SASC banks on growth in demand for Islamic fintech solutions

KUALA LUMPUR: Sedania As Salam Capital Sdn Bhd (SASC), a subsidiary of Bursa Malaysia-listed Sedania Innovator Bhd, anticipates growing demand for digital solutions in Islamic financial services this year following the implementation of the second Movement Control Order (MCO 2.0).

SASC chief executive officer Nisa Ismail said the financial technology (fintech) solutions provider had tested out a new offering for 2021, the GO Halal Programme, which was expected to benefit the credit communities with Housing and Local Government Ministry (KPKT) licence.

“Our mantra for 2021 is to ‘refocus and grow’ where we will nurture our strategic alliances for the GO Halal Programme through our credit community partners with takaful and e-Mandate offerings.

“We want to bridge gap between digital consumption behaviours and legacy infrastructure,” she said in a statement yesterday.

She noted that SASC had expanded its technology partnerships on e-KYC, Core Banking SAAS and Middleware API for the digital banking platform.

“The platform module for SASC’s digital banking solutions is composable and flexible, equipped with full application programming interface (API) integration, to complement the traditional financial markets in this digital era,” she said.

SASC has served over 70 financial institutions with more than RM50 billion loans processed to-date.

Nisa said the demand for digital solutions in Islamic financial services was expected to continue for some time, considering the shift in digital behaviour towards banking habits post the first round of MCO.

“SASC enjoyed a healthy gross profit margin for its financial year 2020, mainly attributable for being the first fintech player that has developed a full API-enabled Tawarruq platform in helping its partners to facilitate loan processing in real-time, allowing room for optimisation of the platform for other Islamic products,” she added.

According to Nisa, the Covid-19 pandemic had presented itself as an essential catalyst for Malaysian financial services, especially in bank digitalisation.

“We know that Malaysia’s Islamic financing landscape is ready for a digital boost in transforming the conventional Islamic transaction banking to suit a new era of digitisation,” she pointed out.

She said the year 2020 had given SASC opportunities to accelerate the upgrade of their partners’ legacy infrastructure, simultaneously futureproofing systems in facilitating new growth for the digitisation of banking.