How MoneyLion's Foong Chee Mun is Shaking Up the Financial Industry in Malaysia

After playing a part in disrupting the US banking sector by employing AI, the chief technology officer of MoneyLion is now setting his sights on doing the same in Malaysia

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionising the financial industry at an unprecedented scale. According to Business Insider Intelligence, by 2023 the cost savings for banks using AI applications is estimated at US$447 billion. Foong Chee Mun spent most of his career around AI and after spending a decade in the research field, he wanted to use the technology to positively impact people’s lives.

The electrical engineering and computer science graduate got his start in the AI field working at Purdue University’s research lab. He was a founding member of the boutique research firm Simulex Inc, which specialised in using AI and advanced analytics to predict human behaviour for the US Department of Defense and other Fortune 500 companies.

Having witnessed many US banks retreating from serving the middle-income population in America following the 2008 financial crisis, Foong was inspired to explore ways to leverage AI in financial services. In 2013, he together with Purdue alumni, Diwakar Choubey and Pratyush Tiwari, co-founded MoneyLion, a mobile banking platform for borrowing, saving and investing.

The intention, Foong explains, was to create a new digital platform and bank that would be at the centre of the user’s financial life, helping the underserved population by offering financial services on par with a private bank.

“We live in an era where change is constant; we embrace change fully which allowed us to grow quickly,” Foong says. “MoneyLion was built from the ground up to change fast. We are a bunch of crazy innovators and we invest in infrastructure that is nimble which is something traditional banks are not able to do.”

Though MoneyLion was founded in the US, the founders had ambitions from day one for the company to expand its presence beyond America. “Our philosophy of expanding internationally comes from the fact that we have built the tech in the US and have served that market successfully for a big chunk of users. We just think that the tech can be reused anywhere else in the world,” Foong explains.

He eventually moved back to Malaysia for personal reasons and subsequently set up MoneyLion’s Malaysian office in Kuala Lumpur in 2013. What started as a team of five eventually grew to a team of 300. As MoneyLion’s chief technology officer, Foong oversaw the development of software and AI that powered the company’s products with the vast majority of their software engineers and AI experts all working from their KL office. “I certainly don’t think we have any lack of talent and it goes to show that we have the ability to build a successful fintech company in Malaysia,” he adds.

In terms of impact in the wider community, Foong says MoneyLion is constantly innovating to serve those underserved by financial institutions. He stresses that MoneyLion extensively researches and evolves new products before they are released to customers. “In our experience, we might run up to five experiments with products in a week, four of them will fail but the successful one stands to benefit both us and our customers greatly,” he says.

Moving forward, Foong says MoneyLion’s aspirations to expand into Southeast Asia will continue in 2022. Kuala Lumpur is a great place for them to launch these ambitions as the appetite for fintech solutions is healthy. He adds that Malaysia’s central bank’s decision to issue licenses to five digital banks is set to disrupt the financial sector even more, accelerating further change and driving down the cost of service. “I’m genuinely excited to be part of this driving force that is making this disruption take place,” he says.

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Credits

Photography

Imran Sulaiman

Topics

MoneyLion Banking Artificial Intelligence

Tatler Asia

How MoneyLion's Foong Chee Mun is Shaking Up the Financial Industry in Malaysia