KUALA LUMPUR, 28 October 2025 — Malaysia’s own Ryt Bank has achieved a global milestone with its research paper, “Banking Done Ryt: Redefining Retail Banking with Language-Centric AI,” accepted for presentation at the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), one of the world’s most prestigious events in artificial intelligence and language technology research.
This marks a historic first for the nation, as Ryt Bank becomes the first Malaysian financial institution to be recognised at EMNLP, firmly placing Malaysia on the global map for responsible, research-led AI innovation in banking.
Developed using ILMU, Malaysia’s sovereign large language model (LLM) featuring fewer than 10 billion parameters and an 8K context window, Ryt AI enables customers to perform secure, real-time banking transactions through natural language commands; for example, simply saying or typing, “Transfer RM10 to John.”
“When we began Ryt, there was no handbook for what an AI-powered bank should be. 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,” said Foong Chee Mun, Chief Product Officer of Ryt Bank.
Designed to meet the rigorous standards of financial regulation, Ryt AI integrates three layers of protection to ensure safety, transparency, and compliance:
- Deterministic Guardrails for compliance filtering;
- Human-in-the-loop verification for every transaction; and Stateless Memory Architecture to prevent data persistence and protect privacy.
Together, these safeguards deliver fast, multilingual, and regulator-grade conversational banking, balancing innovation with accountability.
The research represents a collaboration between Ryt Bank, YTL AI Labs, and Universiti Malaya, uniting academic expertise and real-world application to advance AI innovation in financial services.
“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.”
With this global recognition, Ryt Bank not only showcases the maturity of Malaysia’s AI ecosystem but also reinforces the nation’s position as a credible player in the future of intelligent banking.
