Affin Bank
Kuala Lumpur’s banking scene is awash with savvy mobile apps that ensure customers might never again want, or need, to enter a bank branch.
What gets our attention with Affin Bank is how the firm wants Malaysians to spend less time staring at screens and more at the bigger picture: the nation’s urgent need for thriving tech ecosystems.
Affin is hardly a new firm: the commercial bank, led by CEO Wan Razly Abdullah Wan Ali, dates back to 1975. Its target business segments include community banking, enterprise banking, corporate banking and treasury. Thanks to the digital revolution, the bank can achieve this with a rather compact network of 111 branches in Malaysia. This makes Affin, whose executive director of enterprise banking is Lim Kee Yeong, emblematic of how digital mobile technology is upending relationships between Malaysian SMEs, their customers and the banks that connect the dots.
The emphasis on, and need for, digitalization, particularly for business entities, has never been clearer than during the early waves of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ali says.