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Malaysian Development Bank

In 2021, Bank Pembangunan Malaysia Berhad (BPMB) also known as Malaysia Development Bank engaged Oxford Economics' Global Economic Model Service to support its new vision, strategic planning and rebranding process.

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Overview

The bank has been providing a path to Malaysia’s infrastructural solutions and was mandated to provide medium to long-term financing to the nation’s nascent infrastructure, maritime, oil and gas and technology sectors. With a focus on these four main sectors, BPMB has played a key role in Malaysia’s development for close to five decades. Evolving with the nation’s progress, BPMB has evolved beyond serving the early developmental needs, shifting gears from being a provider of development finance to a catalyst for a new economy. Being sector agnostic, the Bank has expanded its focus from the four sectors mandated during inception. BPMB is now aligning its strategies with the Government’s initiatives on Sustainability, Digitalisation and Technology. In addition to financial viability, the Bank is setting its sights firmly on impactful projects, pursuing the shift towards impact assessment, regardless of sector.

The Challenge

In 2019, BPMB embarked on its 3-Year Strategic Transformation Plan (2020-2022) with a sharpened vision and mission to spark and support Malaysia’s emerging development needs, whilst embracing a mind-set shift towards creating meaningful and sustainable impact. BPMB was commissioned by the Malaysian government to provide long term forecast to support the government’s strategic priority areas.

In previous years and prior to the research department being established, BPMB were able to provide forecasts up to one year by engaging an external consultant (Moody’s Analytics) that was based in a different country (India). As a result, the data and advice that our client received risked being internally inconsistent and inaccurate due to the disability to make adjustments or test scenarios internally. This had impacted decision-making and potentially undermine the confidence of their stakeholders in the planning process.

Additionally, they were criticized for not being able to provide long term forecast independently despite being owned by the Malaysian Government through the Minister of Finance Inc.

In order to provide, the stakeholders with accurate data and forecasts, and with future plans to acquire SMEs and smaller banks, BMBP saw the need to acquire the right tools now, in order to make informed decisions in future.

Oxford Economics’ Global Economic model provides a rigorous and consistent structure for forecasting and testing scenarios. The globally integrated economic model can be used to address questions on a wide range of economic topics such as the impact of oil price changes and forms the foundation of all of our country, industry, and city forecasts.

The simple-to-use software allows the client to quickly build scenarios, export data and present charts, heat maps and dashboards to their stakeholders.
With the individual country models fully linked through global assumptions about trade volume and prices, competitiveness, capital flows, interest and exchange rates, and commodity prices as well as the comprehensive country coverage that examines 85 countries in detail, these fits and serves BPMB’s needs and requirements to conduct long term forecasting.

The Solution

With Oxford Economics’ Global Economic 5 year model, the service was able to fulfill all of the client’s needs and criteria of:

Ability to forecast long term
Extensive selections of indicators made available and used for forecasting and,
Exposure to the global market especially to commodity prices.

The Result

Discovery session. A business development manager from the Singapore team scheduled a call with the senior economist from BPMB to learn more about the business and their needs.
Product trial. Stan conducted an overview of the services as well as a training session and provisioned a trial to the research team for 1 month.
Engagement of services. A week after the end of the trial, the client was able to provide a decision to engage the services. Client was astonished at the seamless process of purchasing the services with Oxford Economics commended how it was very straightforward and easy.
Stakeholders feedback. Within 4 months of using the services the researched team presented their initial forecast and findings using the global economic model, during a stakeholders meeting and were provided with positive feedback from the stakeholders especially on the justification on the calculation of the forecasts aided by the model.
Reduced cost. BPMB was able to safe cost and prevent expenditures resulted from requesting ad-hoc figures and forecast from (Moody’s) that wasn’t entirely useful or accurate.