When Maybank Islamic partnered with Borong to launch Salaam Market, Malaysia's first halal B2B marketplace, building a credible, verified supplier base was the foundational challenge. Without a reliable pool of vetted halal suppliers, the marketplace could not deliver the trust and quality that buyers required. Manual vendor selection, compliance verification, and payment management across a new platform created operational complexity that needed a scalable solution from day one.
Borong's strategic sourcing capability and platform infrastructure provided it: immediate access to a verified supplier network, efficient onboarding, and embedded payment infrastructure that reduced operational risk from launch.
Maybank Islamic struggled with finding reliable suppliers, ensuring compliance, and managing procurement payments across the Salaam Market platform. Building a new marketplace requires a verified supplier base from the start: buyers will only trust a marketplace if they trust the suppliers on it.
Onboarding each supplier by hand against halal certification, compliance documentation and quality standards would have taken months and introduced inconsistency at the most critical stage of launch. Maybank Islamic needed a faster, more reliable path to a verified supplier network.
Payment was a parallel problem. A new B2B marketplace needs payment infrastructure that is reliable, auditable and efficient, and manual coordination across a growing supplier base creates reconciliation overhead and operational risk that scales badly.
Through Borong's Strategic Sourcing capability and platform infrastructure, Maybank Islamic gained immediate access to Borong's existing verified supplier network, streamlined vendor onboarding with built-in compliance documentation, and embedded payment processes that reduced operational risk from day one.
Rather than build a supplier base from scratch, Salaam Market launched on Borong's existing infrastructure with immediate access to suppliers already verified to Borong's vendor assurance standards. Halal certification was applied as an additional qualification layer, and the onboarding workflow automated the documentation and verification that would otherwise have been manual for every supplier.
Payment infrastructure was embedded in the order workflow from launch, processing B2B transactions through a structured system with full reconciliation and audit capability. Manual payment risk was designed out rather than managed after the fact.
Maybank Islamic's own financial products, including SME First Account-i, SME Digital Financing, and Halal2U, were integrated into the buyer-side experience, making SME financing available at the point of purchase and completing the marketplace's value proposition for both sides of the transaction.
Launching on Borong's infrastructure skipped the months of building a verified supplier base. More than 10,000 suppliers already verified on the platform were immediately accessible, giving the breadth of supply a credible B2B marketplace needs from day one.
Automated onboarding reduced the time and effort to verify and activate new suppliers by 80%. A structured digital process replaced the manual documentation review that would have needed dedicated administrative resource, letting the supplier base scale without proportional onboarding overhead.
Embedded payment infrastructure handled transaction processing, reconciliation and documentation automatically, removing the operational risk of manual payment management so both sides transacted with confidence from launch.
Salaam Market is a joint venture between Macro Tech Ventures, Borong's parent company, and Maybank Islamic. Maybank Islamic operates as a strategic partner and platform client, leveraging Borong's marketplace and procurement infrastructure to deliver a halal B2B marketplace with embedded SME financing. Maybank Islamic is a partner and client of the Borong platform rather than a procurement buyer.
The partnership combines marketplace infrastructure with embedded financial services: Borong provides the supplier network, verification standards and transaction platform, Maybank Islamic provides the SME financing that gives buyers working capital at the point of purchase.
What made it possible is the verified supplier network combined with an onboarding workflow that applies the buyer organisation's own qualification criteria at scale.
The marketplace holds more than 37,000 verified suppliers across hundreds of categories. For anyone launching a new procurement channel or marketplace, that is immediate supply breadth which would otherwise take years to build.
Onboarding follows a structured digital workflow that collects, verifies and stores qualification documentation automatically, with custom requirements such as halal certification applied as additional layers.
Verification does not end at onboarding. Compliance, performance and documentation are monitored continuously, so qualification standards hold through the relationship rather than being confirmed once and assumed thereafter.
See Salaam Market in action, or talk to us about launching a dedicated marketplace or procurement channel on Borong's infrastructure.
