CASE STUDY: GXBANK

GXBank Berhad is Malaysia’s first operational digital bank, launched in 2023 under one of five digital banking licenses issued by Bank Negara Malaysia. Fully app-based, with no branches, no paper, and no inherited infrastructure, GXBank built its entire customer experience operation from scratch on the NiCE CXone platform. Two and a half years after going live, the bank serves 1.5 million customers with approximately a 60-person customer experience team. Customer satisfaction has reached 95 percent, first contact resolution runs at 95 percent against a target of 90 percent, and AiNi, an AI chatbot built by GXBank and integrated with NiCE CXone, now handles 70 percent of chat interactions autonomously. Approximately 30 percent of those 1.5 million customers live in remote communities across East Malaysia and Borneo, and more than half earn below the national median income, many of them holding a bank account for the very first time.

We have a customer who actually stayed awake at midnight just to see the interest coming in. ‘I got interest already for my deposit.’ That’s where they get the excitement.

Sylvia Liao

Head of Customer Experience & Operations, GXBank

01 Before

No branches. No legacy. No template to follow.

In 2021, Malaysia’s financial regulators issued five digital banking licenses. GXBank received one of them. In under two years, it became the first of the five to go live.

There was no legacy system to migrate from. No call center to inherit. No accumulated process to retrofit. The founding team drew the flows from scratch: the IVR architecture, the knowledge base, the agent model, the entire customer experience infrastructure. Every decision was made before a single customer had arrived.

The founding vision was both straightforward and radical. No branches. No paper. No requirement to travel, queue, or present documentation in person. A customer could open an account from anywhere in Malaysia, verify their identity through the app, and be banking within minutes. The app was the branch. The internet connection was the door.

Sylvia Liao, Head of Customer Experience & Operations, GXBank, joined from HSBC, where she had spent six years watching legacy infrastructure slow every attempt at digital progress. The pull was the chance to start without that weight: to design something from first principles rather than retrofit something old.

With traditional banks, most banks still have very old legacy systems, which really pull the bank when they want to go forward with digital. With this digital experience, I thought I could start something where we don’t have paper. Everything is self-serve.

Sylvia Liao

Head of Customer Experience & Operations, GXBank

The customers who arrived were the ones the bank had aimed to reach. Many live in East Malaysia and Borneo, in communities too remote for branch banking. This was not an accident of geography. GXBank was designed from the start to reach them.

Serving those customers well required more than a clean app. First-time banking customers have genuine fears about security. They have no prior relationship with the institution holding their money. Every agent conversation, every help article, every automated interaction had to earn trust as well as process a request.

NiCE CXone was selected before the bank went live. The challenge was not the platform. It was building everything that would run on top of it, for customers the industry had never designed for.

02 Opportunity to change

Every touchpoint built to earn trust.

The first question a first-time banking customer asks is not about rates. It is: is my money safe?

GXBank built its entire CX strategy around that question. NiCE Knowledge Management was deployed to create a single source of truth: a public help center on the GXBank website and a parallel internal knowledge base for agents, both drawing from identical information. When a policy changed, it changed once, everywhere. A customer reading the FAQ and an agent on a call were always working from the same page.

The IVR reflected the same thinking. Where traditional banks stack options inside options, GXBank reduced the journey to two steps: choose a language, then reach an agent. No long menu trees. No mid-call transfers.

One feature built on the NiCE platform went further than anything in the traditional model: a self-serve kill switch. A customer who loses their phone can call the hotline and immediately block their account. No agent required. No menu to navigate. No friction at the worst possible moment.

I’m so happy that I could still call your hotline and do the kill switch automatically. Self-serve. I don’t need to talk to an agent. I don’t need to do anything.

GXBank customer

Recounted by Sylvia Liao

GXBank also thought beyond transactions. The bank launched with a saving pocket feature: a tool that lets customers set money aside toward specific goals. A trip. A car. A first financial buffer. For customers encountering a savings structure for the very first time, this was not a product feature. It was an introduction to financial planning. The agents and the knowledge base were built to explain it, not just enable it.

The ambition was never just to process requests. It was to make banking something customers could have for the first time, and trust completely.

03 NiCE solution

One platform. Everything grew from there

GXBank went live in 2023 with NiCE CXone as the operating core of its customer experience platform. Voice, chat, email, and social media were unified from the start. Every channel, one platform. Every interaction, one record.

A customer could read about the saving pocket feature on the help center, open the app to set one up, hit a question, and start a chat. AiNi handled it. If it could not, a live agent picked up with the full conversation already in view. The customer called in the next day with a follow-up. The GX Buddy, as GXBank calls its customer experience agents, had the same knowledge base open that the customer had searched the night before. Nothing had to be explained again. Nothing was lost between channels. That continuity is not a convenience. It is the difference between a customer who stays and one who does not.

NiCE Knowledge Management ran in parallel, powering both the customer-facing help center and the internal agent knowledge base. The GX Buddy on the phone and the customer searching the FAQ were drawing from the same source. What a customer read, an agent could confirm. What an agent said, a customer could verify.

The decision to go with NiCE was made jointly with GXBank’s parent company, which holds a digital banking license in Singapore. A shared platform meant shared knowledge and shared capability development across two markets from day one.

AiNi and AInun: a two-layer AI model

As the customer base grew, GXBank built two AI systems and integrated them with NiCE CXone. The first is AiNi, a customer-facing chatbot powered by Azure OpenAI GPT-4 and connected to GXBank’s core banking APIs. When a customer opens a chat in the app, AiNi responds first. It handles queries, disputes, application status checks, and complex banking workflows without a human agent, achieving a 95 percent coherence score, 88 percent relevance score, and 84 percent accuracy score. Seventy percent of all chat interactions are resolved without a human. When AiNi cannot close a query, it escalates to a live agent with the full conversation transcript already in view. The customer never has to repeat themselves.

The second system is AInun, an internal agent-assist bot integrated with NiCE Knowledge Management. When a GX Buddy is in a live conversation, AInun surfaces the right procedure and the right answer in real time, using Retrieval-Augmented Generation against the knowledge base. Agents no longer put customers on hold to search for a policy. The answer is there before the customer has to wait. “Now they really concentrate on more complex, help desk kind of enquiries,” Liao said. “The agents are getting into more complex cases that they need to handle.”

Multiple concurrent chats. Zero Paper.

At launch, agents handled one chat at a time. Three years in, with AiNi absorbing the routine volume, GX Buddies now manage several concurrent conversations simultaneously. When a customer pauses to search for information, that idle time serves several people. The office runs on the same principle. Every call is recorded. Every interaction is logged. There is no paper in the building, by rule, not aspiration. “A lot of the agents come from traditional banks as well,” Liao said. “They came in and they were very surprised that we don’t have any paper in the office. Everything is recorded, everything is in digital form.”

GXBank does not permit printing. Everything lives on the NiCE platform. Nothing needs to exist anywhere else. The no-paper rule is also a sustainability commitment: the contact center has been carbon-free from day one.

And because the relationship with NiCE has never been set-and-forget, the platform keeps pace with the bank. Bi-weekly technical sessions resolve issues as they arise. Quarterly business reviews surface new capabilities. Three years after launch, GXBank and NiCE are still building together.

04 Results

Two and a half years. 1.5 million customers. A team built for scale.

GXBank opened its doors in 2023. Within 11 days it had 100,000 customers. Two and a half years on, the bank serves 1.5 million customers, served by a 60+ person customer experience team and a platform built to scale without proportional headcount growth.

Roughly 30 percent of those customers live in East Malaysia and Borneo. More than half earn below the national median income. Many had never held a bank account before. Those numbers do not describe a niche. They describe a goal delivered.

The customer experience operation that serves them runs a 98 percent SLA for service request completion. Customer satisfaction stands at 95 percent. First Contact Resolution sits at 95 percent, five points ahead of target. Agents resolve the overwhelming majority of enquiries in a single interaction. No callbacks. No transfers. No follow-ups.

AiNi is the reason the team can serve 1.5 million customers without scaling proportionally. It handles 70 percent of chat interactions without human involvement, processing approximately 60,000 messages monthly. It also identifies and blocks an average of 1,000 malicious or non-bank-related messages each month through advanced pattern recognition. For a bank whose customers are navigating digital finance for the first time, that invisible layer of protection is not a feature. It is the foundation of trust.

The agents who handle escalations work on the cases that require them. With AiNi absorbing the routine queries, chat capacity per agent has tripled. What each GX Buddy handles now is categorically different from what the role looked like at launch: complex disputes, flexi credit queries, onboarding conversations with customers who have questions a bot cannot answer.

Personal loans tell the same story from a different angle. Launched last year, approved entirely within the app, the decision returned in under four minutes. No branch visit. No documents to print. No appointment. Seventy thousand customers have used it since launch.

That is what it looks like when a bank is built around the customer rather than around the process. “We have a customer who actually stayed awake at midnight just to see the interest coming in,” Liao said. “‘I got interest already for my deposit.’ That’s where they get the excitement.” That customer was not testing a feature. They were watching their money work for them, possibly for the first time in their life. The platform runs 24 hours a day, no maintenance window, no downtime. Interest credits at 11:59. You can see it happen.

05 Future

The model works. Now comes the scale.

GXBank’s next move is sentiment AI: detecting dissatisfaction before the customer names it. If the pattern suggests someone who is not getting what they need, the system surfaces it. An agent can intervene. A follow-up can be triggered before the customer decides not to call back.

What we are going to do is proactive. How do we detect it and tell you: I know you called in the other day and you were not happy. So I can give you a proactive approach instead of a reactive approach.

Sylvia Liao

Head of Customer Experience & Operations, GXBank

GXBank is also expanding into SME and micro-business lending. As Liao put it: “Today in Malaysia you have a lot of mum and dad shops that need help.” That is the next door GXBank is looking to open. Many of them will be customers the traditional system never reached.

Find a way to make sure that easy access comes with good security, so customers feel safe. Sometimes a little bit of friction is good. Because it gives you the security that we are also trying to secure your bank account.

Sylvia Liao

Head of Customer Experience & Operations, GXBank