File picture of a customer scanning a QR code for the Atome app to make a cashless payment at a shop in Shah Alam, June 23, 2022. The initial scrum for market share also appears to have settled, with three BNPL providers — Shopee, Grab, and Atome — now dominating the market and accounting for 97 per cent of total transactions and 96 per cent of value in the first three quarters of 2023.
Despite this surge, however, BNPL lending schemes that benefited from Covid-19 lockdowns that drove online shopping and spending are largely unregulated, exposing consumers to the risk of excessive borrowing. This change is long coming. The CCA was proposed as far as 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when BNM saw the need to strengthen consumer protection and ensure non-bank credit providers such as those offering BNPL schemes adhere to a minimum standard of fair treatment.
“So because of the political dynamics in Malaysia, we just had to re-engage but the plan remains the same. We hope to table in the second half of this year ,” she explained.Set up in July 2021, the CCOB Task Force is currently led by the Finance Ministry, BNM and the Securities Commission Malaysia to drive the enactment of the CCA where the existing Task Force will be transformed into a statutory body as it will be known.
What this means is that BNM, the Securities Commission, Co-operative Societies Commission of Malaysia and existing ministries will still continue to act as the regulatory and supervisory authority for their respective sectors under the first phase.