gateway has rapidly gained traction, processing over RM2 billion annually and serving more than 1,000 merchants. This paves the way for Curlec to innovate the digital payment landscape in Malaysia and scale DuitNow payments to the next level.
Source: Curlec by RazorPay
Liew outlined the broader vision, stating, “The target growth of Malaysia’s digital payments sets the path for The Curlec Payment Gateway’s target to serve more than 5,000 businesses with RM10 billion annualized gross transaction value (GTV) by 2025.”
Rahul Kothari, Chief Business Officer at Razorpay, expressed enthusiasm for their substantial investment in Malaysia’s domestic payment ecosystem. He sees parallels between the Malaysian and Indian payments markets, making Malaysia a key strategic market for them. Kothari believes they can play a pivotal role in promoting DuitNow adoption, similar to their role in scaling UPI in India.
If you checked your Touch ‘n Go eWallet app these past few days, you would have noticed a new feature, or a new icon. You might have come across ‘GO+’. I know I have, and a few of our friends have asked us what it was before today’s official launch of Touch ‘n Go’s GO+. Now that it is officially launched, we can properly explain what GO+ is.
Welcome to GO+, your gateway to small time investments and mainstream financial services. Essentially, you are investing with Principal, an asset management platform anchored by CIMB. In turn, GO+ is anchored by Principal, in alliance with CIMB, specifically their e-Cash Fund platform.
GO+ will take advantage of Principal’s asset management platform to sort of make investments to grow your financial assets via Touch ‘n Go’s eWallet platform. By putting as little as RM10 into the platform will supposedly guarantee a growth rate of 1.43% per annum. While that may not seem like much, it is more than putting your money into your bank’s savings account or current accounts.
The growth is not credited over a year long period too. You get returns on a daily basis and the returns are credited to your GO+ account every day. That also means the growth is an immediately visible one. Principal also promises no risks to the platform, so you can be rest assured that you will only be seeing growth.
What makes GO+ even better for users is that because it is integrated with Touch ‘n Go eWallet app, you can transfer the funds from GO+ into Touch ‘n Go eWallet accounts immediately at any given time, and vice versa. It does not stop there though; you can transfer credits from GO+ to any of your registered bank accounts immediately too. You can even use your GO+ account to pay for things via Touch ‘n Go eWallet app. That also means with GO+, you are more flexible than anything else you can currently find on the Malaysian market.
To get yourself on GO+ now, you can look into your Touch ‘N Go eWallet app and immediately register and upgrade your account to a GO+ account. You can start investing with GO+ with as little as RM10. For now, the service is only available to Malaysian citizens above 18 years of age. The Touch ‘n Go eWallet app is available for free from Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store for Android and iOS respectively
The development on the Novel Coronavirus of 2019, now more commonly known as COVID-19, is on every headline for the past month or so. If you have not heard, the Mobile World Congress 2020 (MWC2020) that is supposed to open its doors soon was shut down due to the large health concerns. They are not alone though. The F1 GP to be held in China in about two months time has been cancelled via the request of the local organisers. If you missed our news, Acer’s Predator League 2020 set to happen at the end of this month is also cancelled due to health concerns.
All these are quite expected, to be fair. What is even worse is that plenty of factories in China had to close down or stop operating for the time being thanks to the vicious spread of the virus. One of those affected manufacturing plants are Apple’s contractor, Foxconn. That also means there is currently a global shortage of Apple iPhones. Of course, that is going to hit the market and Apple’s earnings a little bit.
For good measure, for their investors anyway, Apple just predicted that their Q2 revenue will be lower than the expected US$ 63 to 67 billion. If you are thinking that it cannot be that much lower for Apple to make an announcement like this, it looks quite bad from Apple’s side. Their prediction also says that they will not even make the lowest mark of the revenue estimates for Q2 of 2020.
At this time Apple is predicting up to a 36% difference between the expected shipment for Q2 2020 and the actual shipment number. Optimistically they are expecting a 29% difference. Still, that big of a difference in shipments is going to be quite a big hit to their revenue numbers.
Apple did not mention how big of an impact the plunge in shipment will make though. At this time we cannot comment too much into their reduced shipments or even predict how much they will lose in revenue for Q2 2020. To be fair, even our attention is mostly fixed on the development on COVID-19.
Celcom recently announced their Business Suite for Retail. What is that? The Business Suite is technically their service plan. You can liken them to the Celcom Mobile or Internet plan; the only difference is that the Business Suite, as the name suggest, is for businesses; Small Medium Enterprises (SME) specifically.
You can find out more on their site, here. Briefly, Celcom’s Business Suite for Retail is a complete business end-to-end telecommunication and data solution. You get phone plans, data plans, payment solutions, and more depending on the plans you select. If you need to, you can even throw in Microsoft Office 365 into the plan. The plans are basically perfect solutions for SMEs.
Alliance Bank is known for their very extensive and generous SME programs. They have the BizSmart program to promote and encourage the growth of the SME segment in Malaysia. Of course, when there is a chance to deliver even more value to SMEs, they would want to be the first to be a part of it. They have plenty of solutions for SME after all; the SME Express Cash for example.
Source: Celcom
The partnership that just happened today marks the combination of two forces in the SME specific services space. Celcom Business Suite for Retail subscribers are now eligible for Alliance Bank’s extensive financing plans for SMEs. Thanks to the collaboration as well the processes and pains of applying for Alliance Bank’s financing programs are expedited and shortened. SMEs might even be able to get preferred rates on Alliance Bank’s business loan programs like Express Cash if they are subscribed to Celcom Business Suite for Retail.
Information regarding Celcom’s Business Suite for Retail is available on their website. You can also sign up for Alliance Bank’s available financing programs via the same website.
*This article is contributed by By Victor Argonov, Analyst, EXANTE*
There is still a great debate about which
is the best asset to protect investors in difficult times: cryptocurrencies or
gold.
Cryptocurrencies are often compared to
gold. They have a number of features in common – independence from governments,
limited emission, and a user consensus ascribing value to them. This is
especially true in the case of bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency that still
retains the status of the “default crypto”, just like gold retains the status
of the most important precious metal.
However, cryptocurrencies are also vastly
different from metals: they are a lot easier to trade. Physical gold is
extremely difficult to buy, sell, and trade across national borders, and nearly
impossible to use as legal tender. Gold turnover is subject to heavy taxation,
and many prefer to invest in precious metal accounts instead of physical gold.
Cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, are easy to buy and sell, can be freely
traded across borders, and their use as legal tender is becoming increasingly
more common.
These similarities and differences
between cryptocurrencies and precious metals are common knowledge. However, one
crucial question remains unanswered – how much they are able to function as a
protective asset, retaining their value during crises.
Theoretical Considerations
Currently, one of the key arguments
against the use of cryptocurrencies as protective assets is their high
volatility. BTC cost $0.1 in 2010, $1,000 in late 2013, $200 in late 2014,
$19,000 in late 2017, and around $7,000 today. Even just in 2019, which can
hardly be called a particularly volatile year, its exchange rate still
fluctuated by a factor of four over the year. Crashes are commonplace on the
market, and no matter when you buy cryptocurrency, there is no guarantee that
your capital is not going to halve in a month.
On the other hand, the key argument for
keeping one’s funds in cryptocurrency is its tendency to grow in value as the
number of its users increases. Cryptocurrency emission is limited by
algorithms. With BTC specifically it is actually decreasing, which minimizes
inflation. Currently a few dozen million people on Earth use cryptocurrencies,
and their number doubles every year. Even 2018, disastrous as the year was, saw
the number of users increase from 18 to 35 million. At the same time, the
potential new audience is still huge, and in tandem with guaranteed low
inflation it usually stimulates growing exchange rates, regardless of the
bubbles that may occur.
The increasing number of crypto users not
only boosts the cryptocurrencies’ exchange rates and capitalization, but
gradually decreases their volatility as well. Here is a rough comparison, which
nonetheless illustrates the situation. Over the four years between 2010 and
2013 the BTC exchange rate changed by four orders of magnitude, while in the
next four, including the dip in 2014 and the enormous bubble in 2017, it only
changed by two orders of magnitude. It is true that even the modest
fluctuations in 2019 are huge compared to the traditional stock and currency
markets, but this is a predictable consequence of the low market cap, which is
currently at around $200B. Even when taken individually, the world’s largest
companies like Facebook or Saudi Aramco have market caps several times that
amount, while those of the global stock and currency markets have several
orders of magnitude that market cap. So the current volatility of the
cryptocurrencies may simply be a sign that they are still in their infancy.
Practical Evidence
There are many known cases of
cryptocurrencies serving as a protective asset, primarily during national
currency crises. In 2018 the national currencies of Turkey, Argentina, and
Venezuela experienced drastic devaluation. While previously citizens of these
countries tried to buy dollars in similar situations, this time many people
turned to cryptocurrencies. As an example, in August 2018 the number of
cryptocurrency users in Turkey was double the average number for Europe.
The cryptocurrencies’ protection against
fiat currencies’ devaluation is not limited to unstable countries with only a
small share on the global market. For example, statistics show that the BTC
exchange rate usually increases as the Chinese yuan’s rate drops.
However, none of these examples make
cryptocurrency unique. When one country’s fiat currency devalues, any other
country’s fiat currency may serve as a protective asset if it is more stable.
What makes gold unique is that its role as a protective asset is universal. Not
only does it protect its owners from national currency devaluation, but from
stock market crashes as well. Gold exchange rate is not particularly stable and
has its own fluctuations, but it is fairly independent of stock index
fluctuations. Does cryptocurrency have the same advantage? As practice shows,
no.
From 2014 to 2017 BTC’s exchange rate
usually changed in the same direction as the indices, and often with much
greater amplitude. In the fall of 2018 it briefly looked like the situation was
changing. The 2017 bubble had already deflated, and the volatility of the
digital assets dropped by several orders of magnitude (as it usually happens
after bubbles). When American stocks started dropping in price due to the trade
war with China, BTC did not follow the market’s lead and had indeed served as a
protective asset.
However, it was unable to cement that
role. November already saw a new cryptocurrency crash that was followed by the
infamous crypto winter. Whether it was chance or an expected event, it roughly
coincided with the maximum dip in the stock market. The indices recovered due
to the negotiations between the US and China in the spring of 2019, and so did
the cryptocurrencies.
Very Risky, But Still A Protective Asset?
Overall, the properties of gold and
cryptocurrencies as protective assets are very different. If you are afraid of
your national currency experiencing inflation, cryptocurrency can protect your
capital, but if you are a stock investor, expect cryptos to dip during a crisis
as well. The reason for this is simple: despite their advantages,
cryptocurrencies are still considered a very risky asset compared to securities
and gold. They are exactly the assets the investors try to get rid of as soon
as possible during difficult times.
On the other hand, in the long term
cryptocurrencies are still a protective asset. If you are not afraid of long
exchange rate dips and are not prone to dumping all your assets during crashes,
you will probably be rewarded over the years. While cryptocurrency growth on
the scale of 2010-2013 is unlikely, their exchange rates are still expected to
multiply in the next few years. To date, every bubble on the crypto market
resulted in a substantial growth of the exchange rates. For example, the BTC
rate of $3,000-4,000 during the crypto winter of 2018-2019 was vastly higher
than in any year before the 2017 bubble.
The only thing that can seriously
undermine the global positive trend of the cryptocurrencies is a complete ban
on them by leading countries. However, this seems unlikely. With every year,
more and more influential financial communities join the cryptocurrency market,
and they would not want to leave it.
The increasing popularity of
cryptocurrencies will eventually slow down their upward trend, but is also
likely to greatly decrease their volatility and make them more similar to
traditional protective assets like gold. How close that similarity would be is,
as yet, unknown.
