Our Journey

So obviously, we keep banks rolling along with their self-service machines and to do that we need maintenance of hardware and software. We have a nationwide support infrastructure with 24 centres in West and East Malaysia. From our humble beginnings in 1996, we now have 230 employees. And as you can read in our story, we are not afraid to disrupt ourselves before we get disrupted. Our business strategy is also to team up with financial institutions to disrupt the disruptors. And we always win.

In these two decades, our philosophy has not changed either. Better people, not more, make for great ideas and products.

We secured the first bank customer to date, we have six major banks that uses our cash recycling ATM technology. And we grew and grew.

When you’re riding the wave of cheque technology, the last thing you want to hear is the central bank thinking about discouraging its use! Once again, it was either adapt or be left behind. We brainstormed for while and we decided that indeed, cash was king. Or in our case, cash recycling was king. We reached out to a Japanese firm that was the market leader in cash recycling ATM technology. It was a strange time in Malaysian banking – cash recycling was old technology but it was hardly used in Malaysia. Banks were using two machines, one for ATM withdrawals and one for ATM deposits. We developed the app that could connect the separate systems from scratch, and viola!, a cash recycling market was created.

Cheque truncation. That was the trend of the year in our business. But we were ready for it early on and captured the market with eight banks in Malaysia and two banks in Thailand and Brunei still using our solutions today. If you’ve ever used an intelligent cheque deposit kiosk or cheque scanning terminal, that’s likely to be one of ours.

After that big success for us, we decided to list our company on Mesdaq (now known as the ACE Market) on Bursa Malaysia to raise more funds for our business expansion. So, here’s where it gets interesting for us. We went into developing bill payment kiosks that allowed non-banks such as utility, insurance and telecommunication companies to automate their bill payment collections. We also did a paperless, image-based cheque truncation system that used front-end scanner devices and software applications to capture cheque images and data at the bank branches, then this gets sent to the central bank for straight-through clearing and settlement. It was technical and complex but definitely fun.

And remember that app we wrote for you to use your printer to print cheques? We turned that into self-service kiosks that print the image of your cheque deposit to make a receipt. Now that was an industry game changer! With printed images of cheques as receipts, banks could settle disputes with their customers quickly.

Undaunted with our projects being pirated, we soldiered on. One great attribute of the company at this point was the ability to plan, develop and rollout our own software as well as marketing it. We began making more complex software from then on beginning with insurance apps to help you renew your motor insurance and process personal claims. And that proved to be the first big success for us!

Our first steps into our own software development was with Eja Tepat, the first Malay spellchecker. Then came myCheque which was a personal finance assistant. This helped you use your printer to print cheques. And finally, there was Bibi & Bobo; made for pre-school children and loaded with interactive games. Unfortunately, everything we did eventually ended up at the capital of Malaysian piracy – Imbi Plaza.

Starting out small with just 10 people, we truly believed that quality of staff would trump quantity. Our first big project came soon after when we became the software support for a big American multinational supplying ATMs and POS equipment to banks and retailers.