Ryt Bank, Malaysia’s homegrown AI-powered bank, has made history with the acceptance of its research paper, “Banking Done Ryt: Redefining Retail Banking with Language-Centric AI,” at the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) — one of the world’s most prestigious stages for artificial intelligence and natural language processing research.
The achievement makes Ryt Bank the first Malaysian financial institution to be recognised at EMNLP, marking a defining moment for Malaysia’s growing footprint in responsible, research-led AI innovation within the banking sector.
Malaysia’s AI, Reimagining Global Banking
The bank’s innovation is built on ILMU, Malaysia’s sovereign large language model (LLM) with under 10 billion parameters and an 8K context window. At its core lies Ryt AI, an intelligent banking interface that allows customers to perform secure, real-time transactions using natural language commands — such as “Transfer RM10 to John.”
“When we began Ryt, there was no handbook for what an AI-powered bank should be,” said Foong Chee Mun, Chief Product Officer of Ryt Bank. “Our team built one from scratch, and today, that blueprint is being recognised by the global AI community. It’s proof that Malaysian talent can define the future of banking.”
Built For Safety, Speed, And Trust
To meet the rigorous standards of financial regulation, Ryt AI incorporates three layers of protection:
- Deterministic Guardrails for compliance filtering.
- Human-in-the-loop verification for every transaction.
- Stateless Memory Architecture to prevent data persistence and enhance privacy.
Together, these safeguards enable fast, multilingual, and regulator-grade conversational banking, striking a balance between innovation, transparency, and accountability.
Collaboration Between Academia And Industry
The research is a joint effort between Ryt Bank, YTL AI Labs, and Universiti Malaya, merging academic research with real-world application to advance the safe use of AI in finance.
“This milestone proves that Malaysia can lead in both the science and the safety of AI,” said Dr Chan Chee Seng, Full Professor at Universiti Malaya. “By blending research, compliance, and innovation, we’re creating models that are globally relevant and locally responsible.”
This achievement not only showcases Malaysia’s growing capabilities in AI and fintech research but also demonstrates the potential for homegrown talent to influence global standards in ethical and explainable AI.
