How Axiata’s Boost stands out in SEA’s heated fintech race

Boost is a household name in Malaysia – and we’re not talking about juice.

Boost Holdings, the fintech arm of Axiata Digital, is best known for its consumer e-wallet that is used by millions in Malaysia. But it wants to be known for more than just that.

The Boost Life e-wallet / Photo credit: Boost Holdings

Its consumer payments play was just a first step in getting hold of a bigger, regional, fintech pie that spans alternative credit, insurance tech, cross-border payments, and merchant services. Over time, Boost has crossed each of these off its list, and digital banking could be next.

The firm is optimistic about its second market, Indonesia, where its lending business, Boost Credit, has “grown about 20x” since the start of the pandemic, CEO Sheyantha Abeykoon tells Tech in Asia in an exclusive interview. In the archipelago, Boost offers only enterprise services, avoiding the red-ocean consumer market.

With telecommunications showing signs of imminent decline, firms ranging from Singtel in Singapore to True Corporation in Thailand are looking to future-proof their businesses by seeking out new income streams in the digital realm.

Singtel sought to reinvent itself through bets on everything from ecommerce and news aggregation to video streaming in the city-state. Meanwhile, the Thai firm found its answer in TrueID, a content super app that rivals the likes of Netflix and Spotify.

See also: A history of Singtel’s successes and failures in reinventing itself

Kuala Lumpur-based Axiata, one of Malaysia’s largest telcos, began making digital bets in 2013. These formed the basis for its digital arm, Axiata Digital, whose two main pillars today are online advertising and financial services.

Though Boost has leveraged its telco link, Abeykoon is quick to stress that it’s a standalone firm.

“A lot of traditional telcos have tried to make digital services an extension of their existing services to customers – then it becomes more of a value-added service rather than a standalone business,” Abeykoon says. “We don’t think of ourselves as a telco. 95% of the people, including myself, are non-telco… DNA-wise, we are different.”

Drawing from its “telco heritage”

With over 9 million registered users in Malaysia and 350,000 merchant touchpoints, Boost Life is one of the top five most-used e-wallets in the country. (The firm declined to disclose its monthly active users.) The lifestyle digital wallet can be used to top up phone credits, make QR-code payments, and peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers, among other things.

A cross-border payment rail

Giving merchants a Boost

A destination for savings