Malaysian Government’s e-cash programme has gone live for the year where two million youths and students who are in institutes of higher learning will get a little token of help through four main e-wallets, namely: BigPay, Touch ‘n Go eWallet, ShopeePay and GrabPay. To make things appealing, every e-wallets chose to do things their own way to claim with them and GrabPay E-Pemula Approach is the one to hit the limelight as their move does question many things.

Grab E-Pemula Mess

Grab E-Pemula

The whole idea with E-Pemula is to give the users RM150 worth of e-credit to be able to use for offline transactions and not allowed to be used for online transactions. And there are some restrictions as to how you cannot use the credits for like for instance, paying for bill, doing P2P transfers, buying e-payment games and so on. That said, the big e-wallets also threw in some vouchers to make things claiming with them a little more enticing.

Grab’s approach to E-Pemula isn’t just odd, but it’s questionable because not only did the company not issue the credit but issued it as vouchers splitting into denominators of RM30, 20, 15, 10 and 5 which is ridiculous as pointed out in this tweet. To which later after a little bit of investigation, we found out that, it is true and other e-wallets: BigPay, Touch ‘n Go eWallet and ShopeePay gave full RM150 credits and on top of that gave vouchers for users to enjoy.

Netizens are not having it

Grab Malaysia’s Facebook is filled with raging comments from netizens asking where is the RM 150 ePemula, to which Grab officially responded that the RM150 worth of GrabPay Credit Vouchers (emphasis on the Voucher) will be auto-applied accordingly and to be honest, be able to get in that denominators only makes things harder to use, as the user eligible now has to spend more to be able to spend the RM 150.

We don’t know how this is going to pan out as the roll-out is officially happening but it’s only a matter of time before it reaches the right eyes and actions are taken accordingly.

Thanks to TY for pointing out and letting us know.