Global Psytech Sdn Bhd is entering the stage where founder Dr Haniza Yon’s long bet on behavioural science may finally begin to show its full commercial potential.
After years of convincing banks to test an unfamiliar approach to credit assessment, the Cyberjaya-based psychometrics company says it has conducted proof-of-concept projects with more than 20 financial institutions and back-tested its models using thousands of borrowers. In some implementations, Yon says, its credit-scoring approach helped reduce non-performing loans by more than 50%.
Psychometrics measures attributes that cannot be directly observed, including personality, ability, motivation, attitudes and behavioural tendencies.
“What I am most proud of is that we started with an idea that many people were initially sceptical about, but we stayed committed to the science and continued building the evidence,” she says. “Today, we are able to demonstrate that behavioural data can provide meaningful predictive value in credit assessment, particularly when conventional credit information alone does not tell the whole story.”
The technology has since moved beyond psychometric questionnaires. A Malaysia Digital recognised company, Global PsyTech’s General Financial Insight, or GFI, has evolved into a broader credit decisioning platform combining psychometric information with banking transactions, smartphone metadata and conventional financial data.
Having started development in 2017, Yon says the years spent validating and refining the models have given Global PsyTech something valuable beyond the technology itself: accumulated learning and empirical evidence.
The potential market is significant. Conventional lenders are most comfortable assessing borrowers with salaries, collateral and established credit histories. But many small business owners, gig workers, young people and women entering the formal economy lack such records.
These “thin-file” borrowers may be creditworthy but difficult for lenders to assess because insufficient financial data exists.
“They could be gig workers without stable income records, women who had not previously participated formally in the workforce, young people, or others who simply had insufficient financial data,” Yon says. “They will find it difficult to access formal financing, not necessarily because they are poor credit risks, but because lenders did not have enough information to assess them.”
Global PsyTech’s proposition is that behavioural information can help fill that gap, not by replacing conventional credit information, but add another evidence layer.
A major step came in Sept 2025 when Papua New Guinea’s Credit Guarantee Corporation and the United Nations Capital Development Fund unveiled GFI for financial institutions assessing micro, small and medium enterprises. By then, Yon had also established operations in Qatar, worked across Pacific markets, entered Kenya through a local partner and formed a strategic collaboration with the Malaysian Examinations Council.
For Yon, these are not disconnected ventures. Credit risk, employee integrity, leadership potential, job fit and educational assessment all arise from the same underlying question.
“The industries and use cases may be very different, but the underlying question is often similar: what can human characteristics and behaviour tell us that conventional data alone cannot?”
The answer has taken almost her entire career to develop. Global PsyTech is built on more than two decades of Yon’s work in psychometrics and quantitative measurement, and on an earlier ambition to prove Malaysia could develop rigorous scientific intellectual property (IP) and take it to the world.
“I have seen us use foreign products for our needs and wanted to prove that Malaysia too could build world-class psychometric and behavioural analytics technologies, create our own intellectual property, and ultimately take Malaysian innovation to the global market.”
Yon raised RM4.86 million through pitchIN in 2025 at a stated valuation of about RM40 million. Ficus Capital, founded by Abdullah Hidayat Mohamad and Rina Neoh, contributed RM3 million towards this amount. The funding was to support localisation, technology development, hiring and emerging-market expansion.
Yon is now in the midst of raising another round by the first half of 2027 and has confirmed a government fund to be part of the round.
Building the capability Malaysia did not yet have
Yon’s path is not the familiar startup story of a graduate with an idea or an executive leaving corporate life to pursue a market opportunity. She had already built a strong technical career before taking the risky jump into entrepreneurship in her late 40s.
She earned a doctorate in Measurement and Quantitative Methods from Michigan State University and worked in the United States, including as a psychometrician with Educational Testing Service in Princeton. There she saw measurement theory translated into large-scale assessment systems and learned from Professor Mark Reckase and Dr Matthias von Davier, who she said are leaders in their field.
Her return to Malaysia in 2008 was just to take a one year break and recharge but as fate would have it, then Mimos CEO, Abdul Wahab Abdullah, an ex-Motorola Malaysia MD, recognizing the world class talent that Yon was, convinced her to join the national applied research agency.
Yon began to see a gap that had been less apparent during her 16 years in the US: while the country had strong academic expertise in measurement and psychometrics, it lacked the mature industry-based testing ecosystem she had experienced in the US. Education debates focused on schools, teachers and results, with less attention to whether assessments accurately measured knowledge and learning gaps.
Meanwhile, in the corporate market, she saw that many psychological and behavioural assessment products came from foreign providers.
“I began asking myself: why couldn’t Malaysia develop its own scientifically rigorous assessment technologies?” she recalls. This was a question that fermented in the back of her mind for years.
In 2011, Yon founded the Malaysian Psychometrics Association to build awareness, professional knowledge and capability in the field. In 2017, she was involved in bringing two international psychometrics-related standards into Malaysia through the Department of Standards Malaysia.
Her standing in the field also extended internationally. From 2021 to 2025, Yon served as the Asia regional representative on the board of the International Association for Computerized Adaptive Testing (IACAT), connecting her work in Malaysia with the wider global assessment community.
Aside from this community building, MIMOS, where she headed a laboratory for almost nine years, gave her room to conduct research, lead projects and think about commercialisation.
Yet a gap remained between developing technology inside a research institution and getting organisations to adopt it widely. The more Yon thought about that gap, the clearer her next step became.
“Establishing a company became a natural continuation of that journey,” she says. “Entrepreneurship gave me the vehicle to turn scientific knowledge and research into practical solutions with measurable real-world impact.”
Her motivation was not simply to become a businesswoman after a career in science. She wanted to develop a field Malaysia needed and show what local researchers could produce.
“I wanted to demonstrate that we could build world-class psychometric and behavioural analytics technologies here in Malaysia and create our own intellectual property.”
That conviction helped her make the leap. It did not prepare her for the rough ride ahead though.
Hard lessons where building the science was only half the battle
Yon entered entrepreneurship with deep expertise in psychometrics, data, and experimentation. What surprised her was that the science was not the most difficult part of building Global PsyTech.
“I thought that if you developed good technology that solved a real problem, the market would naturally recognise its value,” she says. “I soon realised that it is not quite that simple, and it takes a long time, and with a lot of disappointments and frustrations.”
Commercialisation required a different set of capabilities: understanding what customers would pay for, converting research into a usable product, navigating procurement, building trust, managing cash flow and maintaining a team while maintaining a sense of confidence and belief in the product.
She also came to realise that the colloquial phrase in Cantonese, yat kiok tek, that translates loosly to 'One Leg Kick All', is practically true. On any given day, Yon found herself acting as COO, CFO, CTO, CPO, project manager, product head and salesperson.
“You are constantly making decisions across areas where you may not be the expert,” she says. “Sometimes you have sufficient data to guide you; sometimes you have to rely on experience, judgement and intuition.”
For a scientist trained to seek evidence, that uncertainty was a real difficult adjustment for her. The team still expected direction when she did not have complete information. During difficult periods, the founder had to project confidence, protect morale and sustain a “can-do” and “never give up” attitude.
Global PsyTech’s R&D-driven model made the transition harder. It had to invest before knowing how the market would respond. Balancing that work against the finances of a sustainable company required discipline and courage - not only from Yon, but from a team willing to persist through uncertainty.
“Entrepreneurship, in that sense, has never been an individual journey,” she says. “It has always been a collective one.”
Nowhere was patience more necessary than in trying to penetrate into financial services.
Asking banks to use personality, behavioural tendencies and psychographic information in credit assessment was never going to produce an immediate yes. Banks are designed to be cautious, especially when evaluating risk. The proposition also risked sounding subjective unless Yon could prove that Global PsyTech’s product had predictive value.
Yon’s response was to return to the discipline she knew best: evidence.
The company ran proof-of-concept projects with more than 20 financial institutions and conducted extensive back-testing using the actual repayment outcomes of thousands of borrowers. It refined its machine-learning models repeatedly, showing institutions the relationship between model predictions and what borrowers later did.
“As the saying goes, numbers don’t lie,” Yon says.
The process also taught customers that a predictive model is never finished. It requires data, validation, refinement and monitoring. Since beginning the credit technology in 2017, Global PsyTech has accumulated years of learning and empirical evidence that cannot be quickly replicated.
That long validation period appears to be turning into an asset today. Yon says that in some deployments, the approach reduced non-performing loans by more than half. The company has also incorporated additional data sources so that GFI is no longer dependent on one form of assessment.
Finding the larger platform inside psychometrics
“Over time, I began to see psychometrics from a much broader perspective, not just for use in education,” Yon says. “If we can scientifically measure characteristics that influence how people think, behave and make decisions, then we can potentially use those insights to understand and predict human-related risks and outcomes in other areas.”
In employment, it might help an organisation understand integrity, leadership potential, job suitability or wellbeing. In finance, it might indicate how likely someone is to honour a commitment. In enterprise risk, it could help companies examine the human factors behind misconduct, weak governance or operational failures.
Credit became the clearest demonstration of this idea. Conventional scoring works best when the applicant has a documented history. But thin-file individuals are frequently excluded because the lender cannot see enough, not because the applicant has demonstrated an unwillingness to repay.
Global PsyTech developed its psychometric credit approach to measure attributes associated with financial commitment, entrepreneurial potential and repayment behaviour. When those models showed predictive value, Yon realised the company was no longer merely producing psychometric instruments to generate psychometric scores.
It was akin to a eureka moment for her. “We were actually building behavioural analytics capability,” she says, one that could draw on data beyond an assessment and be applied across talent, integrity, credit and enterprise risk.
She began to realise that while a psychometric testing company can only sell individual assessment tools, a behavioural analytics company can potentially become part of the decision infrastructure used by banks, employers, education bodies and other institutions. It was a different scale market now. That shift is now central to Global PsyTech’s future.
What struck the writer during the course of the interview was that Yon never used the buzz word of the times – artificial intelligence – to strengthen the positioning of her company. This shows her scientific discipline. She will not claim adoption of the technology simply because it has become fashionable. “We don’t just slap on AI.”
For Global PsyTech, the starting point remains the problem it is trying to solve and the underlying science; AI and machine learning are incorporated only where they can improve the analysis, predictive capability or effectiveness of the product.
The company’s current portfolio reflects that widening ambition. GFI addresses credit decisioning and financial inclusion. Its People Assessment System applies behavioural analytics to hiring and workforce development. ExamPro brings adaptive testing, digital assessment and AI-supported capabilities into education and professional certification.
That scientific depth is reflected in Global PsyTech’s 19-person team. Yon says 15 are in technical roles, comprising researchers, data scientists, IT engineers and psychometricians, supported by two behavioural scientists. The composition underscores how heavily the company remains anchored in research and specialist expertise even as it pushes to commercialise its products across more markets.
Taking Malaysian science into markets that behave differently
For Yon, international expansion is also a test of the original purpose behind the company. It is one thing to say Malaysian intellectual property can compete globally. It is another to prove that technology rooted in the measurement of human behaviour remains valid across languages, cultures and institutions.
Global PsyTech’s Qatar journey began in 2022 through an accelerator. Rather than treating it as a quick overseas sales exercise, Yon used the programme to understand the ecosystem, build relationships, localise its approach and conduct pilots. The progression eventually led to the establishment of Global PsyTech MENA.
The experience reinforced a critical distinction: localisation is not translation.
“Human behaviour is influenced by culture, language, social norms and environment,” Yon says. “We have to make sure that the constructs, questions, scoring and interpretation remain scientifically valid and culturally appropriate.”
A questionnaire translated literally may retain the words and lose the meaning. Traits can be expressed differently across societies, while social norms can affect responses. Getting that wrong would undermine the product’s validity.
Different markets also build trust differently. Regulations, procurement, institutional hierarchies and decision-making processes vary. Strong technology alone is insufficient; local credibility, relationships - and patience matter.
Yon says the same lesson has emerged from the company’s work in Oceania, including Fiji, Samoa, Tonga and Papua New Guinea. Collectively, those experiences have increased, rather than reduced, her confidence that Malaysian IP can travel.
“We do not have to change the fundamental science behind our technology, but we must be willing to adapt how it is delivered and applied,” she says.
“Internationalisation is not simply about exporting a Malaysian product. It is about bringing Malaysian innovation to the world, while having the humility to learn from each market and adapt without compromising the scientific integrity of our IP.”
Global PsyTech’s path ahead is promising but demanding. Financial inclusion is a large opportunity in markets where many people and small businesses sit outside conventional data systems. Papua New Guinea offers a model for national-level adoption, Kenya opens an East African route, and Qatar provides a base for the Gulf and wider MENA region.
Education and workforce assessment could become equally important. Its Malaysian Examinations Council collaboration brings Yon’s journey back to the testing ecosystem that first concerned her on returning home. Meanwhile, growing institutional interest in talent, integrity, governance and enterprise risk creates room for Global PsyTech to apply behavioural analytics beyond credit.
Nine years into her journey, Yon does not minimise the difficulty. She admits to underestimating how long commercialisation would take and how much patience it required. Excellent technology can arrive before the market is ready, while the founder must still manage people, cash flow, customers, regulation and uncertainty.
Yet she says she now loves entrepreneurship more than any of her previous careers.
“It is certainly not an easy journey, but it has given me the opportunity to take ideas that once existed in a research lab, turn them into real solutions, and see them being used to solve real problems in Malaysia and internationally,” she says. “That, for me, has been incredibly fulfilling.”
Source: Karamjit Singh, Digital News Asia
