Ant Group Partners With Malaysia’s Kenanga Bank to Debut Super App

Malaysian investment bank Kenanga has teamed with Ant Group to launch what it says will be the country’s first wealth super app.

The app will integrate solutions that include stock trading, digital investment management, eWallet, cryptocurrency trading and foreign currency exchange into one platform and ecosystem, according to a Wednesday (Aug. 24) news release.

“We look forward to not only unifying a broad spectrum of financial offerings under one roof, but more importantly, to make wealth creation more accessible by democratizing financial services for the millions of Malaysians around the country who want better, swifter and cheaper access to financial products and solutions,” Datuk Chay Wai Leong, group managing director at Kenanga, said in the release.

Kenanga, which bills itself as Malaysia’s largest independent investment bank, said in the release the super app is the latest in a series of digital products that include stock trading platform Rakuten Trade and robo-advisor Kenanga Digital Investing. This latest tool uses mPaaS, a mobile development platform created by Ant Group’s digital technology unit.

Research by PYMNTS found that at least two-thirds of consumers are interested in adding a super app to their daily lives.

Read more: New Survey Finds 3 in 4 Consumers With Strong Demand for Super Apps

These consumers showed significant interest in a super app, with 72% of all respondents at least “slightly” interested and a quarter of them “very” or “extremely” interested. Typically, the level of interest in a super app increases with respondents’ income and level of tech integration, although 63% of consumers in the lowest income bracket still showed interest in a super app.

A super app could solve consumers’ biggest problem: how to make their lives function more efficiently without constantly having to add different apps. A key advantage of a super app is its efficiency in taking a tangled thread of apps, websites and channels and spinning them into a single, centralized experience.