Acknowledgements
- Nicholas Lim Pinn Yang
CEO of Foodie Media Berhad
- Stephanie Tan Kar Mun
Director, Group Commercial & Market Coverage, Bursa Malaysia Berhad
Salam sejahtera and Salam Malaysia Madani.
Money and Gen Z Malaysians
May I congratulate the organisers of Monie Fest 2026 for bringing together the various aspects of money, namely finance, investment, and banking, and showcasing them to all Malaysians.
The theme of the event is “Money. Finance. Lifestyle”. In my speech, I would like to tweak it to “Money. Finance. Life”.
I would like to devote this speech to a reflection of the state of wellbeing of Gen Z Malaysians in relation to money. If we paint with a broadstroke, I would say most Malaysians, especially the middle class, are underpaid with their lives overfinancialised thus burdened with high household debts, spending probably too much of their family income and wealth on the children’s education, and insecure about healthcare costs and retirement expenditure.
This state of affairs is the result of 50 years of domestic and global neoliberal thinking and it will take years if not decades to unwind and rebuild.
I would like to encourage you to read Michael Sandel’s What Money Can^t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2012). In the past half a century, especially in the English speaking world, the idea that the market is the solution to every human needs and wants, has resulted in the commercialisation and financialisation of every aspect of our lives.
Sandel regrets that in what he called “market triumphalism”，“everything is up for sale”. He is of the view that not all aspects of our lives should be subjected to market logic in full. Some services could be provided by the State and some by the community. But if Sandel has been to Malaysia, he would find that if he ever republishes his book, he must quote the Malaysian experience as we take the commercialisation of every aspect of our lives to the next level.
I once joked with the owner of Nirvana that he has the highest plot ratio in Malaysia, and yielding better per square foot of land than any other housing developers in the country. The complete commercialisation of Chinese burial services in Malaysia is a recent phenomena.
My great grandmother founded a temple in Kuala Lumpur more than a century ago. Even to this day, having a permanent spot to place an urn at that temple actually does not cost much as it is deemed a community service, just like most of the community burial grounds before the overt-commercialisation.
But everywhere else, it is quite expensive to die as a Malaysian Chinese nowadays.
Healthcare is another concern when it comes to money. Malaysia’s public healthcare system was deemed by the World Health Organisation up until the 1970s as one of the best among the developing countries especially in terms of accessibility. From the 1980s onwards, there has been a two-track system. As a rule of thumb, 70 percent of patients go to public hospitals taken care of by 30 percent of medical personnel and resources whereas the private hospitals take care of 30 percent of patients with 70 percent of the nation’s medical personnel and resources.
The medical outcomes are not good. Those who go to public hospitals have to compete for medical attention and resources, those who go to private hospitals have to worry about spending all their savings.
Adding to the woes is medical insurance. As private hospitals are profit-oriented and can only make a profit out of a limited pool of patients who can afford private medical care, they have to “milk” each of the patients more to make money. Patients who pay via insurance are the best partners in this: the patients have an incentive to maximise the benefits from their insurance payment while the hospitals can make more without incurring the wrath of the patients.
The end result is that insurance premiums skyrocketing, especially post-Covid 19 pandemic, and in a way is eating into the disposable income of the middle class, causing further distress.
The Ministry of Health, Ministry of Finance and Bank Negara collaborated to launch the RESET strategy, a whole-of-nation effort to address the root causes of medical inflation. Under RESET, the base Medical and Health Insurance/Takaful (MHIT) plan will begin in 2027 and I hope there will be a groundswell of public support for the reshaping of the healthcare sector. The insurance plan will have co-payment features and through which will regulate the behaviors of private hospitals: policy holders co-pay less when they seek treatment at healthcare facilities that are charging a moderate fee with fee transparency while those charging a “premium” fee will result in higher co-payments. There should be no compromise on the quality of healthcare in both categories.
The tentative terms are Tier 1 (good behavior) and Tier 2 (premium and expensive) hospitals.
I told the MHIT team that now that they have discovered the formula of which type of private hospitals are of good behaviors, why stop there? It is time for us to reorganise the healthcare sector into three categories and not two, i.e. it is not just public versus private, we should make it clear to everyone that there is a third realm, the social market.
The Social Market could still rely on the market logic to a large extent: hospitals could still generate revenue by running efficiently and serving many more patients coming through from the MHIT plan while “milking” each patient less compared to the past and compared to the Tier 2 hospitals, the so-called premium hospitals.
Entities operating in the Social Market realm could be profit-oriented listed companies, NGOs, or even the private wings of public sector hospitals.
I explained this at length because to deal with the anxieties of the Malaysian middle class, we need to restructure how critical services are provided – by taking a middle path.
It is too late to build a public-sector only healthcare system. We accept that the many private healthcare facilities can contribute positively to the quality of health for many people, especially as we slowly become an ageing society, but what needs to happen is the creation of a Social Market framework so that as many such entities maximise their capacity to serve as many patients as possible and not milk individual patient to the max.
The same goes to education, especially higher education. Many middle class parents spent their life savings on their children’s private higher education. Many students also incur debts through borrowing from Perbadanan Tabung Pendidukan Tinggi Nasional (PTPTN). Students who do vocational training borrow from Perbadanan Tabung Pembangunan Kemahiran (PTPK).
Thatcherism and the neoliberal idea of “user pay” permeate the thinking of the provision of education. The Private Higher Educational Institutions Act 1996 (Act 555) stipulates that a private higher education institution has to be one that is registered as a commercial company. There is no legal room for NGOs and nonprofits to run a private education institution.
Also, I often ask industries, why do students have to borrow to undergo vocational training? Companies should pay for them while these students study and work at the same time to gain hands-on experience especially in the vocational segment.
For many more Malaysian middle class to not worry so much about money, a rethinking of the higher education sector to include the Social Market or the third realm is crucial.
We have also created a society in which the poor and the middle class have no choice but to own and drive a car due to the insufficient provision of public transport and poor urban planning. A decent and livable society is one where the rich feel comfortable taking public transport, and not every poor person has to own and drive a car.
In the last 50 years, Malaysian developers have perfected the art of turning plantation estates into housing estates, along the way making our inner cities hollow and sprawling and stretching the city limits to previously unimaginable extent. Many who work in Kuala Lumpur inner city stay in Kajang, Bangi, Semenyih, Seremban, Shah Alam or Klang, taking hours to commute to work each day.
We thought owning a private house is a tradition handed down from time immemorial. Actually, owning a house through multi-decade mortgages is quite new. Before this, most Malaysians either lived in kampung and on the second floor of shoplots in the cities with minimal carbon footprint.
We should now imagine a new future with young people living in the inner city via rental or ownership that doesn’t cost a bomb. There are at least 70 unused office buildings in Kuala Lumpur inner city and some of them could be retrofitted to become residences.
The capital market should make available financial structures that would help create housing stocks through multimodal ownership. A Malaysian developer explained to me how Malaysian corporations are building social housing in London, with the Canadian and Malaysian pension funds as building owners. Social housing as an asset class is something we will soon have to explore.
I recently told executives from UEM and PLUS that we need to rethink our model. Currently, the highway operators make the most money when there is a traffic jam. The more cars there are on the highway, the more the operators collect. But as we now have Budi95, we can put a price tag, in the form of fuel subsidy, on each litre of petrol wasted on a traffic congestion.
The crisis in West Asia is a supply crunch that is more severe than that of in the 1970s. We as a nation cannot go on forever to have everyone in single driver-cars during peak hours, and having cities that sprawl so far away, as each of these features, ie. car ownership, house ownership, petrol usage, toll charges etc, are actually a financial burden on the Malaysian middle class.
High household indebtedness just to finance a car and a house and leaving very little for other discretionary spending is not a good outcome for so many families.
I hope my speech provokes you to rethink our development models and together, we find ways to change these structures that cause financial stresses and troubles with money. I look forward to the transformative leadership from the young, especially Gen Z, to change our relationship with money, and to change Malaysian lives for the better at once.
Thank you.