- Jirnexu lands a US$11 million Series B round, putting their total funding at US$17 million.
- It is led by SBI Group, which had led a pre-Series B funding previously.
- Jirnexu will be prioritising hiring following the funding, for a RinggitPlus CTO, Digital Marketing lead, and business unit heads.
- They also plan on diversifying into eKYC and automating risk assessment and customer verification with the new cash plug.
Many Malaysians may not have come across the name Jirnexu, but you might have heard of RinggitPlus, a finance comparison site for credit cards, insurance, personal loans, and etc.
But Jirnexu’s true business lies in helping other businesses like banks, insurance companies, and service providers—basically bodies that offer financial services to customers.
Through Jirnexu, financial institutions can offer services like applications done online instead of on paper, a mobile-first approach, financial comparison tools (like RinggitPlus), and most recently, a chatbot aimed to help banks automate the process of customising a personal loan for their customers.
Now, they’ve just raised a US$11 million Series B round led by SBI Group and joined by US-based SIG Asia Investments.
This marks SBI Group’s second investment into Jirnexu after leading a US$2 million funding for pre-Series B last year.
Ryosuke Hayashi, CEO and Managing Director of SBI Ven Capital said that, “SBI appreciates the complexity of financial services—with each vertical and product having its own potential for digital disruption.”
“Jirnexu continues to demonstrate unique value in their goal to lead across all verticals and stages of the value chain—an exciting endeavour in one of the world’s fastest-growing mobile-first markets.”
Jirnexu will be making use of the funding to still serve financial institutions.
They are looking at diversifying into digital identifications and eKYC (electronic know your customer) to help their financial institutions stay ahead of the technology curve, where many of them would otherwise be held back by legacy systems and force of habit.
They hope that these could help them provide personalised financial products at the click of a button.
Jirnexu will be serving these upcoming functions on top of their usual offerings. This includes their proprietary XpressApply, developed to automate marketing, sales and delivery of complex financial products.
These are integrated with their more familiar products (RinggitPlus in Malaysia and KreditGoGo in Indonesia).
“Jirnexu will automate digital risk assessment and customer verification, processes that are hindered by a lack of data and manual, paper-based methods,” said Yen Tuck Siew, CEO of Jirnexu.
We reached out to Hann Liew, co-founder and director of Jirnexu to get more information about their future plans.
“It’s a bit sensitive to disclose too much right now but it’s safe to assume we will follow eKYC practices that have proven effective in other markets and will be in line with the current regulatory framework in Malaysia,” said Hann.
As for their aim to automate risk assessments and customer verification digitally, Hann said, “With the new funding, we will leverage the vast amount of data that’s available to us to implement alternative scoring and verification.”
They will be building these systems based on the technology and customer data analytics from their existing business.
Right now though, Jirnexu’s priority is people.
“There is no way to scale successfully without great people,” said Hann.
As the company grows to offer a variety of services, Hann thinks that growing their talent pool is important for successfully scaling the business.
Jirnexu will be handing more responsibilities down the corporate pipeline, and even P&L (profits & losses) ownership, so they are looking for people who are driven to grow the business as well.
According to the press release, these positions will likely go towards jobs in RinggitPlus.
- Find out more about Jirnexu’s offerings here.
Feature Image Credit: Jirnexu
