Kenanga Investment Bank Berhad, a leading private investment bank in Malaysia, has partnered with Ant Group to launch a bitcoin and crypto-friendly “super app”, per a report from Fintech News Malaysia.
The super app is reported to support stock trading, robo-advisory, peer-to-peer (P2P) financing, bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, and other faculties such as a digital wallet which works with a prepaid card powered by Merchantrade.
“We have dedicated years in building our business in stock broking, futures, asset management, investment banking,” said Datuk Chay Wai Leong, group managing director of Kenanga. “More recently we have collaborated with digital partners like Rakuten, CapBay, Merchantrade, Tokenize to expand our digital product offerings.”
Ant Group, a leading Chinese fintech company, will compile all of the bank’s services onto one platform which is expected to launch in 2023.
“Adopted by many businesses to build new apps and optimize the performance of existing apps, our financial-grade mPaaS mobile development platform is well-positioned to support Kenanga in integrating a wide range of products and services into its SuperApp,” said Ant’s digital technology president Geoff Jiang.
Kenanga is referring to the super app as wealth-as-a-service (WaaS) and plans to partner with digital banks looking to embed the system into their infrastructure. Kenanga believes that by providing these services to rising banks, the institutions will be able to scale much quicker without needing to develop their own products.
However, in order to embed its products into other institutions, Kenanga reportedly still needs regulatory approval from the Securities Commission of Malaysia to become a Recognized Market Operator (RMO) in order to distribute products for capital markets.