Kashmi, a Singaporean social payment app, has announced it will be launching Southeast Asia’s ‘360° fully digital banking product’ in Q1 2017.
Developed from its existing offering, Kashmi will become a social, mobile, all-in-one neo-banking product designed to fit seamlessly into the lifestyles of ‘banked’ and ‘unbanked’ Millennials in Southeast Asia – with features that enable spending, saving, budgeting, borrowing and investing.
The innovative, customer-centric and personalised free banking app, which can also be accessed on a desktop, aims to increase Millennial uptake and engagement with a suite of financial services including bill pay, card transfers, ATM withdrawals and peer-to-peer transactions, as well as products such as term deposits, investments and loans.
These will be offered alongside Financial Literacy Tools to promote active, responsible management through simple, automated tools for budgeting, savings, and group payments.
The product has been designed following extensive research that shows traditional banks are struggling to engage with unbanked and under-banked populations across Asia, with Millennials in particular showing they are disengaged with traditional banking or struggle with access to physical banks.
A survey by Scratch revealed that 74% of Millennials perceive their relationships with banks as transactional rather than personal – citing that banking is ‘time-consuming’, ‘complicated’ and ‘inaccessible’.
As a result of this, huge swathes of Southeast Asia remain ‘unbanked’, meaning over half of Southeast Asia are not registered with a bank (438 million people) – with many more estimated to be ‘underbanked’, meaning they do not regularly use banking features.
With inaccessibility to banks a big issue in some parts of Southeast Asia, and taking into consideration the high smart phone penetration in the region, Kashmi will be able to give Millennials what they want: an all-in-one digital banking solution that allows easy access to a range of financial services – anytime, anywhere.
Key features will include:
1) Free Spend Account
2) Pay, Request or Borrow
– Pay and request funds
– Organise, track and execute group payments
– Lending
3) Financial Management Tools
– Dynamic tracking, reporting and advisory services for budgeting and saving
4) Pay/save with ease
– Term deposits
– Bill payments
– Airtime recharge
According to Rakhil Fernando, CEO and Founder of Kashmi: “Our new product will target millennials, a group of individuals whose spending power is increasing exponentially but who are increasingly disengaged with the banking system. Ultimately we believe attempts by banks to go digital are floundering. Our digital banking solution brings an array of financial services to young people and re-engages them with their own finances through a user-friendly, customer-centric design that is expected by today’s smart phone generation”.
The new Kashmi product will first launch in Singapore in Q1 2017, and then expand into the Philippines and Sri Lanka, followed by countries including Cambodia and Indonesia in Q2 and Q3.
