In a recent interview with The Edge, MoneyLion co-founder Foong Chee Mun reveals that the group, which currently employs over 250 technologists in the areas of data science and machine learning, product management, product engineering and cybersecurity, is expecting to double the size of its Malaysian office.
“To say that Malaysia lacks talents to develop these kind of forefront technologies is simply not true, because Malaysian talents are fuelling the growth of MoneyLion in the US market,” he says. Foong himself is a pioneer in the fintech space, having had the idea to set up MoneyLion while working at an AI Lab at Purdue University, his alma mater. Before setting it up, he had co-founded another company with one of the professors at Purdue called Simulex Inc, which focused on computational human behaviour models. “The AI research lab specialises in this very special branch of AI, called agent-based modelling of human behaviour, and when I was graduating, which was like 20 years ago, this wasn’t very common at the time.