Elaine Deng and Chan Chee Chiu

Leveraging its strong position as Malaysia's fifth-largest fully integrated banking group, the RHB Banking Group is eyeing a more significant role in Southeast Asia.

"We would like to follow our customers as they are also doing business outside Malaysia," says RHB's group managing director Kellee Kam. RHB's full suite of financial services includes conventional and Shariah-compliant retail and investment banking.

RHB aims to be a leading multinational financial services group by 2020. To jumpstart its regional growth, the group seeks to increase the share of revenues from overseas from 5 to 30 per cent in the next four to five years.

All numbers have been on the uptrend for RHB since it successfully implemented its transformation programme beginning in 2006. From a 1.2 per cent loans growth in 2007, the group closed last year with a 16 per cent increment in overall lending. Market capitalisation grew almost threefold from HK$15 billion to HK$43 billion over the same period. Strategic partnerships and innovative products have made these achievements possible.

To further pursue the mass market, the group introduced Easy by RHB, a simple, fast and paperless community banking outlet that is only about one-eighth the size of a regular branch. Using state-of-the-art technology, Easy kiosks can serve six banking products. Requiring only the customer's national identity card and thumbprint for biometric confirmation, credit checking with income verification and credit approval can be completed within 10 minutes.

Easy enjoys strong customer acceptance with outlets growing from two to 245. Confirming its success, the marketing model successfully pulled up the group's market share in the Amanah Saham Bumiputera (ASB) unit trust financing product from 9 to 24 per cent in two years. Total loan assets stood at 3.3 billion ringgit (HK$8.32 billion) as of December 31 last year. About 75 per cent of it is in ASB financing.