During their press conference, they have stated that these changes are scheduled to go live some time Mid-November.

New Look and Feel of RinggitPlus’ New Site

The new revamp is built to be a mobile first experience — the look and feel of it behaves like that of a native mobile app. In the age of where most consumers experience the internet through the lense of their mobile phones this direction certainly makes sense.

This rings true for the RinggitPlus audience as well, on the sidelines of the press conference, Fintech News Malaysia was told that roughly 80% of their visitors interact with their site through mobile phones.

The Upsides of The RinggitPlus Chatbot Experience

The new chatbot seems to be an expansion and improvement of its previous iteration in partnership with RHB.

Instead of just enabling application for RHB financial products, the functionality has been expanded to all the product offerings by RinggitPlus which includes — credit cards, savings, loans and insurance from various FSIs on their platform.

The demo also showed that, to some extent, the chatbot has some built in NLP capabilities to understand Malaysia’s unique brand of English.

One nifty but simple feature that addresses the frustration that many Malaysians face (myself included) when filling up forms is the need to key-in your date of birth despite having already punched in your NRIC number.

Once users finish answering all the questions posed by the chatbot, a form will be generated for users to verify and confirm the accuracy of the details provided, the details will then be passed on the bank/insurance company for their approval process.

Before everyone jumps at us for violating PDPA rules, we’d just like to say that details shown the screenshots above does not contain real personal info and is intended for illustration purposes only.

Possible Improvements that RinggitPlus Should Consider

The chatbot is still in its beta version, so we imagine some of the kinks will be worked by the time it goes live in Mid-November so we’ll avoid bringing those points up.

One area that can definitely improve the consumer experience is to streamlining the series of questions which is asked by the chatbot which can get slightly lengthy for the loan application function contrasting with the fairly straight-forward process of the credit card application

However to be fair, there’s really no easy answer to getting all the details required by the bank without going through that series of questions – but hey maybe a spark of inspiration might take place prior to the launch.

Another cool feature that perhaps can be added in the RinggitPlus pipeline would be to consider extending a version this functionality to Whatsapp, something that banks like DBS are already doing in Singapore.

64 investors put in the maximum allowed RM3 million into Fundaztic when it went live on 17 October 2018. The deal was confirmed fully funded by pitchIN after it completed the mandatory 6 days cooling off period today.

Fundaztic CEO Kristine Ng said:

“We are overwhelmed with joy to see the love investors have shown us. When we planned this fundraising round, we felt that our Elite Club members, who are the strongest supporters of our P2P Financing deals, should be given opportunities to invest in Fundaztic.”

“The best platform to do this was through ECF and we naturally turned to pitchIN.”

Sam Shafie, pitchIN’s CEO said that:

“We knew from its strong pre-live interest that Fundaztic would be successfully funded and we were delighted to see the deal funded in just 38 minutes.”

“Fundaztic is also special to us because it is a fellow Registered Market Operator with the SC, albeit in the P2P Financing sector. This deal marks the very first time that two crowdfunding platforms that are regulated as Recognised Market Operators (RMO) by Securities Commission (SC) came together in a fundraising alliance.”

According to Sam, “This has boosted the awareness, trust and acceptance in the industry. We were very pleased that Fundaztic decision to raise a portion of its funds through ECF as it validated the power of equity crowdfunding. We thank them for choosing to raise on pitchIN.”

According to a press release, Fundaztic is pitchIN’s 22nd successful equity crowdfunding deal, and the latest addition to the equity crowdfunding platform’s 100% successful deal rate since their 2016 launch. Reportedly, pitchIn has raised over RM29 million for Malaysian companies to date.

Shanghai has become the first Chinese city to issue road test licenses for autonomous trucks, with autonomous truck technology firm TuSimple being permitted to operate its vehicles on public roads. The company was awarded the license on October 16, according to local media.

In March, Shanghai issued its first batch of licenses for autonomous vehicle (AV) road tests to SAIC Motor, BMW and NIO. As of the end of September, AVs had driven over 15,000 kilometers on the city’s roads.

Shanghai’s Municipal Economic and Information Committee has said that no collisions have occurred in that time and testing has not affected traffic flow in the city.

TuSimple has operations in the US and China, with Chinese R&D centers in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hebei. The company has developed Level-4 driving technologies—fully autonomous within an “operational design domain (ODD),” therefore not covering every driving scenario.

The company has been working with Shaanxi Automotive and Sinotruck to provide driverless trucks to the Chinese market by 2019.

Shanghai’s city officials initially opened up 5.6 kilometers of public roads for testing but extended this to 37.2 kilometers in September. At the time over 90 companies had applied for licenses. Vehicles are currently being tested in Nanhui and Jiading Districts.

Driverless trucks have been the focus of increasing amounts of research in China. In September 2017, JD announced that it was cooperating with SAIC MAXUS and Dongfeng Motor Corporation to roll out driverless trucks with the Chinese government. Earlier this year, Dr. He Xiaofei, former president on the company’s research division, left to set up his own self-driving truck venture.

Just months later, in May, retail giant Suning announced that it had been testing autonomous trucks in Shanghai, albeit on private roads. The company said its vehicles have also reached Level-4 self-driving capabilities.

The storefronts along Washington’s bustling H Street Northeast are lit up with familiar names and logos: Petco. Whole Foods. CVS.

There is also a Starbucks. Or, more specifically, S-T-A-R-B-U-C-K-S spelled out in the hand symbols of American Sign Language.

That fingerspelling is one way to spot the coffee giant’s first U.S. signing store, where 24 deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing employees run the shop using ASL. The store debuts on Tuesday after being converted from a standard Starbucks location to make the design and technology more accessible. It’s a step, employees and advocates say, toward boosting employment opportunities for the deaf community while also immersing hearing individuals in deaf spaces. And it’s a show of support from one of the world’s largest corporate brands.

“My identity is accepted here,” said Crystal Harris, a barista at the signing store. “Deafness has many faces.”

The store is just blocks from Gallaudet University, a 150-year-old institution and the world’s only university designed for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. The shop mirrors Starbucks’s first signing store, which opened in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2016. Customers from the outside can spot “Starbucks” written out in fingerspelling beneath the main logo and on large table umbrellas. And on the inside, what may appear like any other Starbucks cafe has been specifically laid out and decorated to celebrate deaf culture.

One entire wall, for example, is covered by a multicolored mural commissioned by a deaf artist and Gallaudet faculty member. In fingerspelling, the mural depicts a lowercase “d,” representing deafness, an uppercase “D,” representing deaf identity, an eye to represent visual connections, a hand holding a coffee cup, and other symbols showing merging of deaf and hearing cultures.

The store employs 24 workers who are all conversant in American Sign Language. (Joshua Trujillo/Starbucks)

Customers can communicate in ASL or write their orders on a tech pad. Rather than wait to hear their names called at the end of the bar, customers look up to a screen showing when their drinks are ready. The store was also remodeled to maximize light and open lines of sight — high top tables or tall stacks of cups, for example, limit visibility for people signing to each other. Non-signing customers are also encouraged to use visual cues. Rather than sign that the store didn’t carry chamomile tea, for example, one employee waved his hand across his neck — signaling “no” — and then pointed to a printed menu with other options.

Camille Hymes, Starbucks’s regional vice president for the Mid-Atlantic, said the company chose D.C. for its proximity to Gallaudet and because of the city’s ties to activism for the deaf community. Using the store as a profitable business model, Hymes said, Starbucks can be an example to other companies of “using our scale for good.”

Adam Novsam, a Starbucks utility analyst and a company deaf leadership member, said he had heard from “deaf communities all over the world that they wanted this space.” Even as a Starbucks employee, Novsam said that it can be frustrating to go into other Starbucks or coffee shops and face constant communication barriers. He always has his order typed out on his phone, for example, “to accommodate the other person.”

Store manager Matthew Gilsbach moved from California’s Bay Area to run the signing location. At one point in his three and a half years at the company, Gilsbach said he was stunned to meet a deaf Starbucks district manager.

“I thought, wait, there’s a deaf district manager?” Gilsbach said. “What’s going on?”

The Starbucks signage includes fingerspelling on the walls and large table umbrellas. (Joshua Trujillo/Starbucks)

A mural inside the store represents a celebration of deaf culture. (Joshua Trujillo/Starbucks)