Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad: Navigating success through innovation, customer focus and digital excellence

Executive Summary

Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad’s executive summary includes key statistics such as:

The company’s headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with 4731 employees and 141 branches.
The company reported a revenue of USD 718 million (RM 25.45 billion) with a year-over-year revenue loss of 5.2%.
Additionally, the company’s annual IT spending was reported at USD 16 million (RM 932 million).
The company has received industry recognitions such as being named the Best FPX Bank by Payments Network Malaysia (PayNet) in 2021 and receiving the World’s Best Islamic Digital Banks 2021 award by Global Finance.

The strategic priorities outlined focus on customer centricity, digitalization and a value-based culture.

Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad’s financial overview includes key statistics such as:

The company’s focus areas include strengthening revenue streams, reducing IT complexity and leveraging the power of data. The company’s top priorities include digital innovation, increasing operational efficiency and improving data analytics with AI/ML techniques.

Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad’s industry trend analysis highlights several challenges impacting profitability and sustainability:

These challenges include efficiency and turnaround on business, intense cost pressures, compliance burden, duplication of effort, high paperwork and personnel cost, investment in security and risk, innovation for growth, product differentiation not winning customers, competition arising from various sources such as neobanks, technology companies, fintechs and telcos.
The industry is experiencing slowing revenue growth, customer remediation and interest margins at an all-time low in 2020

Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad’s digital strategy and initiatives focus on several key areas to drive growth and enhance customer experience.

The strategy includes a strong emphasis on leveraging data, reducing IT complexity and strengthening revenue streams.
The bank aims to implement an integrated wealth management business model, leverage fee-based business activities and grow its wholesale banking portfolio.
Additionally, the bank is prioritising front-end sales development, migration of workloads to a nimble architecture and re-platformification across verticals.

Strategic Focus: Drive innovation, adopt omni-channel strategy, improve digital adoption.
Opportunity Trigger: Deployed mobile onboarding, launched tailored apps, planning GO as a super app.
Solution: Achieved mobile banking growth, scalable network solutions, expanded SDN Data Center.

2. Transformation of Branch and Network:

Strategic Focus: Integrate contactless facilities, improve in-branch experience, revamp branch network.
Opportunity Trigger: Launched SME hubs, invested in tech and training for frontline staff.
Solution: Spend $22 million annually, interconnected broadband, cloud-based management.

3. Migration of Workloads to the Cloud:

Strategic Focus: Simplify processes securely, deploy applications at scale, adopt cloud-based platform.
Opportunity Trigger: Partnership for SaaS banking, introduced HUMANE platform.
Solution: Expand data center capabilities, ensure high availability, elastic scaling.

4. Leverage AI:

Strategic Focus: Enhance digital propositions with AI, diversify fee income, leverage AI for predicting financial journeys.
Opportunity Trigger: Launched BEST Invest App, plan Shariah Robo-Advisory platform.
Solution: Improve conversational AI, introduce intelligent frameworks, implement AI-enabled network infrastructure.

Account Profile FSI