Darren KoayChief Information Officer

Personal correspondence

Systems that change without the subscriber noticing

Chief Information Officer Singapore / Southeast Asia

Platform change is my work; a broadband subscriber should hardly notice it happening.

In 2006 an enterprise customer of Halvecrest Networks in Singapore asked why it had never been invoiced for a leased line to Kuala Lumpur. The circuit had carried its traffic for fourteen months. Engineering had completed the order, but the activation message never reached billing, and no report showed the gap. I was a billing systems analyst, and I spent three weeks matching every live circuit in our inventory against an invoice. We found forty-one more. That exercise told me where I wanted to work: in the systems that connect what a network does with what a customer is told and charged.

A household meets our systems at three moments: when its router reconnects after a power cut, when a monthly charge is collected, and when someone asks what we hold about them. I judge any platform proposal by which of those moments it could disturb. Where the answer is uncertain, I am prepared to spend more or wait longer.

Home broadband subscribers
268,000
December 2025, northern Peninsular Malaysia
Company revenue
RM 512m
Calendar year 2025
Technology colleagues led
126
Plus about 60 contractor staff

A subscriber should be able to ignore every platform change we make, because the connection, the payment arrangement and the personal record all come through it intact.

I am chief information officer of Kemaruna Fibre, a privately held broadband provider based in Bayan Lepas, Penang. We connect 268,000 homes and 9,400 businesses across Penang, Kedah, Perlis and northern Perak. Many households also take our streaming-television add-on or a mobile SIM that we resell on a host operator's network. Revenue in 2025 was RM 512 million. Corvanthe Equity, a Kuala Lumpur private-equity fund, has owned 65 per cent of the company since 2021. I lead 126 technology colleagues and report to our chief executive.

My career has been spent in the systems that sit between a network and a bill. I wrote account software for utilities and dial-up providers in Kuala Lumpur, ran billing operations for an enterprise carrier in Singapore and delivered a hosted charging platform for six mobile virtual operators. That last job showed me what one shared platform means for every brand that relies on it. I joined Kemaruna Fibre in 2017 and became its first chief information officer when the new shareholder arrived.

Three decisions show how I work. I delayed our new billing platform by eleven weeks so that card arrangements moved between payment processors rather than through our hands or our customers' patience. I kept subscriber login on two sites we control when most other systems moved to a public-cloud region in Malaysia. I also removed more than 400,000 scanned identity documents that colleagues wanted to keep. Each choice took money or convenience that somebody had planned to have, and I report those costs to our audit and risk committee.

Card arrangements moved without touching card numbers

When billing changed platforms in February 2024, 69,300 of 71,000 card auto-debit arrangements transferred directly between processors. The eleven-week delay cost RM 1.6 million and pushed a bundle launch into the new year.

Routers reconnected while the cloud link was down

Our private links to the cloud region failed for three hours and forty minutes in July 2025. About 41,000 routers restarted by storm power cuts that evening reconnected normally, because authentication runs on our own two sites.

Identity images cut from 412,000 to 8,900

Scanned identity documents held by the company and its installation contractors now cover only open recovery cases, disputes and legal holds, sealed in one restricted store.

Current focus

I am renegotiating the data-return and exit terms of our wholesale mobile agreement before its 2027 renewal, and checking that our fourteen installation contractors apply the same retention rules to subscriber information as we do.

Conversations I welcome

I would welcome a first non-executive seat on a Malaysian or Singaporean board in telecommunications, payments or another subscription business, with up to twenty-two days a year, subject to my chief executive's consent and a conflicts review.

The leadership record

Trusted with consequential decisions.

Formation

  • Bachelor of computer sciencePerindawan University · 1998
Darren brought me the card-transfer decision with the delay already costed and the commercial team's objection set out in his own paper. I never had to discover the price of his recommendation later.
Rosmaliza HamdanChief executive, Kemaruna Fibre
The full record ↗

Contact

I would welcome a first non-executive seat on a Malaysian or Singaporean board in telecommunications, payments or another subscription business, with up to twenty-two days a year, subject to my chief executive's consent and a conflicts review.

  • Board appointments
Write to Darren Contact page