Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Written by: Martin Dale Bolima, Tech Journalist, AOPG.

Kenanga Investment Bank Berhad, the largest independent investment bank in Malaysia, has launched Kenanga Digital Investing (KDI), a first of its kind digital investment platform in the country that uses an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven robo-advisor to make saving and investing simple, seamless and safe for Malaysians.

“We always aspire to bring innovations and technologies to allow our customers to invest better and to make the investment market more accessible to them. Not too long ago, we launched Rakuten Trade [now iSPEED.my] and it eventually became an immense success,” said Lee Khok Kee, Executive Director, Head of Group Equity Broking Business, at Kenanga in the virtual launch of KDI. “We now have close to a quarter-million customers and 80% of these customers are below the age of 40 and have a short investment experience. This is our target market . . . to bring about the younger generation to the [investment] market.”

Added Ian Lloyd, Group Chief Digital Officer at Kenanga, “We looked at what is happening in the market today, and across the industry, especially here in Malaysia, there are more investment opportunities for everyone. But the challenge is where to start, and we kept asking ourselves—how do we make it [investing] accessible, how do we make it affordable, how do we make it simple?”

The fully digital KDI platform figures to be the answer. Fully licenced by the Securities Commission Malaysia, KDI offers two products: KDI Save and KDI Invest. The former lets customers earn daily returns on their savings but with zero management fees and no lock-in period, thus allowing for more potential earnings and ensuring peace of mind. Additionally, KDI Save is offering an industry-leading 3% fixed interest rate from KDI’s launch on the 15th of February up until the end of the year.

The latter, on the other hand, lets customers grow their wealth through a variety of global investment opportunities—but with lower fees as compared to other investment vehicles. In fact, fees are waived for investments below RM 3,000 and are pegged at 0.3% to 0.7% per annum for larger investments. These alone make KDI one of the most competitive robo-advisor platforms for Malaysians today.

“We are proud to launch KDI Save, a cash management product with one of the highest returns in the market, while KDI Invest provides a gateway to the global markets at an affordable fee,” said Lloyd. “KDI’s innovative portfolio design is a game-changer for wealth management. The system selects suitable portfolios to help customers achieve their investment goals in line with each customer’s personal risk preferences. The AI monitors global market conditions and rebalances customers’ portfolios automatically, giving them peace of mind that their portfolio is being taken care of around the clock,” added Lloyd.

Aside from essentially lowering the barrier to entry on investing, the KDI platform helps even novice investors make informed choices with their investments. This is made possible by AI-driven robo-advisors that have “learned” (through machine-learning) from all the investing expertise and experience Kenanga has accumulated through the years and are analysing voluminous investment-related data daily, including information from different countries and asset classes, like stocks and Exchange Traded Funds (popularly known as ETFs).

These robo-advisors then craft portfolio recommendations tailored especially for each customer based on information—like monthly income, occupation, investment goals and risk appetite—they provide in KDI’s simple, seamless and intuitive signup process. These recommendations are purely based on data and devoid of human emotion, effectively eliminating biases or subjective interpretations. The final decision, however, rests on the customer, who can also change portfolios or asset classes easily and seamlessly depending on their situation or financial position.

“This is really exciting because we’ve taken something that typically takes you several days of work with an [human] advisor, having multiple meetings, sharing a lot of different documents and forms, and we’ve made it so easy to get started,” added Lloyd. “You can start saving with KDI Savings for as low as RM 100 and start with KDI Investment at RM 250. It’s a great way to start your [financial] journey today.”

That journey is only going to get simpler and better moving forward, with Lloyd promising that Kenanga will use feedback from its customers to improve the platform continuously.

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