On transactional relationships, investment wisdom, and the metric that’s measuring the wrong thing.
The Helper Who Did Her Job
When we were running Terasa Cafe, we had an Indonesian helper. She was hardworking and reliable. She showed up every day and did exactly what needed to be done. My wife treated her like a sister, genuinely—with warmth that went beyond the employment arrangement.
Then one day, friction arose. The helper wanted to leave and made certain requests we couldn’t fulfill. She made her decision quietly and moved on. My wife was hurt because she felt she had treated her like her own sister.
I had to say something hard:
“Nobody owes us loyalty beyond the exchange. She came to work and did her work. That’s the arrangement, which is completely fair and honest. You cannot expect a sister from a transaction.”
It was a difficult truth, a conversation, and a clean one.
And it applies directly and precisely to every customer who has ever downloaded a digital banking app.
The Customer Who Flipped The Menu
When a customer walked into Terasa Cafe and opened the menu, they didn’t owe us anything.
They didn’t care about our dream, our authentic Mi Rebus Johor, or carefully sourced ingredients; instead, they cared about one question: Does this solve my problem right now?
If yes, they stayed, they ordered, and perhaps became our regulars. If not, they left quietly, without explanation or guilt.
This wasn’t disloyalty, but simply because the exchange wasn’t worth it.
Customer is king—not in the entitled sense, but in the transactional sense. They are always in the position of deciding, and all their decisions are based purely on what benefits them. This is not cold; this is just honest, and it’s the most important truth Malaysian digital banks have failed to fully accept.
The Metric Nobody Asked For
Digital banks are chasing Daily Active Users (DAU), encouraging users to open the app, complete tasks, and unlock rewards daily.
The entire product strategy—using gamification, nudges, and loyalty programmes—is built around getting users to open the app every day, attempting to replicate the habitual swiping behavior seen on platforms like Spotify or TikTok.
However, the question nobody in the boardroom is asking loudly enough is why the customer should care about DAU; the truth is, they don’t and they never did.
Customers care whether the app makes their financial lives better by solving actual problems or providing utility that traditional banks cannot.
When the value proposition is clear, users will engage daily of their own accord; without that core utility, no amount of incentives or gamified points will alter their fundamental habits.
Ultimately, you cannot gamify your way out of a value problem.
What The Investment App Understood
I use an investment app built for dollar-cost averaging and long-term holding, and the first thing it taught me is that you don’t need to open it every day.
In reality, checking the app daily is actually detrimental, as frequent monitoring exposes you to minor daily shifts that trigger anxiety and lead to impulsive, emotional choices that compromise your long-term gains.
True investment expertise lies in the ability to remain detached by limiting your reviews to once a month or every quarter, having confidence in your strategy, and allowing the power of compounding to operate undisturbed.
The ultimate financial tool for a serious investor is one that provides value without requiring daily attention; however, digital banks are currently mimicking eWallet behavior through daily opens, frequent transactions, and high engagement simply because adoption data looked promising.
While they want to replicate that success, their core products—banking, saving, and financial management—have far more in common with investment behavior than eWallet behavior.
The Malaysian bank user’s deepest financial instinct is to save, protect, and not touch their money unnecessarily, yet the digital bank is fighting that instinct daily to hit a metric the customer was never asked to care about.
What The Data Actually Says
TAB Insights recently published research on global digital bank profitability, and the finding that matters most is that digital banks with loan balances above $250 million are significantly more likely to be profitable.
Profitability isn’t driven by those with the highest DAU, the most app opens, or the best gamification; instead, it belongs to the banks with $250 million in genuine lending behavior.
Because lending requires trust and a real relationship with money, it signifies that a user has actually changed their financial behavior rather than simply downloading an app for a promotion; ultimately, regulators and investors care about this trust, not your DAU.
The only number that determines survival is whether people trusted you enough to genuinely bank with you at scale.
This is a relationship metric, not an engagement metric, and it is obvious that you cannot manufacture a genuine relationship through a simple notification.
The Dilemma Nobody Named
Banks raised money based on growth projections, which inevitably required engagement metrics. These metrics, in turn, demanded Daily Active Users, requiring a fundamental shift in user behavior. However, the behavior they needed to change—a saver’s relationship with their money—is one of the most deeply embedded behaviors in Malaysian financial culture.
You cannot nudge or gamify your way to changing it. You can only earn your way to changing it: by building something so genuinely useful, so specifically solving a real problem in the saver’s life, that they open the app because they want to, not because you pushed them.
The Right Question
Not: “How do we increase DAU?”
But: “What problem does a Malaysian saver actually need solved—that they don’t currently have a solution for?”
Answer that honestly and build for it specifically, because the customer didn’t come to your app to help your metrics.
This is not an industry analysis. This is what I observed. Draw your own conclusions.
Clarity is the most underrated business investment. — Lokman S., Majalah BIKIN