3 digital products to be rolled out in H1

KUALA LUMPUR: RHB Bank Bhd is set to roll out three digital products in the first half of this year.

The push towards digitalisation is part of the bank’s approach to become the digital banking of choice and to lower its cost.

“The digitalisation of our offerings is a key growth driver for the group and, as such, we have allocated up to RM300 million in the next three to five years for this,” said group managing director Datuk Khairussaleh Ramli at the bank’s annual general meeting, here, yesterday.

“We are targeting to release up to three digital products. One will focus on mortgage and the other will be for the small and medium enterprise (SME) segment.”

This month, the bank has begun to collaborate with financial planner RinggitPlus.com for the ChatBot digital credit card application service, known as the RHB RinggitPlus Xpress Apply.

“It is still early days for the ChatBox but we do forecast growing momentum. As of now, we do see that 90 per cent of the transactions on the website are for personal loans,” said Khairussaleh.

Despite its aggressive push of the digital platform, the bank has no plans to launch an e-wallet.

“The e-wallet segment in Malaysia is too congested as a lot of entities are pushing for their own brand of e-wallet. We have no plans for our own ewallet but we may collaborate with an e-wallet provider,” he said without elaborating.

He said as of now, the bank is not deliberating on downsizing its branches.

“The brick-andmortar and business is evolving. It is not as important as before but we believe we can re-purpose it into something else, something more niche and targeted,” said Khairussaleh.

RHB Bank’s net profit rose 16 per cent to RM1.95 billion for the financial year ended December 31 2017, compared to RM1.68 billion in the previous year.