Malaysian digital banks scale via savings habits and customer segmentation

Some customers aim to save 60 ringgit a week, according to GXBank data.

Digital banks in Malaysia are using their parent companies’ ecosystems, daily savings habits, and customer segmentation in order to scale their operations, market leaders said.

AEON Bank is bridging the gap once faced by its parent company AEON Credit in the motorcycle financing business by providing loans and collecting payments. In the past, collection and disbursement was done by another bank on behalf of AEON Credit’s over 4,000 motorcycle merchant partners.

“We’re working…with our immediate parent, AEON Credit, to get all the merchants on board,” Idham Baharum, treasurer and chief sustainability officer at AEON Bank, told attendees of the ABF IA Summit 2026 held on 14 April.

The years that AEON Credit has worked with those 4,000 partners—many of whom struggle to get financing from traditional banks—equated to data credit on disbursed loans and sales.

Using its parent company's data, AEON Bank can determine the creditworthiness of the merchants, Baharum said in a panel session moderated by Sean Choo, head of retail and business banking APAC and head of Malaysia at Oliver Wyman.

GXBank, meanwhile, highlighted Malaysians’ habit of saving small increments on a daily basis.

Khuan Yew Lee, executive director and regional head of product at GXBank, observed that their customers schedule tiny increments of money to be transferred daily to a “savings pocket” service in their GXBank app—with emergencies, travel, and a car being the most common reasons for saving.

“These are microsavings. And these savings will accumulate up to, say, 60 ringgit a week. So people are really trying,” Lee said.

One gap he thinks digital banks can bridge more is a budget expense tracker, or at least a way for customers to track their spending. “I wish we can do a lot more in the months to come, in the years to come, to help customers start thinking about budgeting, to start tracking their expenses,” he said.

Even if customers set aside money, if they don’t control their expenses, they will end up using up their savings all the time, he said.

For Shahariz Bin Abdul Aziz, director of digital transformation at Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad, having a segment-based strategy is important in an era when customers can compare services between financial service providers and easily move accounts.

“It’s not sustainable when banks end up committing from a pricing perspective,” Aziz told attendees. “Anytime when there’s a better pricing proposition, they will just move.”

Having a segment-based strategy, especially in pricing, is part of having a proper value proposition for customers. A customer seeking digital wealth advisory services will have different needs from customers in the micro-business segment.

Banks should know the customer lifetime value and then be able to offer propositions at certain points of their lifetime, Aziz said.