How Boost is Innovating Cashless Payments in Malaysia

Boost launched in 2017 with a mission to revolutionize the way Malaysians conduct their daily transactions. Previously a cash-dominant culture, the Malaysian government began incentivizing digital payments as a way to curb corruption.
By understanding consumer needs and using cutting-edge technology, Boost makes transactions easier, faster, more secure, and rewarding. Catalyzed by the emergence of e-wallet service providers, over 70% of Malaysians now prefer to visit stores where digital payments are feasible.*
Curious to know more about their unique journey and challenges, we spoke with Maybelle Cheah, Customer Analytics Team Lead at Boost.

Helping Businesses and Consumers with Cashless Transactions

As a lifestyle e-wallet, Boost helps users with daily transactions like topping up mobile prepaid or games credits, paying utility bills, paying for on-street parking, buying bus and train tickets, ordering food, purchasing movie tickets, shopping, and meal vouchers, and even making payments to charities.
Boost Business allows merchants to receive payments and manage cash flow in one place, whether they’re operating hawker stalls or retail outlets. Merchants get an increase in business visibility, easy cashless transactions, and security against counterfeit currency.

Gaining Detailed Insights From Campaigns

Backed by the Axiata Group, Boost has been one of Malaysia’s fastest-growing e-wallet players seeing over 50% growth in the number of users over the past year, and a consistent multi-fold increase in the Gross Transaction Value (GTV) over the past 2 years.
But with an increase in user acquisition, Boost suddenly faced a new challenge of preventing those users from churning. The key to preventing user churn was engaging the users, getting them to perform repeat transactions, and become loyal customers over the course of time.
When you have over 7 million users, identifying and tracking user behavior as well as understanding marketing ROI becomes an essential yet complex task.
According to Cheah, cohort analysis allows the team to identify important trends in user behavior to improve engagement and retention. The team analyzes user data at a granular level and creates micro-segments of users, allowing Boost to target customers with messaging that’s highly relevant to each micro-segment.

Personalized Communication: 5x Increase in Retention

Engaging consumers in a personalized way has always been a top priority for Boost. The marketing team uses in-app messages, push notifications, and emails to communicate with users, and each of these channels play a unique role in engaging customers.

For instance, in-app messages help them drive campaign awareness and exposure for their most active users, while push notifications and emails help encourage action from users who haven’t opened the app in a while.
Cheah emphasizes the importance of tracking how users respond to their campaigns by keeping an eye on metrics like open rates, view rates, click rates, and conversions rates. This allows their team to understand what’s resonating with users and what’s not. As a result, Boost has seen a 5x increase in customer retention rates for the first 90 days.

Witnessing a 2x increase in MAUs

While personalized messaging has helped Boost cement its position as one of Malaysia’s fastest-growing e-wallet companies, the marketing team is carefully crafting a long-term retention plan to increase the customer lifetime value (CLTV), encourage brand loyalty, and optimize the product experience. And by using AI, the team can send relevant product recommendations and increase engagement with a personalized touch.
At Boost, the team’s KPIs include improving metrics like: daily active users, daily new users, transactions per user, and number of use cases per user. With CleverTap, the marketing team at Boost is able to execute data-driven campaigns and analyze the results in real time, which translates to a 2x increase in MAUs (monthly active users).

Helping Malaysians with a Lifestyle Boost

Boost is helping merchants of all sizes become a part of the thriving Malaysian digital economy, especially those in the underserved and unbanked sections of the population. By partnering with an array of major Malaysian household-name brands, Boost also serves cash-based businesses such as night market sellers, food truck operators, and small-scale proprietors. They’re now actively exploring cross-border e-wallet interoperability across the region.