by BERNAMA / pic by BLOOMBERG

AMBANK group aims to have 1.4 million online customers on its Internet banking platform, AmOnline, by the end of its financial year in March 2021.

AmBank group chief operations officer Datuk Iswaraan Suppiah said the figure was a significant increase as compared with 230,000 customers when the platform was launched two years ago.

“Two main online initiatives that AmBank has is AmOnline and AmAccess Biz, which is our cash management solution for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

“Since AmAccess Biz was launched at the end of last year, we have almost 8,000 corporates within 10 months, and we envisage the number to at least double within the next year or so,” he told reporters today at the Red Hat virtual press briefing on Charting Malaysia’s Course for Digital Resilience with Social Security Organisation (Socso) and AmBank.

Recently, AmBank group and Socso were recipients of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 Malaysia for their innovative use of Red Hat’s enterprise open source solutions.

The bank won in the Cloud-Native Development category, while Socso came out tops in the Digital Transformation category.

Iswaraan said with digital capabilities, AmBank expects new customers to open accounts as the technology adoption rate is about 90 per cent per person.

“The whole idea is (to offer) convenience to customers. We realise that having banking services at the branch per se is limiting, and our idea is basically providing banking services in the customers’ ecosystem,” he said.

On future plans, he said the group is heavily investing in the Open Application Programme Interface (API).

Generally, the programme helps developers to use a specific software product in various ways, for example, fitting it into third-party projects.

“There are already people connected through our open APIs and many partners are utilising us for that purpose.

“This is how AmBank will facilitate the digital area, but the branches, automated teller machines and other physical banking aspects will still be available,” he said.