Welcome back to Planet Doug. And for those who are unfamiliar with my YouTube channel, this is what I call Planet Doug Studios. I sit on the bed of whatever low-budget hotel I’m staying in, put my GoPro on a tripod on the mattress in front of me, and I record a video. So, welcome to Planet Doug Studios. I’m currently in Banda Aceh in Sumatra. That’s where I’m recording this. And just before I left from Malaysia to come here, I recorded and posted a video about the Touch ‘n Go e-wallet app and Touch ‘n Go card in Malaysia and how I use it in my everyday life. And I got a lot of comments to that video. And this is basically a video about your comments to my experiences with Touch ‘n Go. I have all of the comments loaded up here on my tablet. I’m going to read them, show them to you on the screen so you can follow along. And the idea here is that in my video about Touch ‘n Go, my perspective was from my life as a tourist in Malaysia. So, there are a lot of things I didn’t mention, things that I knew but didn’t mention. And people made comments about, they gave me tips and advice. And these are all things that I knew about but didn’t bring up in that video. And there are a lot of things that I just don’t know about Touch ‘n Go that a local person in Malaysia or even in Thailand or Indonesia, they would know about these e-wallets that I don’t know. So, I got a lot of great feedback and new information in the comments, and I thought a good way to expand on my original video is to reply to these comments in Planet Doug Studios.
So, the very first comment is from Ruff Rosa, and she actually gave me the idea for this video. She writes, “Doug, you might as well title this as part one and head on to make the part two with all the info you get from the comments.” So, Ruff Rosa said, “Hey, you could make a video based on the information you get from these comments.” And if I were still in Malaysia, I would probably record a regular video, a part two, where I go out with my Touch ‘n Go app and Touch ‘n Go card and then use it on the streets of KL demonstrating all of these new points. But since I’m not there anymore, I’m going to base this video around the comments. She goes on to say, if I might add, the NFC cards are also available to be purchased online. So, you do not have to go to a physical store. Shopee and Lazada have them, too. I wasn’t aware of that, but it makes sense that you could order them online, but of course, as a tourist, we may not have a mailing address, so I never looked into this or mentioned it. I talked about going to the Touch ‘n Go store and they have a self-service kiosk and you can put 10 ringgit into the kiosk and just a card pops out, one of the NFC-enabled cards, and that’s what I mentioned in my video but as Ruff Rosa says you can also order them online. She goes on to say TNG are available in 50 countries. You can use TNG to pay in countries including Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, the UK, the US, the EU, China, and more. For some countries, you can select the country flag, and the app will be changed to reflect the country, including the currency. For example, to enter Thailand, you need to fill up the entry form, and you can do that in the TNG app once you select Thailand flag. So there will be other comments related to these points that she brings up and so I won’t go into them in detail now but yes that is a key factor about Touch ‘n Go, the Touch ‘n Go e-wallet app is that you can use it in other countries. I’m very much aware of that, being able to use it in other countries here in Southeast Asia but you can also use it in many countries around the world and I don’t know a lot about that. I’m learning about that here in Indonesia and in fact I plan on shooting a video about using Touch ‘n Go in Sumatra here in Indonesia and that video will be coming out in the future. So, I don’t know much about using Touch ‘n Go in Singapore, in Thailand, but I know that all of these countries have their own e-wallets and they have their own national payment platforms. I don’t really know the terminology for this. I just call them a payment platform, but the one in Malaysia is called DuitNow. And all the e-wallets, all the banking apps, all of these different digital payment systems, they all connect to each other through DuitNow. So, in fact, when you use Touch ‘n Go in Malaysia, you see a DuitNow code. You can scan it with your Touch ‘n Go app and then pay the vendor, but the money might go into their bank account. It could go into their e-wallet app, a different app. So, if you see what I mean, DuitNow is Malaysia’s national system and then I use Touch ‘n Go because it was the most convenient for me as a tourist. It connects to DuitNow. But someone else in Malaysia could be using their banking app to scan the same code and that app also connects through DuitNow. But here in Indonesia, their national system for their e-wallet and digital banking systems is called QRIS. Q-R-I-S and DuitNow in Malaysia is connected with QRIS here in Indonesia. The two systems are linked. So I can come to Indonesia with my Touch ‘n Go app and I can scan QRIS codes here using my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet app. And that is something that’s very very important that I didn’t talk about in my original video. And there will be more about that as I go on. So, thank you Ruff Rosa for suggesting this video.
I got several comments about my pronunciation of DuitNow. And this is kind of an odd thing because I shot that entire video. I’ve been saying DuitNow, DuitNow in my day-to-day life. Nobody has ever corrected me, but it never occurred to me to find out what the word meant. I just saw it, DuitNow. It sounded good to me, sounded fun, and I just started saying, “DuitNow.” But in the comments, I’ve learned quite a few more things. So, let me read the comments. Number one, DuitNow. I had to pause and think for a sec that he’s actually referring to DuitNow. And this comment from Nook Desus, of course, is referring to the Malaysian pronunciation, but to me, I don’t know what the Malaysian pronunciation is. I went to Google Translate and I listen to it and it’s a bit like du-it, DuitNow, like DuitNow. But it all to my English Canadian speaking ear it all sounds the same. It all sounds like DuitNow. Next comment from Moonlight. Off topic, but I kind of proud with the DuitNow word invention itself. Duit means money in the Malay language. So basically it means money now and it rings perfectly as you can do the transactions so fast. I also think DuitNow is pun intended with do it now like please transfer the money quickly lol. So yeah. So what I learned through the comments is that duit means money in Malay. I think it also means money here in Indonesia. But I didn’t know that. I didn’t know. It never even occurred to me to do the research and find out what DuitNow meant. Again, I’m nowhere near the Malay pronunciation. Third comment from Relaxo Drive. DuitNow is a name like killing two birds with one stone. Duit is money in Malay and it’s pronounced as DuitNow. Ingenious, right? So, yeah, it is a very ingenious choice. I’m not usually a big fan of puns and play on words. Like if you’re going to name your YouTube channel and you come up with clever word play or like a joke, I find that over time, the joke wears thin and then you’re just left with this goofy name. DuitNow is more clever than that because it does mean money now. Money now. DuitNow. But I did notice that in Malaysia, DuitNow didn’t really become the main word that everybody uses. So, for example, when I was using my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet app and I would go into a restaurant or to a vendor in Kuala Lumpur, I didn’t say to them, I’d like to use DuitNow, please. Right? People don’t say that. They don’t say DuitNow, please. They actually use the name of their e-wallet app or they might just say QR code. So I go in and I say, “Oh, Touch ‘n Go please.” If I go to 7-Eleven, I go up to the store clerk and I tell him how I want to pay. I say, Touch ‘n Go, please. I don’t say DuitNow. And other people, they’ve told me in the comments, they might say QR code, please. They tell the store clerk, “I’d like to pay with a QR code.” People don’t seem to use DuitNow in the national language. And I’ve noticed that’s a big difference here in Indonesia because their version of DuitNow called QRIS. It rolls off the tongue better. And everybody refers to QRIS, no matter what you’re using. So, I’ve been using Touch ‘n Go here in Indonesia, but when I go up to the restaurant owner or to the clerk at a convenience store, a lot more about that in my video. I say, QRIS, please. In Indonesian, bisa means can I or may I or is it possible? So, you just say bisa QRIS. Bisa QRIS. I just say that over and over. Everybody refers to QRIS. So the name of the national platform is the name that everybody uses when they use their e-wallet. But Malaysia seems to be different where somehow DuitNow didn’t sink into the national language quite as deeply and people tend to say oh Touch ‘n Go please or they say QR code please or maybe they use the name of their banking app or whatever e-wallet they’re using. So I did notice that difference between DuitNow and QRIS. DuitNow is a very good name, but it doesn’t seem to have been adopted in the same way that QRIS has. And I did read that the Indonesian government heavily promoted QRIS. There were like nationwide campaigns talking about use QRIS, QRIS this, QRIS that. And I’ve noticed there are YouTubers here in Indonesia. There’s one in particular, Kate Gypsy or Gypsy Kate. I think it’s Kate Gypsy. She’s recently recorded two or three videos about QRIS and about sort of the modern digital banking systems here in Indonesia. And she only talks about QRIS. Like QRIS is amazing. QRIS is wonderful. I use QRIS every day. But in Malaysia when I was there, I didn’t really talk about DuitNow. I didn’t say to people, “Wow, DuitNow is amazing. You got to use DuitNow.” I ended up talking about Touch ‘n Go that I say, “Oh, I love DuitNow.” I mean, I love Touch ‘n Go. I use Touch ‘n Go every day. That’s kind of the language I would use, which is kind of funny. One more comment. Duit money now, not do it now. So again, this commenter is commenting on my pronunciation, but I really don’t know the difference. It’s like DuitNow. Like DuitNow. Is that the Malay pronunciation? And then English do it now. Do it now. I don’t know. To my ears, they sound the same.
Now, I have a whole series of comments about practical tips and advice about using Touch ‘n Go and DuitNow. And these are things that I overlooked in the video. Some of them I overlooked on purpose because if I talked about everything about Touch ‘n Go, the video would be 3 hours long. Or these are things that just never occurred to me or they’re things that a local person could do but a tourist can’t do. So I’ve got a whole bunch of these.
The very first one is from a longtime Planet Doug follower, a subscriber and supporter. And he writes, “You do know you could turn on biometric to bypass the PIN to bypass the PIN number.” And this is an interesting one because to be honest, when I did, I shot 18 different examples of using Touch ‘n Go in Kuala Lumpur. Like 18 separate purchases, restaurants, automated vending machines for coffee, getting in the MRT, the KTM, buying snacks, buying Ramly burgers, everything I could think of that I do on a day-to-day basis, I filmed myself doing it. Going to KK Mart, 99 Speedmart and then every single time when I got to the okay now I scan their code or they scan my code I talked about entering my PIN so I enter my PIN and then I have to approve the transaction by entering my PIN and I did that for all 18 examples and it wasn’t until I finished editing and uploading the entire video, not editing and uploading but until finished shooting the entire video, I kind of went, “Oh, no. You don’t have to use the PIN. You could also do it with your thumbprint or you could even do it with facial recognition.” So, within the app, you can choose what security method you want to use. Do you want to use your fingerprint on your phone basically or do you want to use facial recognition or do you want to use a PIN? It’s basically your choice how you set up your phone. And in my case, I was out doing a lot of cycling and hiking in Indonesia for a while and I had this phone in my pocket and I had it set to fingerprint scanning to open up my phone to unlock my phone. I use my thumbprint. But when I had the phone in my pocket all day and I got hot and sweaty and I’m riding my bike, the fingerprint sensor being pressed against my wet clothing and my wet skin was constantly triggering the fingerprint scanner. So, it would like try to do a fingerprint scan dozens of times and I’d end up getting locked out of my phone just because it kept triggering the fingerprint scanner. And I figured out that was what was happening. So then I turned off the fingerprint scanner and I turned on PIN for my phone. So when I returned to Malaysia, I just never reset my phone. So my phone was set to PIN activation, PIN unlocking. So I went through all the Touch ‘n Go examples and I did the PIN PIN PIN every time. And it never occurred to me that 99% of people out there, they probably use fingerprint or facial recognition. And yet I was just I only demonstrated one option. And I realized I made that mistake. So in the video I did list them every time. Not every time, but many times when I said now I enter my PIN on the screen I put in. There are actually three methods you can use for approving the transaction. You can use a PIN or you can use a thumbprint, fingerprint or you can use biometrics like facial recognition. So I did say it in the video but only in caption form. I felt really dumb by the time I shot the video that I completely forgot to bring that up. But yeah, there are so many things to mention in a video. You instinctively overlook some things. So yeah, you can also use biometrics for approving a Touch ‘n Go purchase or a DuitNow purchase. You don’t have to use only your PIN. That’s a very important distinction.
Here’s something else I knew about but I overlooked. The commenter writes, “There is one more example you missed out where the stall vendor will ask to take a picture of your phone screen when the payment is done.” Usually, this is done if the seller just works there for the boss. So, this I knew about. I was talking about all the different ways you can use Touch ‘n Go that you scan their code, they scan your code, you have to do this, you have to do that, then you have to approve it. And then when you’re done the transaction, what I often would do is take my phone with Touch ‘n Go open and I show it to the vendor to show them that I paid them that the payment went through and then I show it to them and they look at it and they say, “Okay, all right. Thank you very much.” So, I confirm payment with them by showing them my screen and that’s what I normally do. But there are many instances when you show them your screen and then the vendor will take a picture of it for their own records. I don’t know if they need to do this or they just do it just in case like the commenter is suggesting. It could be that the employees are asked to do this by the boss so that later on the boss can check up they can get a big folder of all the photos of all the DuitNow transactions throughout the day. So that happens to me all the time. But when I went out and did my 18 example transactions just by accident, I never came across a vendor who asked to take a picture of the transaction of the confirmation screen that the payment went through. None of the vendors that I used as an example asked to take a picture of my phone. So I completely forgot about that as an example. Had I remembered, I would have gone searching until I found one that did it that way and then I could show it on video as another example. You know, like pro tip, sometimes the vendor will ask to take a picture of the transaction on your phone. And that is a normal thing for Touch ‘n Go for DuitNow. And I know that a lot of foreigners using Touch ‘n Go for the first time, they might be nervous about that because your phone screen is so personal. And then when you complete a Touch ‘n Go transaction, we don’t know what’s being displayed. Like, is there sensitive information about us, our name, our Touch ‘n Go e-wallet number, all these things? We’re not that comfortable with people taking pictures of our phone, but that is a common request using Touch ‘n Go. And I guess that does bring up the question, are you required to comply with that request? That I don’t know. I always do. I’m not that concerned about security. This comes up all the time in my videos and in the comments. People are very concerned about security. And to help me out, they give me advice and tips. Be careful about this. Don’t do this, be careful about that. But I tend to be fairly open about just about everything. So when the guy says, “Oh, I need to take a picture of it.” Oh, yeah. Here you go. Click. And I’ve looked at the Touch ‘n Go confirmation screen and I don’t see anything sensitive there. I don’t, like I said, I don’t get super crazy about this stuff, but this can happen. Maybe you can say no. I’m sure you can. Legally, I don’t think you have to let them take a picture of your phone, but vendors will ask for that quite often, so you should be prepared for that.
I got a few comments about basically the same topic about using Touch ‘n Go, DuitNow, while driving. And I’ll read two of the comments as examples. I’m Malaysian and I used TNG only for toll payments. Honestly, I don’t know what else I can do with it. This video is very educational. Thank you, sir. Another one, you can use TNG wallet to pay petrol too. And there were other comments like that, all coming from the perspective of people who drive. And I had personal conversations with friends of mine as well in Malaysia who when I was talking with them about Touch ‘n Go and I just love Touch ‘n Go. So I bring it up in conversation all the time. I just bought bananas using Touch ‘n Go. I bought ice cream at McDonald’s. I did all these things with Touch ‘n Go and I’m so excited. And they generally looked at me and said, “Well, all I use it for, I use the card for highway tolls, for parking, and to pay for gas, things like that.” So, all of these topics related to driving. And I knew about that, but I never mentioned it in my video because a tourist generally is not going to be driving unless they’re renting a car, which is relatively rare. But I suppose I should have brought it up. And to be honest, when I was in Kuala Lumpur, I was thinking that if I was in the car with my friend Daryl, we often go out for brunch and I go with him when he’s running errands and he picks me up in his car and we drive around and he’s always scanning with a Touch ‘n Go card to pay for parking and for highway tolls. And I also go out with my friend KY who drives all the time and he’s got his Touch ‘n Go card in one of those. This looks like a fly swatter, you know. Pro tip, if you’re a driver in Malaysia and you use Touch ‘n Go all the time, sometimes the scanner is a couple of feet away from your car window and you can’t reach it when you put your arm out and you got to open the door to your car and it’s very awkward. So, you can get one of these plastic fly swatters and you put your card in the tip and then it gives you like two, two and a half feet of extra reach and you can reach out the window and beep your Touch ‘n Go card to pay for highway tolls, parking, things like that. Pay for gas. And I was thinking while I was shooting all my examples, if I happen to be in the car with Daryl and this happens, I was going to film him doing it. I never do it, but I was going to include him as one of my examples, but in the time that I was filming, we just never did go through a highway toll. Daryl did comment later on. It’s like, dude, why didn’t you, you could have asked me, I would be more than happy to demonstrate this for your video, but at the time things were moving fast and I thought if it happened naturally, I would film it. If it didn’t, like I don’t drive anyway. Tourists don’t drive, so it’s not really that important an example. But for Malaysians, it’s probably one of the most important things. Using Touch ‘n Go for highway tolls and parking. So that’s something I completely, I mentioned it in passing towards the end but I should have made a bigger deal about that because transportation I use it of course for MRT LRT monorail KTM but Malaysians they’re driving they’re drivers this is a driving culture in Malaysia so e-wallets DuitNow they’re all probably thinking more about driving and highway tolls. So yeah, I should have brought it up in the video.
Something else I don’t think I mentioned at all in my video, I’ve already referred to it once and I got a lot of comments about this is that you can now use Touch ‘n Go in other countries. I know I mentioned that in passing already, but I have five comments here I’d like to read. There might be some information in here that people out there don’t know and then after I read all five, I will give my feedback on these. So, first commenter writes, “Pro tips, you can use Touch ‘n Go e-wallet in Indonesia. Just change the country at the top left corner.” Next one. And you could also use Touch ‘n Go in South Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Macau, Hong Kong, and Singapore. It’s quite convenient to use actually. Third one, pro tip. If you travel overseas, you can pay with Touch ‘n Go app in countries like Thailand, Singapore, and even China. You can switch the app to different countries and pay with different currency. Your main currency will still be in Malaysian ringgit. A long one here. Power of Touch ‘n Go. TNG wallet can be used for cross-border payments in over 50 countries through its partnerships, especially the Alipay Plus network, which includes countries like China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Australia, Turkey, the UK, the US, and various European nations through its international partnerships. How it works? Look for QR payment signs or the Alipay Plus logo when traveling abroad to use your TNG wallet for transactions at supported merchants. Also remittances. The GoRemit function allows you to send money to countries like Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Your e-wallet enables hassle-free transactions wherever your adventures take you. And that detailed, very informative comment is from at will. Yeah. So very I appreciate that comment very much from Ican Emoen. Another comment. You can use Touch ‘n Go e-wallet in Indonesia by scanning QRIS codes, which are widely accepted at retailers, restaurants, and shops. To do this, simply scan the QRIS sticker with your e-wallet’s scan function, enter the amount in rupiah, and confirm the payment. This allows for cashless transactions across Indonesia. Conversion rate is very low compared to bank and money changers. Last one from longtime Planet Doug supporter. In fact, all the phones that I use for Touch ‘n Go in Malaysia were donated to Planet Doug by this commenter. Your TNG wallet can be used in Indonesia, too. Look for QRIS QR to scan and pay. So, there’s a lot of information there. I might have to go back a little bit just to refresh my own memory. So, of course, I knew I could use Touch ‘n Go in other countries. I never I don’t think I even mentioned it once. Maybe I mentioned it in passing, but I don’t think so. I certainly never talked about it in depth because I’d never done it. Years ago, I was aware that Touch ‘n Go was now available in Indonesia. I was in Sumatra at that time and I tried to do it back then and I just got an error message and it told me that foreigners were not allowed. This was a service only available to Malaysians. So, from that point on, I just gave up on it. I never tried again. But since years ago, either that was a mistake, I misunderstood, or things have changed because now Touch ‘n Go is firmly linked, for example, with QRIS here in Indonesia. And even I, as a foreigner, I can use Touch ‘n Go in Indonesia. So my message to foreign visitors to Malaysia, if you’re coming here and going on a bit of a regional tour, you might go to Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, you might consider getting the Touch ‘n Go e-wallet in Malaysia. You can have a balance on that Touch ‘n Go e-wallet app and then if you fly to Indonesia, you can just keep using the exact same e-wallet app. There would likely be advantages to also getting a local Indonesian e-wallet app, but you don’t absolutely have to. With DuitNow and QRIS being firmly integrated, you can just open up your Touch ‘n Go app in Sumatra, in Java, in Bali, wherever you go, and look for the QRIS codes. They look different from the DuitNow codes a little bit. There’s like a red triangle that indicates it’s a QRIS code QR code. Look for that QR code with a red triangle and chances are you’ll be able to scan it with Touch ‘n Go and then make a payment as usual. And the balance you had in your e-wallet in Malaysia is still there. It doesn’t go anywhere. And a very important point that a number of these commenters made is that you loaded the money into your e-wallet in Malaysian ringgit. The e-wallet is holding it in Malaysian currency. But then when you go to Indonesia and now you’re paying in rupiah, your money hasn’t changed currencies. You still hold Malaysian ringgit, but then the app does the conversion for you. Like when you make a payment, it gets converted from ringgit to rupiah and then that rupiah is given to the vendor. And I don’t know this for sure. I’m not a financial person in any way, which should be obvious based on Planet Doug Studios, very low-budget hotel talking to you from the bed in my low-budget hotel room. There’s no financial genius here. So, I don’t really know a whole lot about bank rates, conversion rates, foreign exchange, transaction fees, all that kind of stuff. But people are saying that the rate you get using Touch ‘n Go to convert from ringgit to rupiah is better than the rate you would get like going to an ATM and withdrawing rupiah from your bank account or taking Malaysian ringgit in cash converting it at the airport with a money changer into rupiah that those conversion rates are not as good that TNG will give you a better conversion rate automatically. So that is the input I’m getting from the comments. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it certainly is more convenient and yeah, once you master the e-wallet in Malaysia, you’ve spent time figuring out how to use it. You’ve got the flow going, you might as well keep it going in the next country and use Touch ‘n Go when you get to Sumatra. A couple of comments mentioned that in the top left corner of the app, there’s a drop-down menu with country names and flags. So, they’re saying that when you go to Indonesia, you just go to that setting and click on that button and change it to Indonesia. And I didn’t do that when I came here because to be honest, I didn’t understand what it meant. I wasn’t sure of all the changes it would make because I know like in a Google account or something you change your country setting it has a domino effect and can just change a whole bunch of things that you didn’t want to change and then it can be difficult to go back. So I’m very leery about clicking on a button that makes a universal change like changing your country. I was like, “Ah, I don’t I want to learn more about this before I choose to do that.” So, I left it alone because I did not understand what it meant. And then I went to sleep here my first night and then I was here for most of a day and then maybe the next morning I woke up, I turned on Touch ‘n Go and it was in Indonesian. So, the Touch ‘n Go e-wallet app has switched from the Malaysian version to the Indonesian version. And it had happened automatically for me. I didn’t choose to do it. I didn’t click on the button and choose Indonesia. It just happened on its own. And I’m assuming this is normal, a normal procedure that the e-wallet can it knows it’s in a new country because it can tell by the IP addresses by all the computer stuff that I don’t understand. It knows it’s in Indonesia. And then for the first 24 hours, it seemed to be okay. We’ll just leave it in the Malaysian setting for now. See what’s going on. But after 24 hours, I think it said, “Okay, this guy, he’s now in Indonesia, obviously, or at least his phone is.” So, it clicked over into Indonesia. And as far as I can tell, the only change that it made, like serious change, is that now the balance of your e-wallet is now showing in Indonesian rupiah.
And that’s the main change. But it didn’t change anything else. It didn’t convert the currency from ringgit to rupiah. Your currency is still in ringgit. It’s just displaying the amount in the local currency, in this case, Indonesian rupiah. And one thing I was very happy to see is that even though it was now displaying my balance in Indonesian rupiah in big numbers down at the bottom in smaller numbers, it still told me the equivalent in Malaysian ringgit. And the same thing happens when you make a purchase here. I’ve scanned a couple of QRIS codes using Touch ‘n Go. Easy as can be. Worked beautifully. And the amount that I have to pay. So I went out and had mie Aceh and I had a couple of drinks and I had some snacks and my bill came to 26,000 rupiah and you start freaking out a little bit because I’m accustomed to seeing ringgit and 26,000 ringgit you know you’re like whoa I mean that’s a huge amount of money so you kind of panic a little bit and it’s nice to get the reassurance that down at the bottom it tells you the equivalent in ringgit. So it says 26,000 rupiah and then you can glance at the bottom and then it tells you that’s whatever six ringgit or something like that. Seven ringgit. So it’s like oh okay you know it’s just nice to see the two currencies on the same page all the time. So every time you pay in rupiah it also tells you the amount in ringgit. And of course, after you hit the button to say, “Okay, pay.” Then you’re given the option, you have to approve the transaction. So you can look at the amount again just to make sure, okay, is this number right? And then you can approve the transaction with your PIN, facial recognition, or a thumbprint. So those are some key points. The changing the country setting, in my case, it happened automatically. And it didn’t change anything significant and it still shows Malaysian ringgit as well as the local currency. And the only other thing that changed is that Touch ‘n Go is a whole ecosystem like or e-wallets in general is a vast ecosystem. There’s so many other things you can do with it, not just buy mie Aceh. So all of those extra features are country-specific. So when it changed to the Indonesian setting, the app itself looked quite different because all the items down below, all the extra things you can do changed. All the local travel deals, links you can click on for things in Indonesia. So the app looks quite different when it changes to the Indonesian version, but it is still Malaysia’s Touch ‘n Go e-wallet. That hasn’t changed at all. It’s just giving you the Indonesian skin on top of it to show you items related to Indonesia and showing you the currency of Indonesia. So, I guess the number of countries where you can go with Touch ‘n Go. People are listing a lot of countries here. My experience extends only to Indonesia so far. And I’ve heard of people using it in Thailand. I think the Thailand system is called PromptPay. And PromptPay is also linked to Malaysia’s DuitNow. They’re all connected. So you could go from Thailand to Malaysia and you could use Thailand’s e-wallet app in Malaysia. You know it’s all interconnected. And I find that quite interesting because when I was reading about e-wallets, it seemed like every country was fighting for dominance. Like they were fighting to see which country’s e-wallet was going to emerge as the king of e-wallets and get a worldwide acceptance. But it feels like the industry is moving more towards cooperation that the exact e-wallet you’re using from which country is not that important. It’s less important than the connections between the countries. So that every country has its own e-wallet. But because of all these agreements between the national platforms, DuitNow, PromptPay, QRIS, Alipay in China, which I know nothing about. You can just go around the entire world. But of course, there’s going to be a lot of gotchas, a little bit of details, little things that won’t work here that do work there. It’s not going to be 100% everything I can do in Malaysia with Touch ‘n Go I can do everything in Turkey or France or wherever you can go. Some of these comments were listing countries like all over Europe, Australia, Turkey, the UK, the US, various European nations. I’m sure in each of those countries there’s a little bit of, oh, you scan something. Oh, it doesn’t work here or you know, you just work out what the limitations are in each country. But for the most part, I think the base of paying using your Malaysian Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, you can do it all in many, many countries now, but I don’t know which countries exactly. People say up to 50 countries. That could be true. I don’t actually know.
I also got a set of comments all related to other ways of reloading your Touch ‘n Go e-wallet because as I talked about in my video, sure, anybody can go to the Google Play Store and then you can download the Touch ‘n Go e-wallet to your phone, open an account, and you’re like, “Wow, I have a Touch ‘n Go e-wallet. This is so amazing.” But then you realize, oh, how do I put money in there? Like, it’s useless until there’s money. So, somehow you have to figure out, well, how do I get money into this thing? And if you’ve never used a digital e-wallet before, it’s kind of a mystery. It’s mystifying. Like, you don’t know these things cuz you didn’t grow up with it. Yeah, I’ll talk a little bit more about that later, too, I think. So, I talked about a reload PIN because that was the only way I was aware of that I could do it and it’s the most convenient for me. I go to 7-Eleven. I go to the clerk. I actually usually show them Touch ‘n Go on my phone just to make sure we’re talking about the same thing and I say, “Can I have a Touch ‘n Go reload for 100 ringgit?” And I give the clerk 100 ringgit. They put it into their cash register and they give me a receipt with a PIN on it and you enter that PIN into Touch ‘n Go and the 100 ringgit is transferred to your e-wallet. So that’s what I talked about. But I got quite a few comments talking about alternatives particularly for local people for Malaysians. So for example, well and for travelers I guess. Yeah, the very first one is about travelers not local people. So this comment from Evelyn Marie for travelers, you can also reload using credit cards. So you really don’t even have to take out cash. Now even pasar malams also accept QR payments. So that’s an interesting one because yeah, I’m not a credit card guy. I’ve been out of Canada for a long time and since I left Canada there’s been kind of a credit card revolution and again I’ll talk about that more later and I just haven’t been part of that revolution. Credit cards seem like only Bill Gates can afford to use a credit card. I think of credit cards as much more serious financial instruments than they are today. They’re just like everyone has like 10 different credit cards. They’re very casual about them. But I’m not. So, I was like, “Oh, I don’t want to use my credit card.” I think of a credit card as being very dangerous. I don’t use it in my day-to-day life. I don’t go in I don’t even have my physical credit card with me 99% of the time. I never go into a restaurant and say, “Oh, I’ll pay with my credit card.” Or go walk into a hotel and pay for my room with a credit card. Never. I’ve never used a credit card overseas in my entire life. So, I just I don’t know anything about credit cards. So, they’re pointing out that yeah, if you’re a foreigner coming to Malaysia and you want to put a reload on your Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, you could go to the bank, go to an ATM, withdraw rupiah, go to 7-Eleven, give them the rupiah, get the reload PIN, enter it into the app, and that’s how you get money. But, Evelyn Marie is saying, “No, you don’t have to do it that way. You can just do it with your credit card.” So, you go into the Touch ‘n Go e-wallet app, hit the reload button and just say from my credit card and you enter your credit card details and boom, money is transferred from your credit card, whatever credit card it is directly onto your e-wallet. And I mean that yeah, that if you’re comfortable using credit cards, you don’t mind entering your credit card number into the e-wallet app, you’re confident in the security and you know how to do it. Yeah, that sounds like a great option. I’ve never done it, so I don’t have any experience with that. And I don’t know what the final fee would be in terms of conversion rates, credit card fees, all these things. I don’t know much about that, but yeah, that sounds like a great option. Another comment, you can just transfer from your bank account to TNG account without going to 7-Eleven to buy a PIN. And that would be, I think, for a Malaysian person because they all have local bank accounts. And they can just when they reload Touch ‘n Go, they where does the money come from? They can select bank account and then they can connect they can connect Touch ‘n Go directly to their bank account. So in fact I think you can transfer money but you can also have your money deducted directly from your bank account I think. But again I never talked about that because I don’t know anything about it and as a foreigner in Malaysia I can’t open a bank account. So it sounds very very convenient in a way but I can’t open a Malaysian bank account. So, these bank account options are not open to me, but they would be a very convenient way for a Malaysian to do it. For a foreigner, a casual backpacker foreigner that doesn’t want to mess around with credit cards, bank accounts, anything like that, I still think the 7-Eleven PIN is the way to go. It just feels like everything’s under your control. Here’s my 50 ringgit. You get the PIN. You enter the PIN. Okay, 50 ringgit. And you’re not messing around with dangerous credit. I still think of credit cards as dangerous. Anyway, so related to this is this comment from a976. Most Malaysians too do payments using their bank account QR code because only one source from financial account instead of having another such like TNG e-wallet where you need to top it up thereafter. Of course, it’s good also if you can have one or two options. I think what Ya is saying is that for Malaysians, they don’t even need to use Touch ‘n Go because their bank will give them an app that does the same thing. So, if you have a bank account at one of the major banks in Malaysia, you can download that bank’s app and you can use the banking app to scan QR codes through the DuitNow system. So, you don’t have to have Touch ‘n Go. They can just do it with their bank. Everything I do with Touch ‘n Go, apparently they can do it with the app from their bank and that can be attractive because why mess around with two systems when you can have just one. But then comments at the end, but at the same time, why not have two? You can have your bank app and you can have Touch ‘n Go. You have options. But they’re saying that for Malaysians, they may not need Touch ‘n Go. They can just use their banking app. And I have zero experience with that obviously, but it sounds like a very I don’t know what I wonder how common it is like what percentage of Malaysians would use Touch ‘n Go as their main digital e-wallet and what percentage just say, “Ah, I don’t need it. I’ve got my bank app.” And I wonder what the limitations are. Can a bank app do everything Touch ‘n Go can do? It seems unlikely that the bank app can compete with the whole Touch ‘n Go e-wallet universe, the whole ecosystem that I see when I start scanning through all the options available. But at the same time, day-to-day life, all you’re doing is buying snacks in the market, paying for meals at restaurants, and if your bank app can do all those things through the DuitNow system, yeah, you don’t really need a Touch ‘n Go. But again, yeah, I didn’t talk about that because I don’t do that and I don’t know anything about it and as a foreigner, I can’t open a bank account in Malaysia anyway. So, that was a complete dead end for me.
And I got a few comments on just small things like use cases that didn’t occur to me or that just aren’t part of my day-to-day life and other things you can do with Touch ‘n Go. So for example from address1420 one more point to add chief you can scan a code for donating some money at masjid. Now, that didn’t come up when I was going through all my examples, but it makes sense that the digital e-wallet Touch ‘n Go is used to pay for things, to give money, to send money, to transfer money. It makes sense that in the world of mosques and churches, any religious institution, if you wanted to make a donation to the mosque, chances are they will have a QR code available for you. You go to the mosque. I haven’t seen one of these, but they could be on display at the mosque and you could scan it and make a donation to the mosque via Touch ‘n Go. And in thinking about this donation to charities, donating to a mosque, things like that. I also started thinking about people that are begging, that are homeless, that are out on the street asking for money. I noticed quite a few of my last few days in Malaysia before flying here to Sumatra. There are all these people in normal spots. I see them all the time because I walk down the same streets and go to the same MRT stations and I see the same beggars on a daily basis and they might have a cup out front where people put money in or they might be selling packages of serviettes for people to buy and make a donation. And while they’re sitting there waiting for people to give them money, they’re all on their phones cuz everybody has a phone. Even a homeless person, even a beggar tends to have a phone and they’re busy watching YouTube videos and they’re scanning and sending messages and things to people. So, it would be very easy for a beggar to open a Touch ‘n Go e-wallet account, get their own donation QR code, print it out, and have it there as a little stand beside them. Because I was wondering whether e-wallets, meaning so many people, aren’t even carrying money anymore. Like even in my case, I always have money in my wallet, but I used to track it very very carefully because I always wanted to have small bills cuz I hated trying to buy something for three ringgit and you go into the store to get it and you look in your wallet and all you have is a 50 or 100 ringgit note. I feel like I’m being very annoying to the store clerk cuz they’re always running out of change. Nobody ever has change, especially when you go to the night markets and things like that and you’re trying to buy all these snacks and food items and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t have change for that.” And now, of course, you use Touch ‘n Go. I love it for that reason. I don’t have to worry so much about having change, but now I don’t know what’s in my wallet. So, I see a homeless person ahead of me. I want to give them one or two ringgit or whatever I want to give them. I don’t know what’s in my wallet anymore. I used to know exactly what was in there. And a lot of people don’t carry any money at all these days. So, I’m, I’m wondering whether homeless people and beggars are suffering. They get less donations throughout the day because people just don’t have money in their pocket anymore. So, even a beggar, I think, has to get with the times and develop a QR code for setting up beside them where they’re sitting at the side of the street asking for money and now you can just scan my code. I would do it. Absolutely. I would do it. It just makes sense. But yeah, just the modern world. So, it’s something that I was thinking about. But yeah, as Adro says, another use case is donating money at a masjid. Another point that I hadn’t thought about. This commenter writes, “Make sure you redeem your Touch ‘n Go reward points.” I like that comment because again I mentioned I really don’t know anything about credit cards. I don’t use them regularly. I’m not a credit card master. Same thing with reward systems. I’ve never signed up for one in my life. Everyone around me my whole life they talk about airline miles. Oh, I got 10,000 miles. I got 8,000 miles. I got 180. I have no idea what they’re talking about. They get bonuses. They get discounts. They get points. They cash in their points. Everybody’s making out like bandits, but I’ve never understood any of this. I’ve never gotten an airline points program. I’ve never redeemed anything. Sometimes I might look at it casually, like I do fly on AirAsia occasionally and I’ll get these messages saying, “Oh, you got some points.” And then I don’t go looking or investigating, but I might come across it where they tell me how many points I’ve got. I’m like, “Whoa, I got a lot of points.” And then I look at the value and it’s like, oh, it’s worth 80 cents or 1.2 ringgit and it’s like thousands. And so like what’s why waste your precious life energy thinking about these things or worrying about them? But people do say that through Touch ‘n Go, they offer a lot of reward points and it’s worth keeping track of them and redeeming them. It’s actually real money. Again, I don’t know. I use Touch ‘n Go all the time. Am I leaving money on the table because I’m not investigating all these ways of getting reward points and cashing them in? But anyway, that’s a comment. Something I hadn’t thought about and I didn’t talk about in my video. Another comment on the same topic. Another good thing is the reward points. Each transaction earns you points which you can redeem to various items including fuel. Again, kind of a driver perspective. Like me, I have around 5k points which I can redeem for fuel. One ringgit for 100 points. So yeah, I mean that’s real money. 5,000 divide by 100, that’s a lot of ringgit. Might as well cash that in. If they’re giving it to you, you know, you might as well take it. So, yeah. So, reward points seem to be a thing in Touch ‘n Go, which I wasn’t aware of. Something else I was completely unaware of. I never ever thought about it, mainly because again, I’m no financial genius. This is from KaiKy999.
And the best thing is that with Touch ‘n Go, you get around 3% PA of return, which is way better than normal savings account. I don’t know anything about this, but I guess if you have a balance on your Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, it’s like having money in your account. And I guess Touch ‘n Go gives you interest. I wasn’t aware of this. Is it true? I don’t know. But this commenter says, “Yeah, you know, if it’s like a bank account, and in fact, if you keep a balance on your Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, you’re earning interest at a higher rate than a regular bank account, like a regular savings account. So 3%. I didn’t know that. I was completely unaware of that. So I did not mention it in my video either.” Another very important item, a feature of Touch ‘n Go that I didn’t mention in my video at all. Well, I think I mentioned it once very quickly in passing. This commenter says or writes, “Hi Doug, you can also apply for a Visa TNG debit card. It will make your life much more easier as sometimes certain establishments only have card payment and doesn’t accept any QR transaction. The Visa debit card is linked with your TNG e-wallet.” And this I did know about and I talked about it in other videos at length where in fact I did get a Touch ‘n Go Visa card. Though there’s a very important distinction. It is a Visa card through the Visa company, but it’s not technically a credit card. It’s a Visa debit card, but it has a number and an expiry date and a CCV code that functions exactly like a credit card. And this card, no exaggeration, saved my life because I only have one credit card. I’m holding on to my financial existence on a very thin thread at this point in my life. You know, that one thread breaks. I’m going deep into the crevasse of financial ruin, you know, and I’ll never get back out. But there I was with this one credit card based from my bank in Canada and it was hit with fraud again. I don’t know how it just was and it was cancelled. So I found myself with no credit card at all until I got the new one. But there was a postal strike in Canada. So it was taking weeks for them to even deliver the new card. And all of that time I was without credit. And so without a credit card, you’re stuck in the modern world. Everything you need a credit card for to book hotel rooms on Agoda, airlines, everything you want to do. And I have a bunch of online accounts, a website, I have to pay for photo storage archive, I pay for a journal archive, I pay for on and on and on. And you add up all of those things, to be honest, it’s a substantial amount of money per year. And they seem to be almost in sync that there’s a month of the year where all of these bills come due. And I pay for all of them using the credit card that I have registered online. And the payment due period just happened to coincide when my credit card was cancelled. So everything I did online, I was getting emails. We’re shutting down your account. We’re deleting your account. We’re closing it because you haven’t paid. Payment is past due. It was like a sitcom joke almost that you see the payment past due notices in sitcoms all the time. But yeah, this was all very real. And then out of nowhere, I just discovered that I could get a Touch ‘n Go Visa card. I thought, “What the what?” Nah, there’s no way. Because even when I learn about these financial instruments, people tell me in the comments to other videos all the time, “Oh, you got to get this card. You got to get that. You got to get that.” And then when I look into them, well, I can’t get them because you have to have this. You have to have that. You have to be a permanent resident of the country you’re in. So, all these things people tell me about, as soon as I try to get them, I’m denied because I’m in the country on a tourist visa. I don’t have a bank account. I don’t have an address. I don’t have any of these things you need to get these financial tools. I’d have to go all the way back to Canada to get them. But then I was looking at this Touch ‘n Go Visa card and maybe I’m not supposed to have it. Like, don’t tell anyone that I have it. Maybe I’m not even supposed to have it. But I thought, as a foreigner, no way are they going to give me one of these things. Not a chance. But then I opened up the Touch ‘n Go e-wallet app and there’s a little button there that says card. Clicked on the card and it lists Visa card and I went, “Okay, I’ll apply for one.” And I got one within minutes. All I had to do was fill out the form and because my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet account was verified, I was at the highest level of Touch ‘n Go user. I guess it didn’t matter that I’m a tourist in the country on a tourist visa. They issued me this Visa debit card and it functions just like a Visa, like a credit card. So I could go online all of my online journal, online photos, online website. I have so many things online and I just changed the credit card number from the cancelled one to this Touch ‘n Go debit card and all the payments were suddenly approved and all the money was being deducted from my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet balance. To me this was mind-blowing. You know, you see all these YouTube videos of YouTube vloggers coming to KL and like KL blew my mind. Malaysia blew my mind. I wasn’t expecting this. And I joke about how silly that is all the time. But in this case, there I was in Malaysia using a Touch ‘n Go e-wallet app and I managed to get a debit card by Visa. And the fact that I could do that just blew my mind. It absolutely blew my mind. And I was suddenly booking hotel rooms, paying for flights, covering all of my online debts to get my online life back up and running. So, luckily, nothing was deleted. I didn’t lose any of my archives online. I was that close to losing everything cuz I couldn’t pay for any of these things. I had no mechanism for payment. And then this Touch ‘n Go debit card kept Planet Doug spinning in orbit, let me tell you. So, that is a pro tip. Even as a foreign visitor to Malaysia, even though you’re there on a tourist visa, I think you can get a Touch ‘n Go debit card. Again, that’s a distinction. It’s not a credit card. You can’t go out there and start buying jet skis and hot tubs and bottles of champagne. I’ll just charge it to my card. You can’t do that. You have to have the money in your Touch ‘n Go e-wallet before you can approve the transaction. So, the money, it’s a debit card and it’s sucked out of your Touch ‘n Go e-wallet balance automatically. So, anyway, but still saved it saved this YouTuber’s life. I can tell you that. Another comment, a very interesting one. Advantage minimize exchange of germs from cash that has been who knows where. So, I guess the idea here is that using an e-wallet has health benefits, potential health benefits, because it’s contactless instead of me getting out my wallet, taking out some money paper that has been soaking in, you know, humid sweat in my wallet for weeks or months, and then I hand it over to a vendor. And then I mean I’m pretty sure this is not a big worldwide issue or worldwide concern, but I mean if you’re worried about germ transfer and cleanliness, why not? Now you don’t actually have to handover money to this person and now they’re handling it and handing it on to the next person. And that paper bill could be a vector for some kind of bacteria, some sort of virus, germ that gets passed from person to person. And I wouldn’t normally talk about this sort of idea to be honest except that it relates directly to the growth of e-wallets worldwide because of the pandemic. Again, I don’t know anything personally about this. I wasn’t even aware of e-wallets back then, but based on things that I read that when the pandemic hit and there was this huge push for contactless everything, that’s when e-wallets exploded and became, you know, the economic juggernaut that they are now partially because everybody was forced to use it. Vendors had to adopt it. Governments were encouraging it. Banks were encouraging it. Hospitals, everybody was encouraging it because now you could go into a store and buy something and you had to have no physical contact with the seller, which under pandemic rules, you weren’t even allowed to have anyway, right? So the vendor could have a QR code from DuitNow out on the street outside their store and you can maintain a 6-foot distance from the human being and then you just scan it and pay it and money doesn’t change hands and in theory viruses don’t get transmitted because everything is contactless. And it’s an interesting question where would we be today if not for the pandemic? Would e-wallets be as popular as they are now without that push from that era when everybody was trying to stay as far away from everybody else as possible and nobody wanted to hand things to other people and everybody was disinfecting everything that came into their life. So yeah, it’s an interesting topic.
This next topic is a big one and I don’t think I’m going to go into it in depth because I still don’t fully understand it. But in my video I talked about how when you reload your Touch ‘n Go e-wallet from 7-Eleven, you’re given a choice. You can choose non-transferable or transferable for that money. And the difference if you want it to be transferable they charge you 1%. And then I kept reading and reading and reading the paragraph talking about the difference between these two. And as I said in my video, I didn’t really understand them. I thought I did, but every time I dove into the details, I still didn’t quite get it. And that’s probably because I don’t do all the things that a Malaysian would do. Like once you factor in bank accounts and moving money from credit cards, bank accounts, e-wallets, then maybe this whole transferable, non-transferable has more meaning. But in my day-to-day life, buying five ringgit worth of bananas or a two ringgit ice cream cone from McDonald’s, that whole stuff didn’t really matter that much. And just to be on the safe side, because I started paying for hotel rooms and flights and things like that, I always chose transferable and I paid the 1% fee cuz I just figured ah just to be safe. Because I didn’t really understand the difference. But anyway, I got a number of comments about that, people explaining it to me and I’ll read one of the longer ones here that might explain it far better than I ever could. So, comment. If I’m not mistaken, the first option is always the best. The first being transferable. If you want full access to Touch ‘n Go services, the second option, payment at shops only, doesn’t support DuitNow QR. It only works with QR codes that have the Touch ‘n Go logo, usually blue background. That means you can’t use your balance with all QR codes like at 7-Eleven which uses Public Bank QR. The second option also doesn’t allow you to transfer your e-wallet balance to other accounts. That’s why the first option is recommended. You can check which services aren’t available under the second option, payment at shops only, by opening the TNG app. Tap your balance at the top left, then select transferable e-wallet balance at the bottom. So, I think I get all that, that penetrates my dumb brain, but I still get confused because it says if all you want to do is payment at shops, then you choose non-transferable. So, it’s non-transferable if you want to pay at a shop. But when I go to a shop and I scan their QR code and I use Touch ‘n Go, it says we are now transferring money to their account. So, it says non-transferable. You’re not allowed to transfer, but when you actually do it, the language they use is, okay, we’re transferring your money now. Would you like to transfer the money now? This is how much you’re transferring. See what I mean? So, the vocabulary is contradictory. It’s probably just a mistake in their UI systems that nobody thought it through. It’s like, oh, we’re telling them it’s non-transferable, but then we’re saying in the next step, oh, now you’re transferring. They could have used a different word. Maybe that was the issue. But anyway, I did do as this commenter suggested and go to my Touch ‘n Go app and looked at the screen where they break it down. So it says here basically non-transferable balance cannot be used for e-wallet transfer, DuitNow transfer, Go+ investment, ATM withdrawal, bills, prepaid top-up. So those are all the things you can’t do. But again, I don’t really understand that exactly because it says I can’t do an e-wallet transfer and I can’t do a DuitNow transfer. And yet whenever I use DuitNow, it says I’m transferring even if it’s like a shop only transaction. So but anyway I always just to be safe I said okay give me the full transferable balance just I don’t ever want to be stuck. I don’t want to be stuck somewhere I have to pay somebody and then suddenly it says oh you can’t because you don’t have enough transferable balance. I never wanted to be stuck. So, I always said, “Okay, make everything transferable. I’ll pay the 1% just in case.” And I kept thinking that someday I’ll figure this out and then I can decide. One interesting note there is ATM withdrawal. And this is something I should have mentioned earlier when I was talking about the Touch ‘n Go debit card. That Touch ‘n Go Visa debit card, according to everything that I read, you can also use it to withdraw cash from an ATM. And I haven’t had a chance to do that yet. So, I plan on doing it as an experiment here in Indonesia. I’m going to go to a local ATM, take out my Touch ‘n Go Visa card, put it into the ATM, and see can I actually withdraw money from my Malaysian Touch ‘n Go account in rupiah in Indonesia. So, I’m going to test that. So, but anyway, I could go on and on about this transferable, non-transferable. This is the one area that I understand the least, but there are a lot of comments on this video that you can scan and see a bunch more where people are explaining it better than I can.
And here’s a comment giving me a practical tip. Why don’t you just put the card inside your phone case? This is a very interesting comment because as I talked about in my video, the Touch ‘n Go e-wallet ecosystem basically consists of like two main parts. You’ve got the Touch ‘n Go e-wallet app on your phone and you’ve got the Touch ‘n Go card. And I would use this to scan codes and I use this to tap into the MRT, things like that. And I keep this in my wallet. So every time I go through the MRT turnstile, I have to get out my wallet, take the card out of the wallet, scan it, put it back in my wallet, and put my wallet away. So now I’m carrying my wallet and my phone. And they’re saying, which I’ve seen a lot of people do, why don’t you just put it inside your case? Like everybody, like I’ve got this transparent case, plastic case around my phone. I could open it up and slide my Touch ‘n Go card inside. So now all I can use my phone to hold the card and I can scan in and out of the MRT using my phone, right? I don’t have to put it in my wallet. That’s very clever. I can see how that would work. But in a way, it doesn’t work for me partially because I like using this phone holder. It’s like it turns my phone more into a camera. I’ve got a shutter button and a microphone mount and all these things. So, this I like to use this and it makes my phone bigger and bulkier. And if I had this inside here, I think it would be hard to arrange it like put it where I needed to scan it against terminals and things like that because I’ve got this bulky thing attached to my phone. And then just in general, I do like to keep things separate. Like I like to have a separate tool for everything rather than a multi-tool and it feels like well I’ve got my e-wallet here and my e-wallet card here and I like to keep them in two separate places and now if I put it in my phone I lose my phone. I also lose my card. Do you see what I mean? It’s like I don’t know. I just kind of It’s probably overthinking security but I like to keep them separate. But yeah, I can see how putting it inside your phone would be pretty handy. And I was worried a little bit about that about NFC. Like every time you put your phone, your card against your phone, is that activating NFC in your phone and are weird things going to start happening? Drain your battery? Is it constantly NFCing back and forth with your card? I don’t really understand NFC either. So anyway, good suggestion though.
Speaking of security, which I just did, I got a lot of comments similar to this one. Commenter wrote, “You should not show your QR code on YouTube like this, bro. Others can save it and misuse it.” Another one, “Hi, Doug. Just be careful on showing your QR in the video.” The third one, beware of showing your own bar or QR code at the beginning of the video. So, yeah, like in the video, of course, I was giving practical demos of using Touch ‘n Go and then every time I was getting the vendor to scan my QR code, I was opening up a QR code on my phone and I’m showing it clearly in the video. And I thought about that too at the time. I thought, “Oh, should I be doing this? Is this like not very secure?” And I was thinking, “Well, I can always cover it up. I can blur it out.” But that’s a lot of work when you’re editing a video to blur things out, especially if they’re moving around. But then I did research into it and when you show your QR code to the vendor, that’s a dynamic code. It’s a unique code that’s generated for every transaction and your Touch ‘n Go e-wallet app it generates a new code every 60 seconds. So I don’t think there is a problem with security. I create a QR code they scan it. It’s done. I approve the transaction. Even if somebody takes a picture of that QR code from the video, they can’t use it. It’s a one-time code. So, I don’t think there’s a security concern there. Am I wrong about that? I don’t think so. Like, it, it generates it every 60 seconds. It’s a unique code. Plus, even if by some weird trickery, some genius hacker can take an old code and make it work, how would that work? Because they would show it to the vendor and it’s scanning, but it’s connected to my account. I have to approve it. And if I’m sitting here and I suddenly get this Touch ‘n Go notification, oh, here’s a purchase. Would you like to approve it? And I’m like, well, no, I didn’t make a purchase. That other person can’t approve the transaction anyway. So, anyway, I don’t see a problem with showing that code on screen. And in the video, I showed the other code because for my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, I created well, it created a QR code that people can use to send money to my e-wallet. And I showed that in the video as an example. And in fact, a number of people that watched the video scanned that code. They were watching the video and they enjoyed it and thought it gave good value and they wanted to make a donation or a contribution to the Planet Doug universe keep me spinning in orbit. And a lot of people scanned that code from the video and sent me some money. I think some of them did it just as you know kind of for fun to just do something to interact engage with me and some people sent me one ringgit. Somebody sent me I think 10 cents and other people sent me substantial amounts. People sent me 50 ringgit, 30 ringgit, 20 ringgit, 10 ringgit using that code and that’s what that and oh by the way I’m mentioning all this because I want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you very very much. That, that was very kind of everyone who made a contribution to Planet Doug to keep this planet in orbit, keep me from, you know, crashing spinning out of orbit and crashing into the sun. You know what I mean? So, yeah. Thank you very much for all those donations using the QR code. But that’s what that QR code is for. You’re supposed to show it to other people so they can scan it, so they can send money to your e-wallet. You can do it with friends. I talked about that in the video. You go out for lunch with friends. Your friend pays the bill for everybody, but now you want to reimburse him for your part of the lunch and you say, “Oh, what was my part? Oh, my lunch was 15 ringgit. Here, let me send it to your e-wallet.” You scan their code. You send them 15 ringgit to their e-wallet rather than giving them 15 ringgit in cash. So, that’s how it’s supposed to work. So, putting it in a public forum like a YouTube video, I don’t think it’s a problem at all. In fact, my plan is now I think at the end of every one of at all at the end of Planet Doug videos, I’m going to put that code in the video at the end. I don’t see why not. There people are very generous in the world. Malaysians in particular, very generous people. They love to support YouTubers and I’m here to be supported. And if I put that code there, it just makes it easier for someone who wants to make a small donation like buy me a coffee, PayPal, rather than doing that. It’s like, oh, there’s Planet Doug’s QR code. Let me I got my phone right here. Let me scan pause the video. Scan it. Oh, I’ll send Doug one ringgit. Two ringgit. He can buy himself a cup of coffee when he gathers up enough of those, that sort of thing. So yeah, I don’t think it’s a security concern either. I guess in a general sense, the less personal information you put online, the better. But for me as a public figure, depending on public donations and AdSense revenue to be able to keep doing what I’m doing, being more open actually benefits me as a YouTuber, I think. So anyway, I don’t think there’s a big security risk. I wouldn’t recommend it to everybody in the world to grab all of your QR codes and put them in a video and put them on YouTube. I mean, as a general rule, maybe you should think before you do stuff like that, but I don’t think there’s a security concern here. For me, I don’t think so.
A lot of the comments that I got on my video were from Malaysians, so they know more about Touch ‘n Go than I do. So, most of their comments were telling me things I didn’t know, expanding on things I said in the video. So, there weren’t very many questions, but I got one question. This is from Robert Maring. What would happen if you scanned the wrong vendor’s code or if you paid too much, added an extra zero? Because I did talk about that in the video. It’s one of my pro tips. It’s like make sure the QR code is legitimate. Look at the name of the business. Make sure it hasn’t been tampered with. Cover it up with a fake code. And when you enter the number, make sure you do it carefully because it’s very easy in a public setting, a crowded market, you’re like entering five ringgit, and you accidentally go instead of 500, you go 5000. And now you sent the vendor 50 ringgit or 500 ringgit or 5,000, it could be very easy to make that mistake. And the question is, well, okay, if that happens, what do you do? And to be honest, I don’t know. I’m assuming that if you were working with a vendor, you made a purchase from a vendor and then ah, you accidentally sent them 50 times too much or 10 times too much, something like that. You could show the vendor and oh, I’m so sorry. Look, I sent you way too much money. And you could talk to the vendor and they would confirm. And then if they’re a nice person, a good businessman, businesswoman, they would send it back to you, right? They would calculate, okay, you were only supposed to give me 10 ringgit. You gave me a hundred by mistake. Here, let me scan your QR code. I’ll send 90 back to your e-wallet. I hope the vendor would do that, but legally you sent them 100 ringgit, they got 100 ringgit. I don’t know if they’re legally required to reimburse you. And I don’t know if there’s an appeal process in Touch ‘n Go. I have no idea. And if you sent the money to the wrong person, if the QR code had been tampered with by a scammer or a thief and you sent the money to somebody else, I think you’re yeah, there’s nothing you can do about that. I think you’ve lost that money. There’s no way to get it back again. Maybe in Touch ‘n Go, I haven’t gone that deeply into it. There’s an appeal process. You can click on a button that says this money was sent to a scammer to the wrong QR code and then maybe TNG will investigate it. Kind of like a credit company investigates fraud and if you were the victim of fraud, the credit card company will reimburse you the money that you’d lost. Maybe Touch ‘n Go is covered by insurance companies, insurance policies like that, but that I don’t know. Yeah. So far, you know, fingers crossed. I’ve never done that yet.
Coming to the end of the comments and this last set of comments, I’ve kind of mentally grouped them into one topic and you’ll see how these different comments relate as I talk about them. So, I have a comment here. It’s basically just echoing what I said about how amazing Touch & Go is, but more from a national pride point of view. This commenter writes, “What can you ask for more? Awesome technology, awesome country. It’s just Malaysia. Malaysia is truly Asia.” And this Malaysian pride in Touch & Go and the DuitNow ecosystem, I think they’re justified in having that pride because it’s amazing and it’s very well designed and they’re turning into a world leader in e-wallet digital technology. I mean, from my point of view, they’re way ahead of Canada. Canada doesn’t have anything like this. So, I think pride in that system.
Here in Indonesia, they’re very proud of QRIS, the Indonesian version of DuitNow. They’re extremely proud of the system they’ve created here. And again, justifiably so. I think Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, these are all world leaders in developing this kind of online digital e-wallet technology. So, the national pride is justified.
And the next comment asks me, does Canada have anything like that? So in Canada, is there a version of Touch & Go and DuitNow? I haven’t lived in Canada for a very long time. I haven’t even been in Canada physically for about 16 years right now. So I have no idea. But my guess is, based on a little bit of research, a little bit of reading, and no, basically Canada doesn’t really have anything like this. We don’t have a national QR code system like DuitNow or QRIS. We don’t have e-wallets. And I think Canada followed a different path, and I mentioned it earlier, the credit card revolution. And I think in Canada you see people using their phones, paying for everything. And their system, in a way, you could argue it’s even better. I mean, there’s pros and cons on both sides, but what they use in Canada, I think—again, don’t quote me on this because I don’t really know—but I think in Canada everybody uses like Google Pay and Apple Pay.
And the difference, as I understand it, is that Google Pay and Apple Pay is a digital credit card. So, it’s like a digital version of your credit card connected to Google Pay, and then you just tap your phone. So, you can pay at Tim Hortons, at Starbucks, at the grocery store just by tapping your phone, and you’re paying with your credit card through Google Pay, through Apple Pay. And I say you could argue that’s even a better system because it’s faster. Like, I don’t know how it works, to be honest. I’ve never done it. I don’t have Google Pay. I don’t have Apple Pay. I’ve never used one of these systems. It kind of mystifies me, to be honest.
I’ve actually been hanging out in Malaysia with a couple of Americans, and I would go into the MRT system with them, and I’m zipping through with my Touch & Go card, but they would go buy a token, but they’re paying for the token with their phone, and they just take their phone and they tap it on the token machine in the MRT system. Beep. Like I asked, “What? What did you just do?” And “I just paid with Google Pay.” And I’m like, “What do you mean? How does— I don’t even know how that works.” So all these Americans are going around Malaysia just using Google Pay. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And they’re paying for everything. And it’s faster because with a QR code, of course, I’ve got to open the app, scan the QR code, enter the amount, hit confirm, and then approve the transaction. Someone using Google Pay, for all I know, they just go beep, it’s done. So, it’s faster.
But there are disadvantages to that as well. I think the biggest disadvantage is that the vendor has to have a terminal. They have to have a credit card terminal with a Tap & Go attachment. So they have to pay for that, and there are fees involved. So like here in Indonesia, for example, I go out onto the street to buy fried bananas, as I did in Malaysia. It basically has no added cost to the vendor. All they have to do is make a copy of their DuitNow QR code or QRIS. They laminate it, put it up, so they don’t have to buy a terminal. They don’t have to buy a Tap & Go terminal. They don’t have to have this digital cable connecting them to a computer network. They don’t have to do anything. So, it’s open to everybody—big corporations, big stores, and small vendors. So, the e-wallet QR code system has that advantage. It’s much cheaper. The technology, the barrier to entry is almost zero. Anybody can do it. As I said, even the beggars asking for money at the side of the street, they can have a QR code and accept money to their e-wallet. But no beggar is going to have a credit card terminal with a Tap & Go terminal so somebody can go by with their phone and tap and go, right?
So again, I’m just scratching the surface about the differences between the e-wallet system in Malaysia and the Tap & Go credit card Google Pay system in Canada. There’s probably a lot going on there. But to answer the question, do we have the Canadian equivalent of DuitNow and Touch & Go? I’m pretty confident in saying no. We have nothing at all like that. Nothing at all. It may develop in the future, but now Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam—they’re all way ahead of Canada, and I think way ahead of the United States in terms of this kind of technology.
Getting to the end, two comments that again are kind of related to this topic. Josh Paul wrote, “This guy just came out of a cave or something.” And Zack Legend writes, “No offense, bro. TNG was introduced more than 20 years ago. What is the big deal?” So basically they’re kind of making fun of me, saying, “What? You made a 47-minute video about Touch & Go e-wallets? Like what rock did you crawl out of? Have you been living in a cave? We’ve been doing this for—one guy says 20 years. I don’t think it’s been that long, but I don’t know. How in the world can you not know about this? What’s the big deal? Why are you even talking about it?”
But the main reason I’m talking about it is what I just mentioned. Like we don’t even have it in Canada. We have a whole different system. So for me as a foreign tourist in Malaysia, this e-wallet Touch & Go, QRIS business in Indonesia—it’s all brand new to me, and I think it’s pretty amazing. I love using it, and yeah, I’m not familiar with it. As far as digital e-wallets are concerned, I just did come out of a cave. I just crawled out from under a rock. I never used it before, never heard of it before, didn’t know anything about it. So yeah, it is all brand new to me, which is why I find it so interesting.
Second-to-last comment from David Shepard. “I would be interested to know how Touch & Go compares to Google Pay and the Wise card.” So I added this comment to the list because it relates to exactly what I was just talking about. I’d like to know too. I’m going to have to go back to Canada at some point and just rejoin Canadian society just to understand how Google Pay works. And at this point I don’t dare do it because, as I said, I’m very leery of credit cards in general because of my background, and I don’t really want to go around with a credit card in a digital payment where I’m just busy tapping on things. I’m very happy in the Touch & Go QR code universe. I just discovered it. I’m just learning to love it and learning how to use it in different countries. So that’s enough for my brain to chew on right now. I don’t need to add Google Pay and Apple Pay, and of course Wise.
I’ve been hearing a lot about Wise, and that’s a whole other area I’d love to know more about. I did try a couple of years ago to get a Wise card, but I mentioned that I often can’t get these things. People leave comments saying, “Why don’t you get a Wise card? They’re amazing. Do this, do that.” And I try to apply, and because I’m a Canadian and Canadian banking systems tend to be very rigid and weird, I find, and then I had to do things to get the Wise card that I wasn’t capable of. I had to be physically in Canada to get the card issued. I couldn’t get it issued while I was overseas, and those rules might have changed. I might be able to get a Wise card now, but the last time I looked into it, in order to do it I had to have a photocopy or a digital copy of a bill—like a water bill, phone bill, electricity bill—that was mailed to my permanent residence in Canada, showing my name and address to prove my identity. I had to have a physical piece of mail that was delivered to me at my address in Canada. And I can probably come up with one of those, but I just haven’t gotten around to it.
So I may end up getting a Wise card if the Planet Doug YouTube channel actually turns into a sort of like—could stand on its own financial feet, and then there’s actually money to do something with—then it would be nice to have a Wise card, have as many options as possible: to use Touch & Go, QRIS, you know, DuitNow, have a Wise card, have the Touch & Go Visa debit card, to have a few different options. Right now my financial life is pretty simple. There’s not a lot of money to worry about. So even if I had a Wise card, I don’t really have enough money to split between it and Touch & Go and everything else anyway. I don’t really need that many financial instruments right now. But I mean, if I could get a Wise card I would, just because I’d like to know what it is. I don’t even know.
So how does Touch & Go compare to Wise? David Shepard, I don’t know. And I didn’t do the research to find out, but perhaps other people can tell you.
Last comment I’m going to highlight—there are a lot more comments, there are like over 400 of them, so these are just a selection—but from Jess97196: “I transferred the money to your TNG QR code that appeared on the screen.” So as I mentioned, a few people saw my Touch & Go e-wallet QR code on the video—I put it up there as an example—and just scanned it and sent some money to my e-wallet. And I just want to tell everyone who sent money: I got it. It arrived in my Touch & Go e-wallet.
The interesting thing there though is I’m branded on YouTube as Planet Doug. Everything is Planet Doug. But when you sign up for a Touch & Go e-wallet, it’s based on your passport. You upload a copy of your passport, and it’s associated with your passport number, which is your legal name. So the Touch & Go QR code is labeled with my full legal name. So you might think, “Oh, Planet Doug, I’m going to send Planet Doug some money.” And you scan it, oh, it’s like, “Oh, it doesn’t say Planet Doug.” Which I don’t like. I wish it could say Planet Doug. I wish I could give it a—you know, your Touch & Go e-wallet has to be based on your legal name as based on your official ID. I get that. But I would like to be able to change the public label so that it actually says Planet Doug rather than my name, because it’s different from Planet Doug. But trust me, that name is my name, and that name is registered with the Touch & Go account that is keeping Planet Doug afloat at the moment.
So all the people that sent money to me via the Planet Doug Touch & Go e-wallet, I got all of the donations. Thank you very much. And it will all be put to good use making more Planet Doug videos.
So we’ve gotten finally to the end of the video, to the last comment. And to be honest, when I sat down to shoot this video here in Humble Planet Doug Studios, I did say to myself, keep everything short and sweet, make a short video. But I don’t know how long I’ve been talking, but it’s been a long time. And yeah, that’s just how things go on Planet Doug sometimes—or people would argue all the time.
So yeah, shout-out to the Crunch Club. All you people that made it all the way to the end of the video, you members of the Crunch Club, thank you very much. I appreciate all of you. Congratulations making it this far. I hope I kept you entertained while you had this video playing in the background while you’re doing dishes or making the bed or going for a walk, doing whatever it is you’re doing, treating this as a podcast—basically an audio podcast that you can just listen to. That’s kind of why I talk so long. I figure people don’t have to be staring at the screen all the time. They can just have it playing in the background and pause it and restart it later if I’m entertaining enough for you to do that.
But yeah, in the Planet Doug universe, go check out the Planet Doug Patreon. That’s always there. I’m updating it as often as I can with little video clips, photos, updates, links to other YouTube channels that I find interesting, newspaper articles that I find interesting. There is a Planet Doug on Substack and a lot like on Planet Doug Patreon and on the Substack and on Buy Me a Coffee. When I post a video, I create a PDF of the entire video—like a PDF transcript, a written transcript of the whole video—and then I copy and paste that into Patreon, and I copy and paste it into Substack and my website and Buy Me a Coffee. So that’s there as well. Just a little tidbit, a little bonus for anyone that likes to see things in written form.
So yeah, go check out all of those. And if I don’t see you anywhere like that, I’ll see you back here on Planet Doug or on Planet Doug Behind the Scenes where I record long-form podcast storytelling videos. So go check that out on Planet Doug Behind the Scenes.
And yeah, that’s it. Thank you very much for all the comments on the Touch & Go video. And as I said, I hope to make a companion video about using Touch & Go here in Banda Aceh in Sumatra. I’ve been working on that video a little bit every day as I use Touch & Go at different places. So I hope that one turns out to be useful for other people as well.
All right, shutting down. See you in the next video.