Day 9: Visiting Maybank Islamic and 1337 Ventures

Today I started the day early by going to the hotel gym. For some reason, the equipment uses a combination of pounds and kilograms to measure the weights so it was a little interesting trying to calculate the right weights. Sadly, the breakfast at this new hotel was not as good as at our hotel in Singapore. I ended up just eating lots of nasi lemak eggs without the nasi lemak and some hash browns.

Maybank Islamic

After breakfast, we all boarded the bus to head to the Maybank Islamic headquarters for a company visit there. Our visit was in the executive boardroom space at the top of the Maybank tower. I found the presentation interesting learning about how Islamic banking differs from traditional banking. It’s quite complex in terms of its differences, however the main practical difference I identified was that their interest rates had a ceiling height of 10.65%. Interestingly, these products which offer this capped interest, are available to anyone, Muslim or not with the only catch being that if you bank with them, you cannot spend money from the bank on things with are considered ‘Haram’. I had a good chat with some of the executives to try to better understand exactly how they price in this capped interest rate however it was a little difficult to get straight answers.

1337 Ventures

After this company visits, we proceeded to have some lunch at a nearby shopping centre before going onto our second visit for the day at a venture capital firm called 1337 Ventures. The presentation here discussed how 1337 Ventures went from coaching app developers on business advice to the VC firm it is today. There was also quite an interesting presentation on the different areas where the CEO, Bikesh, sees future growth and opportunities for startups. I asked some questions about how often they see good returns for their crowd-sourced startup investors, learning about the gambling side of startup investing.