MalaysiaBankingScale · $100K
Public Bank

The most efficient bank in Malaysia has one more efficiency left: agentic servicing for Public Bank

Give Public Bank an agentic layer for mortgage and hire-purchase servicing, early-delinquency outreach, and retail service in Bahasa Malaysia, English, Mandarin, and Tamil — extending the lowest cost-income ratio in Malaysian banking into the conversation layer.

Entry use case
Hire-purchase & mortgage servicing and payment outreach
Expected outcome
Deflect statement, payoff, and insurance-renewal contacts in-channel and lift early-bucket cure rates with policy-timed reminders — measured against branch and hotline baselines
Recommended next step
Baseline branch and hotline volume for payoff-quote, statement, and renewal contacts, then pilot WhatsApp servicing on the HP book in one region.
What we understand

Public Bank's operating reality

Public Bank is Malaysia's third-largest banking group and its efficiency benchmark — consistently reporting the lowest cost-income ratio among large Malaysian banks — with leading domestic market shares in residential mortgages and hire-purchase (auto) financing.

Public fact

Its 2024–25 acquisition of a controlling stake in LPI Capital tied the group closer to general insurance distribution, adding renewal and claims-adjacent service surfaces to the retail relationship.

Public fact

A mortgage-and-HP-dominated book generates steady, predictable servicing volume — statements, payoff quotes, insurance renewals, early-arrears reminders — that branch staff handle today at branch cost.

Reasoned inference

Malaysia's multilingual reality (Bahasa Malaysia, English, Mandarin dialect-speakers, Tamil) makes staffed multi-language coverage structurally expensive — and precisely the platform advantage of a multilingual agentic layer.

Reasoned inference

BNM's fair-treatment and e-KYC frameworks, plus Malaysia's PDPA, define the conduct envelope; a conservative bank will require evidence-grade logging before any customer-facing AI.

Reasoned inference

The founder-era culture of cost discipline survives as institutional identity; investments framed as efficiency-compounding rather than transformation-theater fit the house style.

Seller hypothesis — validate

Validate with the account team before outreach: Loan-servicing and core API accessibility for grounding · BNM posture on conversational AI in customer servicing · Post-LPI integration plans for insurance-renewal servicing

Build vs buy

Why we have a right to win here

Buy-led target

Limited internal ability or appetite to build the core platform — strong candidate for the packaged solution

Evidence: Public Bank's technology posture is deliberately minimalist — it runs efficient, conservative systems and has never pursued attacker-style digital builds; its brand of discipline is buying proven capability late and deploying it well. Conversational infrastructure will be bought, with evidence-grade conduct logging as the gate.

Why they won't build the full stack: Building platforms is the opposite of the franchise playbook: it adds fixed cost and execution risk in a domain with no differentiation upside for a bank whose moat is credit discipline and cost control. A bought layer compounds the existing moat.

What management is signalling

Management continues to emphasize industry-leading cost efficiency and asset quality, with the LPI Capital acquisition deepening the bancassurance-adjacent franchise.

Inferencerecent investor communications (validate) · 2025

GTM implication: Frame everything as cost-income-ratio arithmetic — the single metric this institution's culture is built around.

What already exists (don't pitch this)
  • Leading residential-mortgage and hire-purchase books
  • PB engage mobile app and internet banking
  • Nationwide branch network with multilingual staff
  • LPI Capital general-insurance distribution tie-up
  • Lowest cost-income ratio among Malaysian majors
What customers still can't do end-to-end (pitch this)
  • →In-channel loan servicing actions
  • →Two-way early-arrears outreach with payment completion
  • →Mandarin and Tamil automated service coverage
  • →Insurance-renewal servicing integration
  • →Interaction-level QA
Opportunity map

Where agentic communications pays off first

WorkflowWhy it matters hereValueComplexitySpeedChannels
Mortgage & HP servicing
Grounded answers and in-conversation actions (statements, quotes, renewal confirmations) in four languages, with branch handoff for advice moments.
The bank's two dominant books generate the bulk of predictable service volume — the cheapest large deflection pool available.
Friction today: Payoff quotes, statement requests, and insurance-renewal questions route to branches and the hotline at staffed cost.
WhatsAppIn-app chatVoice
Early-arrears payment outreach
Policy-timed reminders with payment links in-channel, bounded rescheduling options, hardship routed to officers — fully logged for BNM fair-treatment review.
Low NPLs are the franchise's pride; keeping them low as the cycle turns is cheaper than curing them later.
Friction today: Early-arrears reminders are letters and SMS; two-way resolution requires branch or collector contact.
WhatsAppSMSVoice
Retail service & card support
Grounded resolution in BM, English, Mandarin, and Tamil across channels with warm handoff and full context.
Bulk balance, card, and FD questions should resolve at self-service economics in the customer's language.
Friction today: Multi-language demand meets a hotline staffed primarily in BM and English.
WhatsAppIn-app chatVoice
Watch the change

Hire-purchase & mortgage servicing and payment outreach: today vs the agentic model

Scenario: A Penang customer asks in Mandarin on WhatsApp for her hire-purchase payoff quote, gets it grounded from the loan system in seconds, and accepts the linked motor-insurance renewal — a branch visit and two phone calls that never had to happen.
Today
same interaction, two worlds
Agentic layer
First-contact resolution
deferred via tickets
in-conversation actions
Platform capability
Cost per contact
$13.50 median assisted
$1.84 median self-service
Benchmark
QA coverage
1–2% sampled
100% scored
Platform capability
Sources & assumptions
  • · First-contact resolution: Process design: agent acts in systems of record
  • · Cost per contact: Gartner customer service cost benchmarks, 2024
  • · QA coverage: Platform capability: every interaction logged and evaluated
  • · Gartner, customer service cost benchmarks (2024): $13.50 median assisted vs $1.84 self-service per contact
  • · McKinsey, digital-first collections research: 20–25% NPL reduction among leaders; up to 40% opex reduction with gen AI
  • · Baymard Institute: ~70% average cart abandonment (meta-analysis)
  • · IAMAI–Kantar via IBEF (2025): 900M+ Indian internet users; 98% consume Indic-language content
  • · LeadSquared and vendor funnel studies: 78% of students choose the first institution to respond (directional, vendor data)
  • · HDI / ITSM operator benchmarks: $15–25 per L1 ticket; 40–60% of L1 volume is resets/status (validate per customer)
  • · Conventional-flow wait times and volumes are typical operator patterns — assumptions to replace with the customer's own baseline
  • · Agentic-flow behaviors (context retention, 100% logging, in-line policy checks) are platform capabilities, not projections
Recommended solution

One integrated stack, opinionated for this account

Channels · Tilicho Labs
WhatsAppIn-app chatVoiceSMS

Voice & channel orchestration, telephony, conversational execution, session/state, routing, integration build. Capability coverage validated during implementation.

Intelligence · Google Cloud
Gemini reasoningEnterprise groundingWorkflow agentsMulti-agent orchestrationGoverned actionsEvaluation & analytics
Systems · Public Bank
Loan servicingCore bankingInsurance interfaces (LPI)Collections/arrears systemPayment gatewayCard management

API access to these systems is the critical-path dependency.

Trust & languages
Bahasa MalaysiaEnglishMandarinTamil

Identity-bound sessions, policy-bounded actions, 100% audit logging, human approvals at defined points, in-tenant intelligence.

Business case

The economics, with your numbers

Addressable monthly interactions1.5M
Seller assumption — replace in discovery
Current cost per interaction ($)$0.9
Industry benchmark scale — validate
Automation / assistance rate (%)55%
Seller assumption — pilot proves this
$1.4M
Current operating cost / mo
$5.4M
Modelled gross benefit / yr
0.2 mo
Payback on Scale
155%
3-yr ROI (modelled)
Automated/assisted interactions per month825K
Modelled AI run-cost per month (usage + cloud, system estimate)$289K
New monthly operating cost$896K

All figures are modelling estimates from the labeled inputs above — nothing here is customer-provided yet. The pilot's first job is replacing these assumptions with Public Bank's measured baseline. Package price covers implementation only; recurring usage billed separately.

Recommended package

Scale — $100K implementation

Scale · $100K · A multi-channel production deployment10–14 weeks to production across priority workflows

Why this package for Public Bank: Loan servicing, payment outreach, and retail service share one core integration across the bank's dominant product lines; multi-language coverage (BM, Mandarin, Tamil) is native to the deployment, not an add-on.

Included
  • 4–6 channels
  • 2–3 priority workflows
  • Multiple enterprise integrations
  • API credential & security setup
  • Advanced orchestration
  • Multilingual support
  • Agent Assist / human escalation
  • Production analytics
  • Expansion roadmap
Not included
  • ✕Usage & consumption (billed separately)
  • ✕Enterprise-wide governance build-out
  • ✕Multi-BU rollout
Recurring costs (separate from the package)

Packages cover implementation and integration only. Recurring costs are billed separately: Tilicho Labs platform usage (~$0.15/call-min indicative, usage only), Google Cloud consumption, telephony/carrier charges, managed operations, and support & optimization. No package includes unlimited usage.

Customer resources required
  • · API access + credentials for: Loan servicing, Core banking, Insurance interfaces (LPI)
  • · A named business owner for hire-purchase & mortgage servicing and payment outreach
  • · Security review counterpart and policy sign-off (Loan servicing scope)
  • · Baseline metrics for the pilot's success thresholds
Executive messages

What to say to whom

CEO / Managing Director

“Public Bank's moat is discipline compounded over decades. An agentic service layer is that same discipline applied to conversations — lowering unit service cost from an already-lowest base, in all four languages your customers actually speak.”

CIO / CTO

“A bounded, partner-delivered integration into loan servicing and core systems — no transformation program, no platform bet, just the house pattern: proven capability, carefully deployed.”

COO

“Branch staff stop producing payoff quotes and statement copies; the hotline stops absorbing renewal reminders; both refocus on the advice and exception work that justifies their cost.”

Head of Retail / HP Financing

“Servicing quality on the mortgage and HP books becomes measurable and multilingual, and early-arrears outreach lifts cure rates before accounts ever reach collections cost.”

Chief Risk / Compliance Officer

“BNM fair-treatment expectations and PDPA consent enforced as configuration with 100% logged interactions — the evidentiary standard a conservative institution requires before automation touches customers.”

CFO

“The bank that wins on cost-income ratio gets a tool that directly lowers it: implementation plus usage pricing, deflection measured against branch and hotline unit costs you already know precisely.”

Outreach

Pre-built offer emails for Public Bank

Written from this account's own research — the strategic signal, the capability gap, the entry workflow, and the modelled economics — not a mail-merge template. Pick the moment and the persona, edit anything, then copy or open in your mail client.

Moment in the deal
Cold outreach — no prior conversation
Who it's addressed to
Cares about: The workflow itself and its daily failure modes
Register
Length
Draft — edit freely before sending
Open in mail client

Customer-safe by construction: drafts are composed only from customer-facing fields. Account tier, build-vs-buy classification, priority score, internal routing, and partner-commercial detail are not inputs to the composer, so they cannot appear in a draft. Money figures are always framed as modelled from the customer's own volumes. Read before sending — you own what goes out.

The pursuit

Tier 2 — high-potential incubation

Why this tier

Malaysia's most efficient large bank — the leading residential-mortgage and hire-purchase lender with a famously low cost-income ratio and conservative culture — where an agentic service layer is the rare investment that deepens, rather than dilutes, the cost discipline that defines the franchise.

Recommended next step

Baseline branch and hotline volume for payoff-quote, statement, and renewal contacts, then pilot WhatsApp servicing on the HP book in one region.

Entry: Hire-purchase & mortgage servicing and payment outreach · Scale package · 10–14 weeks to production across priority workflows. Human fallback throughout; success thresholds agreed before build.

Start the pursuit

Research-based priority-account universe assembled from public information, market scale, communication volume, and solution fit. This is NOT an authoritative list of top Google Cloud customers; existing Google Cloud relationships are noted only where publicly reported. Validate every account with the account team before outreach.