The Malaysian media tycoon-digibank pioneer on GX Bank’s board

This column was first published on The Malaysianist, a weekly guide to understanding Malaysia’s current affairs that focuses on money and power. It was edited to reflect Tech in Asia’s editorial guidelines.

“I have long accepted the past and moved on,” wrote tycoon Tong Kooi Ong in a 2022 op-ed, ruing how Malaysia seemingly started the world’s first digital bank but squandered such an opportunity.

That digital bank was PhileoAllied Bank, and it was his own. Tong is known today as the publisher of business weekly The Edge, but he was among a clutch of Chinese businessmen who rose to fame in the ‘90s by growing listed holding companies through a series of acquisitions, including stockbroking firms and banks.

Tong Kooi Ong / Image credit: Tech in Asia

After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, a forced merger with Maybank – the brainchild of then-finance minister Daim Zainuddin – brought an end to Tong’s ownership of PhileoAllied.

When it seemed that Tong was done with the Malaysian banking scene, decades later he returned, this time as a minority shareholder of GX Bank.

The tycoon indirectly holds a 2.93% stake in the digital bank GX Bank Bhd, which is majority-owned by a joint venture between Southeast Asian super app Grab and Singapore telecoms giant Singtel, as well as the Kuok conglomerate.

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Aside from Tong, who is also father-in-law to Grab co-founder Anthony Tan, GX Bank has another elite shareholder: Mohamad Norza Zakaria. Norza is the major shareholder of Citaglobal, the Pahang royal family’s listed construction concern that also counts former Agong Sultan Abdullah Ahmad Shah as a substantial owner.

GX Bank’s elite shareholding is typical of Grab. In Singapore, the company hired an elected member of parliament last year despite questions over conflicts of interest. The politician, Tin Pei Ling, would eventually leave Grab after just months into the job.

Tong and Norza, however, don’t sit on GX Bank’s board. Instead, it is filled with other banking veterans such Zaiton Mohd Hassan and Maimoonah Mohamed Hussain as well as corporate Mohamad Reza Abdul Mutalib, who is also executive chairman of oil and gas firm Propel Global.

Banking on entrepreneurship

With GX Bank, Tong’s digital banking journey comes full circle. In the early ‘90s, he took over the sole Kota Kinabalu branch of Singaporean banking group UOB. He then established PhileoAllied Bank in 1994, transforming it from a mere stockbroking concern just two years earlier.

Maybank, Murad, master accounts

Still hanging around