It has plans to enter schools in the primary and secondary levels, says CEO

By NUR HAZIQAH A MALEK / Pic By ISMAIL CHE RUS

Homegrown e-wallet Boost is currently in talks with education institutions as it aims to partake in the Ministry of Education’s (MoE) plan to build a cashless ecosystem in schools.

The e-wallet owner, Axiata Digital Services Sdn Bhd CEO Mohd Khairil Abdullah, said while the company has penetrated public tertiary level institutions, it has plans to enter schools in both the primary and secondary levels.

“For school cafeterias, we are not there yet, but we are definitely planning to (enter). In universities, definitely…you can find some universities using Boost already,” Mohd Khairil said.

“In the next phase, we will be participating in the MoE’s move towards shifting the education landscape into a cashless society, which was recently announced,” he said at the Super Shake campaign launch in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.

He said Boost is currently engaging with, and is present in, most public universities such as Universiti Malaysia Sabah.

“Some of them are more active, as they aren’t only used for cafeterias, but also bookshops,” he said, adding that there is a small number of Boost users making fee payments.

It was previously reported that the MoE is working towards building a cashless ecosystem in schools via a cashless programme as part of the ministry’s efforts to increase financial literacy among schoolchildren.

On the e-wallet’s market share, Mohd Khairil said there is no way or method to track the performance at the moment, but noted that the mobile application (app) has recorded four million users as of last Friday.

“One of the things that I noticed in the past 12 months (is that) our user base has increased to four million, that represents an up to 1.8 times growth.

“Our active user base, however, has increased by 6.5 times — which makes us believe that we are currently No 1, despite not having actual market share figures,” he said.

In order to increase more users backing the app’s growth, the company plans to update the e-wallet’s homepage for both its new and old users within the coming month.

Mohd Khairil said the company has been tracking how users move or navigate using the e-wallet mobile app’s user interface.

“We realised that there is a certain content feature that they usually go to, but the way our application is designed right now makes it rather difficult for them to go there.

“That’s why we’re redesigning the homepage so that it is easier for them to get to the feature, and hopefully, that will encourage more users to go on board with the Boost app,” he said.

Boost was launched in January 2017 for prepaid users to top up their mobile credit through money transfers from their cards or the app’s 17 online banking partners, and its lifestyle e-wallet feature was later introduced in June.

To date, the app has garnered over 80,000 merchant touchpoints.