Why Malaysian Addresses Challenge Businesses and How to Overcome Them
Pop quiz: you’re a tourist to Malaysia, feeling your way around Kuala Lumpur. Your friend tells you the “mamak” food stalls in “PJ” are to die for – how can you find where that is exactly?
Sure, you might check Google or your map app, and figure out it stands for “Petaling Jaya” (and yes, its “mamak” food stalls really are die-die-must-try as they say locally). But if you’re a new business setting up shop in Malaysia, you can’t afford to repeat that whole process for every local address you can’t understand.
In this article, we’ll explain why Malaysian addresses are the way they are and how to solve common local addressing problems without the time and expense of becoming your company’s “addressing expert”.
How Malaysians key in their addresses
Malaysia’s confusing address system reflects a mishmash of British-era addressing conventions, historical quirks and traditional community identifiers. These do not easily map onto a Western understanding of addresses – and can confuse businesses that assume they can treat local addresses the way they’ve done in their home country.
Here’s a list of local addressing conventions to keep in mind:
Malaysians commonly use abbreviations for street names, cities and federal territories.
We’ve already mentioned PJ filling in for Petaling Jaya. The Malay word for street, Jalan, might also be written as Jln or Jn.
Some Malaysian neighbourhoods or areas are known by multiple names or aliases.
“We have so many ways of writing an address in the capital,” explains Chris Ng, Senior Engineering Manager at GBG Loqate. “We can put KL or Kuala Lumpur or even Wilayah Persekutuan (Federal Territory).”
“My sister-in-law was staying at Anjung Bercham Utara, in Ipoh,” recalls Wai Kit Kong, Engineering Manager for GBG Loqate. “We found out that her neighbour calls it Kampung Bercham; two aliases for the same place due to historical reasons.”
Some think condominium names count as full addresses
Other common contractions: High-rise residents might input only the condominium's name instead of the formal street address. And some addresses still use lot numbers assigned when the land was first divided.
“Those lot numbers eventually become streets and house numbers,” explains Gunaseelan Krishnamoorthy, Product Ops Manager for GBG Loqate. “Some areas are renamed, but others still use the lot number as their primary address.”
Problems with addresses cause headaches
Businesses that don’t resolve addressing problems in Malaysia may experience a range of costly and complex problems, like the following:
- Inaccurate customer analytics: Abbreviations or aliases might prevent businesses from getting a reliable count of their customers in a specific area. For example, querying the database for Petaling Jaya leaves out customers using PJ, resulting in skewed analytics that pollute marketing or business decisions.
- Property and financial valuation errors: In Wai Kit’s example, the two different names for Kampung Bercham might cause headaches for real estate companies. “If I were to do a property evaluation, I might get two different data sets for the same neighbourhood – with two different valuations!”
Inaccurate addresses can confound banks’ Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) procedures, affecting credit scoring judgments for both borrowers and lenders. - Inefficiency leading to increased costs: Bad addresses might lead to lost business for banks and financial institutions if they can’t reach customers with legal letters, claims, or even new debit and credit cards. In one example, a broadband provider visited an address to install a fiber connection – but found an empty lot when they arrived. This lack of address validation results in higher costs from redelivery attempts, wasted fuel and a larger carbon footprint for e-commerce, logistics and service providers.
Why become an address expert if you can hire one?
A solution that can turn messy address information into standardised, reliable address data can overcome all these issues – improving customer experience, operational efficiency and financial returns along the way. No more botched valuations! No more wasted fuel on wrong addresses!
But fixing this issue is not as simple as it looks. “Managers might think it’s a problem from CRM, data or digital analytics affecting downstream issues – only later realising it’s actually an address problem,” explains Luwize Tan, Loqate’s Head of Business Development (Southeast Asia). “That originates in an input field with no forms of checks or validation before it’s stored and used by connected systems.”
However they’re collected, building an effective address verification solution demands a robust infrastructure that most organisations simply can’t afford to build on their own.
It’s a huge challenge to consolidate disparate address data, reconcile duplicates into a single verifiable record, and create the systems needed to correct address data inputs in real time for just one country – let alone scale that capability to work in over 200 countries worldwide.
Handling this situation is best left to specialised providers like GBG Loqate, who’ve already invested in developing a global address verification solution with a proven track record of delivering accurate, real-time address validation at a truly global scale.
You can let Loqate put in the hard work verifying the Malaysian addresses on your database (which they already do on a global basis) – so you can comfortably focus on your business’s core competency.
“We take data sources from all over, and we standardise them into an easy-to-use structure across all countries,” Gunaseelan explains. “We provide the appropriate output format that you need to reach your customer.”
- Turning fragmented data into verified addresses: Loqate sources and curates the most comprehensive address data from multiple global sources, all to create a single "golden address" record, the term used for the most complete version of any given address.
In the case of Malaysia, Loqate collaborated with global address data suppliers (like GPS mapping companies) and hyperlocal experts like GrabMaps to collect verified addresses and create golden address records with a high degree of completeness.
Gunaseelan says Grab has been a particularly useful partner in boosting address reliability. “Grab has addresses they have delivered something to; that gives us the confidence to deem them valid addresses,” he explains.
“With GrabMaps, we’ve gone through the hard work of verifying around eight million out of 11 million addresses,” adds Luwize. - AI parsing and matching engines handle noisy input data, correct errors in real-time and achieve the highest possible address accuracy. “You might have multiple aliases representing the same place due to historical reasons,” Wai Kit tells us. “For us in Loqate, this calls for normalised data – if a customer were to key in one alias, we can actually return the primary, actual name.”
Loqate is built on an engine that reaches across the globe, making it far more powerful than the competition's single-country solution. “Why can't another company do the same thing we do? It will cost a lot of money because it will only be for one country,” Wai Kit says. “Our single engine works for 250 countries and territories.” - One API for global address validation: A provider like Loqate has already done the extensive research into each country's localisation needs, from Malaysian short forms to Makani numbers in the United Arab Emirates. Loqate provides a single API that you can plug into your platform – “a very stable, scalable API that handles millions and millions of verifications every minute,” as Luwize puts it, delivering standardised, validated addresses for all countries, while taking unique formats and hierarchies into account.
Cracking the Malaysian address code
For a new business entering Malaysia for the first time, getting addresses right should be a top priority. However, you can’t afford to sink time, money and resources into figuring out confusing local addressing conventions – resources better used for your key business operations.
That’s why partnering with Loqate makes sense: we’ve already invested in the data, artificial intelligence and global expertise needed to normalise Malaysian addresses and make them work for your business.
With Loqate, you’ll be using addresses like a local – finding out-of-the-way “mamak” stalls (and any other address you need for your business) without painful trial and error.
Want to see if Loqate is a good fit for your business? Schedule a demo today to receive a free data health consultation.