How to squeeze your (banking) parent
And a look at Malaysia's "harmless" corporate raider.
Two items for a Sunday read:
➜ How TNG Digital is squeezing its own parent CIMB
➜ The gaps in PM Anwar Ibrahim’s corporate ally Ishak Ismail's recent interview
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There’s a clip going around of CIMB’s Lawrence Loh speaking at a panel by The Asian Banker where he said:
“Actually in Malaysia, I’m more scared of Touch ‘n Go — who is not a digital bank — than the digital banks because of the size of the customer base which they have built over that many years. I think if I’m not wrong, they have 28 million customers that dwarfs any of us.
“In Malaysia, they decided not to be a bank, they decided to work with banks to actually offer our services onto that, and they eat up all the margins that we can have. So if we were to play with them, essentially the consumer benefits, of course, but the bank margins will be depressed significantly.”
At first, I found it funny.
A CIMB executive publicly sweating over a company his own holding group partly owns?
But a closer look at TNG Digital’s latest financials, and Loh’s comments sound more confession than gaffe.