Meet Andy Lim, the Founder and Group Managing Director of IBPO Group Berhad, an award-winning holding company specialising in financial solutions. Recognised as one of Malaysia’s ‘Fast Moving Companies’ with an impressive estimated market value of RM100 million.

But Andy's journey to success was far from ordinary. At just 12 years old, he began working as a cleaner to help make ends meet, a responsibility that shaped his resilience and ambition. By the age of 18, he had entered the financial world as a mortgage banker, quickly rising to become one of the Top 10 Bankers at Standard Chartered Bank.

From a young age, I never thought that I would become an entrepreneur. I’m actually born from a really poor family. Can you imagine my first job was at the age of 12 years old? My first job was actually a cleaner. Yes, a lot of people never thought that - they thought I actually graduated from a top university. In fact, I just graduated from high school, SPM level.

Everything I had to learn from zero without any support, no financial support and no business experience at all. I have to really put in a lot of effort to learn from zero to today. But of course, I think I have managed to find a purpose in my life that I want to achieve - to be able to help people on financial freedom and improve the financial literacy rate in Malaysia.

Honestly speaking, I never thought that before because as I said earlier, I was born from a poor family. I got no choice… I have to find a job to feed my family and myself, for school and everything.

I am from Sungai Petani, Kedah, (and) my first official job is in KL. Can you imagine that, the moment I came to KL, I don't even know how to speak fluent English and I’m not even able to communicate well with my colleagues in the telemarketing companies that I worked at before.

So, I started in this financial sector as a telemarketer at one of the biggest outsource telemarketing companies 20 years ago. I switched from a telemarketing firm into the banking industry, joining Standard Chartered Bank as a mortgage banker. That's how I started in the financial sector until today.

When we first started this company, we started as a financial consultancy company. I think the big change is that we kept evolving since the pandemic. Today, IBPO is almost 13 years old.

During the pandemic I started to realise that we have to do something different, we have to change the way we work, the way we organise and manage the business, because the world is never the same again. We have to change - be more dynamic, aggressive and the most important I think is the technology you want to invest into.

We want to be something special and unique in the market, that’s the reason why we brought Fusion Finance. It’s a combination of traditional finance with AI technology. I think that's the unique point of IBPO and of course, we hope that we will be able to keep evolving.

Of course, throughout the entire journey, we have faced a lot of obstacles in the past. But we just don’t know how to stop and give up. As long as we know, and even myself, I know what is my purpose in life, whatever obstacle we just have to go through with it. This is what we want. We never thought we wanted to give up. Never. We’ll never give up in IBPO. That's the reason we keep evolving no matter what.

I actually watched a movie, there’s a quote in that movie that said, “Keep growing or die”. It’s really quite interesting as an entrepreneur, we have to keep evolving, keep growing or die. That’s the whole purpose of life! Otherwise, how are you able to compete with the people who have been (here) for years in the market? This is the mentality that we want to put in the company.

I think everything started to change after the pandemic. It made me start thinking about how to evolve and change. I think in IBPO, one of the key elements we want to bring into our company is the dynamic culture. We want everyone to be as aggressive as they can, in order to be a better place. We are always trying to improve on our internal process, technology and everything. It’s back to the quote again, keep growing or die.

When you step into the technology area, especially AI technology, it will never end because you have to compete with a lot of talented people in the market, not just in Malaysia. So, we have to keep evolving and changing. We’re always looking at the pain points.

Since the last 2 years, everyone has been talking about AI, but I always think, what’s next? Of course Artificial Intelligence can come with machine learning and even now people are talking about Gen AI, (which is) slightly better than AI.

As long as we are able to capture the big data in the market, and provide customised solutions and technology then we will be able to solve the problem. We are trying to combine the dots and improve further on the Gen AI and to provide the Gen AI chatbot into our ecosystem. In fact, we’re actually developing our own AI mobile app.

(The mobile app) is able to advise customers or even provide end-to-end financial solutions to our customers on their personal financial management.

I would say in the next 5 years, we will be able to expand our market into different countries, not just in Malaysia. The next will be the Singapore market, Indonesia and even Thailand - Southeast Asia market.

Just never give up. I understand that the majority of the people are spending time having fun out there. But I think the mentality is the key element to improve further, and to know what is the purpose in life. Of course, not just everything is because of money, you need to have something to really pull you out from - not just money. When you got a purpose in life, you will never give up and keep going. This is actually the same mentality that we want to bring to the company and to the people. This is what we want, we’ll keep evolving and never stop.

Every single moment is my proud moment. I actually started this company from zero, completely zero. Not even a computer! Just imagine when you’re meeting with a customer, you don’t even have a template for an appointment paper. I just took a blank paper and wrote the customer name and just go for it.

I even started this company from an office about 700sqft. I think today - IBPO office - we have in total about 40,000 sqft. So I would say every single moment, we enjoy it.

We wanted to be part of the society, we wanted to be a contributor - to contribute to financial literacy to the country and to improve further on the financial literacy rate on how to fully utilise financial technology to life.

I think work-life balance is really important. When it comes to work, we’re a little more serious and dynamic. When it comes to personal life, we can just be as normal as we can. I think this is the principle, we just don't want things to change. We just want to be ourselves (and keep things simple). This has kept me grounded, never forget the past.

I’m a cyclist - I go for some rides every week, maybe once or twice a week. I run as well, although it’s just 10-20 km a week, and working out. That’s how I release stress and sometimes, I sing a little bit (*laughs). So it’s all about work-life balance.

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