How Malaysia’s top financial comparison site plans to dominate Southeast Asia

Suppose you want to compare loans, credit cards, or insurance plans. Depending on where you live, your destination would be different: Moneysmart in Singapore, Cermati in Indonesia, or RinggitPlus in Malaysia.

Look at how complicated the financial comparison landscape is in Southeast Asia:

Now, on the surface, RinggitPlus doesn’t stand out – except that it claims to be the number one player in Malaysia, an assertion iMoney would challenge (iMoney did not respond to Tech in Asia’s multiple requests for comment).

But Jirnexu, the company behind the website, is brewing something special. It all started with a revelation.

While the company focused purely on comparing financial products in the first one-and-a-half years of its history, it found that banks lacked an efficient way of converting the leads it provided. This affected Jirnexu’s bottom line, because it collects fees from clients for every approved customer referred.

“I had an overly romantic vision of doing in Southeast Asia what Money Supermarket has done in the UK,” says Siew Yuen Tuck, co-founder and CEO.

No longer just an aggregator

But rather than wait for the market to catch up, Yuen Tuck (YT) took matters into his own hands. His secret weapon: a tool called XPressApply.

On the consumer side, users can apply for financial products using XPressApply’s easy-to-use, mobile-first interface. The information is then passed on to the financial institution, who can use the tool to acquire and retain the customer. Think of it as CRM software for banks.

Yuen Tuck (seated, with glasses), and the Jirnexu team. Photo credit: Jirnexu.

YT claims that, compared to traditional lead conversion methods, the software has led to a threefold increase in customers acquired.

Banks often hire call centers to manage leads. Agents call up customers, verify their information, and then send them a PDF form which has to be printed, filled out, and then sent back. It’s incredibly tedious.

“Some banks have built online forms where they take their traditional forms and then ask their questions one by one. And sometimes that can be worse in terms of conversion rate because of how they’re designed,” he says.

Good outlook for investors?