Bank Islam Malaysia has unveiled a gig economy marketplace on its digital bank platform Be U, confirmed Aleph Labs, the creative engineering company behind the Be U brand.
The new marketplace recommends part-time gigs to users based on their interest and behavior.
“Partnering with job aggregator sites, this allows users to seamlessly apply for jobs and receive payments on their Be U accounts. In addition, BeU has a goal setting feature that nudges users from time to time to allocate a portion of their income into those specific goals,” Aleph Labs wrote on its social media platforms.
Bank Islam, Malaysia’s oldest Islamic bank, launched its cloud-native digital bank last July, becoming the first bank – Islamic and conventional – in the country to do so. Building a standalone digital bank is part of the bank’s five-year business strategic plan, LEAP 25, which intends to make Bank Islam a leader in Shariah ESG total financial solution particularly in the digital banking and social finance space. Built using Mambu Digital Core as its technology backbone, Be U is housed in the Amazon Web Service cloud.
Since its launch, the BeU app has been downloaded over 100,000 times. It is targeting between 350,000 – 400,000 downloads by July this year.
The Malaysian Islamic banking landscape is at the cusp of an interesting inflection point, anchored by digitalization. The country welcomed the first five recipients of Bank Negara Malaysia’s highly coveted digital bank license last year – two of whom will be operating on a fully-fledged Islamic banking basis. Simultaneously, incumbent banks, such as Bank Islam, are doubling down on their digital mandate and giving these digital bank licensees a run for their money; Al Rajhi Bank Malaysia become the second bank to roll out a cloud-native digital Islamic bank last December with its Rize platform.