As an investor, imagine walking into a digital mall where every aisle displays a variety of wealth products. Local and foreign shares, bonds, unit trust funds, exchange-traded funds, robo-advisory services, cryptocurrency, peer-to-peer (P2P) financing, insurance, e-wallet and more. When you buy into one of these products, you get reward points that give you a discount for future purchases.
This is exactly what Datuk Chay Wai Leong, group managing director of Kenanga Investment Bank Bhd (KIBB), envisages its wealth super app will do.
The super app, which is expected to be launched in the first quarter of next year, is being developed in partnership with the Ant Group’s digital technology unit. It will be the first of its kind locally and one of the very few worldwide, says Chay.
The idea for the super app was conceived by Chay and KIBB’s board of directors in 2019, two years after it launched Rakuten Trade, a fully online trading platform. A slew of investment activities and partnerships soon occurred in the following years.
In 2020, KIBB entered into a joint venture with P2P financing platform Capital Bay to launch the country’s first Islamic supply chain finance start-up and acquired a 4.99% stake in e-money service provider Merchantrade Asia Sdn Bhd. In 2021, it
acquired Islamic exchange-traded fund (ETF) provider i-VCAP and bought a 19% stake in licensed digital asset exchange Tokenize Malaysia. Kenanga Digital Investing (KDI), an internally developed robo-advisory platform, was launched in early 2022.
The super app aims to combine all these investments on a common platform and make them accessible to investors through smartphones. “Our business model is predicated on the philosophy that we want to provide A to Z to our clients to help them invest and manage their wealth,” Chay tells Wealth.
As comprehensive as its offering may seem, KIBB is not stopping there. Chay says it is scouting for deals to acquire a stake in a licensed initial…
