KUALA LUMPUR (March 7): Malayan Banking Bhd (Maybank) has appointed Alan Lau Chee Kheong as group chief operations officer, effective April 1.

Lau will be reporting to group president and chief executive officer Datuk Khairussaleh Ramli, and is expected to oversee end-to-end industrialisation of transactional operation functions such as trade, credit and treasury with a focus on customer experience and interaction.

“His track record and capabilities put him in good stead to bring group operations to the next level, especially in a heightened landscape of change in addition to the pursuit of sustainable business encapsulated in the Maybank M25+ aims,” said the bank in a statement.

Maybank said Lau, who is currently the group chief compliance officer, has been with the group for 39 years, gaining a significant amount of local and regional experience, demonstrating depth and width especially in the areas of audit, regional operations, both at the front-end in sales as well back-end operations and compliance.

Meanwhile, Maybank said it is realigning its overseas operations in line with its M25+ strategic aims to strengthen its position beyond Malaysia, and the regionalisation of its business and product solutions.

The bank said the effectiveness of the current international organisation was reviewed to enable more seamless strategy execution where the relevant countries will report directly to Group Global Banking, Group Community Financial Services, or Khairussaleh’s office, as the case may be, effective April 1.

Maybank’s share price closed one sen or 0.12% lower at RM8.68 on Tuesday (March 7), giving the group a market capitalisation of RM104.63 billion.