Boost Bank Launches its Pioneering Embedded Digital Bank App for Malaysians 

Embedded banking is the answer to helping underserved communities to become financially healthy and make life easier, helping individuals to more easily save money, pay bills, receive discounts on products and services and more. As part of this effort to help underserved communities, Boost Bank launched with incredible success in the summer of 2024 and Boost Bank Chief Technology Officer Dr. Steven Gan talked us through the process of creating this wildly successful digital bank from scratch.

Boost Bank is a collaboration between Axiata and RHB Bank, Malaysia’s 5th largest bank, and one of five banks awarded a digital banking license from the Malaysian government. It is also the only digital bank where the Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim officiated the launch. 

While Boost Bank will leverage its 11M retail customer base for adoption, the bank is targeting new customers, notably the underserved community, to provide essential banking and eventually, banking life-cycle management options. Dr. Gan explained, “We are trying to make life fiscally healthier and easier for the underserved community.”

Approximately up to 60% of Malaysians are lacking financial literacy and Boost Bank aims to greatly reduce that number. “If there is an incident like a car accident, some people may not have the cash flow to pay for those emergencies,” Dr. Gan explained. “We are enabling spending jars for customers to help them plan for emergencies. People can also use spending jars to save for their telco bills, groceries, e-commerce purchases, etc., while also encouraging them to put up to 30% away for savings.” 

To make life easier for Malaysians, Dr. Gan explained that many rural customers have to pay their telco, electrical and other bills in person. This often means traveling a great way to a city center to pay their bills, which is time-consuming and costly for rural Malaysians. Boost Bank is creating an extensive partner ecosystem of telcos, utilities, grocers and more that will link up with Boost Bank so customers can pay their bills with the click of a button. “Our digital bank will allow those customers to pay those bills easily–that is the point of our rapidly-growing ecosystem,” said Dr. Gan.

Boost Bank began planning its infrastructure by conducting extensive research on better banking, ie., how to best secure customer data, provide an optimal user experience. Then Boost Bank began building the bank two years ago with Ping Identity. Ping Identity was selected because of its proven enterprise success and capabilities like robust IAM solutions  which help Boost Bank to securely manage customer identity authentication across Boost Bank standalone and embedded banking experiences along with single sign-on (SSO) capability which provides convenience to customers, reducing the complexity of multiple credentials. The company began building the bank and then embarked on a massive 3-month ORR (Operational Readiness Review) approval process run by the Central Bank of Malaysia (Central Bank).

The ORR was incredibly extensive. The bank had to prepare the system for testing, create documentation, outline technology policies and more to ensure Compliance with the Central Bank. Boost Bank was ready, but there was a hiccup: Boost Bank was using shared secret keys, which would not meet the Central Bank’s requirements. Fortunately, PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud offered private key sharing, which would remedy the Compliance challenge, so the bank decided to work with Ping to quickly pivot and migrate everything to the cloud in time for the launch. 

The teams worked together and held an internal launch within two months and launched publicly in five months. “The Ping Professional Services team really helped us to complete the entire migration in just two months for our internal launch,” Dr. Gan said. “We had to give such credit, because without those keys, we could not have had a public launch three months later.”

As imagined, the process was challenging, with 43 custom nodules and over 30 journeys that needed to be built. Also, the team faced some loading performance issues which would have caused users 30 seconds to log in once the system was live. “A 30-second log in would have been very frustrating for customers,” said Dr. Gan. “Thanks to the teamwork between Boost Bank and Ping, and the support of my boss, we now have among the fastest log in times at just two seconds.”

Boost Bank is successfully embodying the true art of a better and embedded banking experience. Digital banks typically require a fund transfer to the new digital banking account from an existing account, but Boost Bank will uniquely allow users to onboard without an existing bank account with a lower threshold limit. If users would like to have the full banking capability, they can easily upgrade their bank account with a FTV (Fund Transfer Verification) to get full banking access.  

“Today, users don’t have to go through the hassles of downloading a bank app, filling out all the fields for things like Know Your Customer (KYC) and Customer Due Diligence (CDD) as needed for central banks,” Dr. Gan said. “Now, users can create an account with just the click of a button and a liveness selfie in just five seconds.”

Boost Bank also provides the greater benefits of digital bank. Dr. Gan explained, “Today, if you are a bank customer and wallet customer, you can use your wallet to scan and pay–the money pulls from your bank account, which results in a seamless experience when dealing with transactions and payments while earning interest accrual from the bank CASA account and protection by PIDM up to RM 250k. 

Boost Bank is leveraging passwordless to provide secure yet easy log in experiences. Dr. Gan explained, “We don’t have SMS or OTP so we have to use facial recognition to make it easy and secure for customers. We use passwordless for things like log ins and cooling off periods.”

By building its infrastructure using the PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud, Boost Bank is lowering costs from an on-premise system. With Ping managing the solution in the cloud, Boost Bank has freed up hours for internal resources to focus on engineering initiatives which deliver a better customer experience as opposed to maintenance. Boost Bank has also removed risk with the reduction in technical debt by moving to an externally maintained cloud platform.

Boost Bank is moving quickly and has no plans to slow down. Since its launch, the company has already added multiple new partners to its ecosystem, launched wallet-linking and more. Dr. Gan said, “We are Malaysia’s first homegrown bank built by Malaysians and we will continue to expand our services and partner ecosystem to deliver the next possible banking-as-a-service to best serve our citizens.”

These initiatives include adding Gen AI to enable better experiences and scale and integrate partner capabilities. For example, if Mydin is a partner, Boost Bank customers can integrate a Mydin loyalty program card into their embedding banking thru wallets to reduce discounts on groceries and goods, loyalty points, pay bills and more–all from the Boost Bank embedded banking app. Boost Bank is also leveraging Ping as it expands its partner network to help grow its customer base while saving money. These are ambitious goals, but considering how much Boost Bank has accomplished so quickly, they are sure to exceed these expectations.