Breakout markets like PH fire up CIMB growth in Southeast Asia
Having marked 100 years of operations last year, CIMB is pushing on to its next century, energized with achievements from its newest market, the Philippines.
Starting in 1924 as Bian Chiang Bank—engaged in financing businesses in Sarawak, Malaysia—the organization’s latest rebirth is as CIMB Group Holdings Bhd, a full-service bank that caters to both corporates and individuals.
The name comes from Commerce International Merchant Bankers Bhd, which the group took on in 1986, coming through a decades-long series of mergers and acquisitions.
Now, CIMB identifies as a regional bank that is deeply entrenched across seven markets in Southeast Asia.
These cover Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.
The Inquirer joined dozens of other journalists from across these markets at CIMB headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, as the group shared their plans for the rest of this decade.
CIMB secured a license from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas in 2018. CIMB Philippines is a universal bank, but it chose to operate as a digital bank.
Novan Amirudin, Group CEO at CIMB, described the Philippines as “an interesting market.”
He noted that the country is heavy on fund flows related to business process outsourcing as well as remittances from overseas Filipinos. Considering that, the Philippines also has “very large” incumbent players.
“We realized that how we add value and serve the customers and society in the Philippines is via the digital space where we will serve a lot of the underserved—those who are involved in e-commerce,” Novan says. “Thus, we found our niche.”
He says CIMB Vietnam is very similarly situated, with strong emphasis on digital offerings. CIMB debuted in Vietnam in 2016. Having no need for physical branches, they have two offices in Vietnam. In the Philippines, they have only one.
As of February 2025, CIMB PH says they have signed up 9 million customers in just six years. They expect to cross the 10-million threshold this year.
Novan says Vietnam and the Philippines have been “extremely important” to CIMB.
“We have full banking licenses in those two countries, [but] we chose to operate digitally when we started about five or six years ago,” the CEO says.
He say that CIMB allocates just about one to 2 percent of its capital towards developing their business in Vietnam and the Philippines. “But the benefit that were getting (from these two markets) is not just for those two digital banks alone.”
“Having those two digital banks in the fastest-growing markets in Asean? Yes, that’s exciting. But to me, what’s more exciting are the lessons that we are learning from Vietnam and the Philippines and we are applying these throughout the entire CIMB Group.”
Novan was referring to the digital approach, which has proved successful in Vietnam and the Philippines. The second great learning is the way they expanded in these markets.
“We have expanded in the Philippines via a unique partnership model. We realized that when we first started in the Philippines six years ago, if you want to grow organically on your own, it’s extremely difficult,” he says.
“What we did was, we partnered with a number of e-commerce players that have access to a lot of customers,” he adds.
In particular, CIMB PH made itself visible in popular online shopping platforms such as Lazada and Shopee.
CIMB PH also partnered with GCash and, more recently, it has launched its own e-wallet, dubbed CIMB Pay.
Through this latest offering, CIMB PH links consumers to “one million” merchants that use QR codes for transactions.
“We provided these e-commerce players banking solutions for their customers. That allowed as to scale a lot faster than if we would have done it organically,” Novan says.
Thus, Novan says, CIMB is using the proven concept of the partnership approach seen in the Philippines in order to spur growth in their “more conventional” markets.
“For example, in Malaysia and Indonesia, we are looking at the partnership approach to also grow our customer base,” he says. “So it’s not just the benefits of the digital businesses in Vietnam and the Philippines per se, but it’s the learning that we have developed to be applied across the entire CIMB group.”
