Touch ’n Go eWallet Brand Guidelines: A 1997 Toll Card, TNG Digital & a Glitched Icon

From the Jalan Pahang toll plaza to a phone.

Touch ’n Go began as a card, not an app. English Wikipedia says the contactless smart-card system was developed by Teras Teknologi, while the brand and its central clearing system were owned and run by Rangkaian Segar Sdn Bhd, now Touch ’n Go Sdn Bhd. The first system went into use at the Jalan Pahang toll plaza on 18 March 1997, and by 15 November 1998 it covered the whole of the North–South Expressway, Wikipedia says.

The card spread from tolls into daily travel. The company’s own timeline lists SmartTAG, an in-car unit for toll lanes, in 2000; cards on trains and buses in 2008; and on-street parking in 2011, the year it says every highway had adopted the card. Wikipedia adds that the national identity card, MyKad, has carried a Touch ’n Go chip since 2001, that Touch ’n Go became the common ticket for Klang Valley rail and bus lines in 2002, and that it and SmartTAG were made compulsory on all expressways from 1 July 2004. Co-branded versions followed, among them a PLUSMiles card for the PLUS expressways and a Malaysian Tesco Clubcard with Touch ’n Go features from 2014.

The step into software came in 2017, when Touch ’n Go and Ant Financial set up TNG Digital. The two companies date the app differently: the Touch ’n Go group’s timeline places the launch of the Touch ’n Go eWallet in 2017, alongside the new venture, while TNG Digital’s own page says it launched TNG eWallet in 2018. Both describe an app that grew out of toll and transport payments. Wikipedia describes it as a way to link a physical card and to pay at some tolls through a feature called PayDirect, though the app balance and the card balance stay separate.

From tolls to GOfinance.

The app now reaches well beyond the highway. TNG Digital’s timeline lists a money-back guarantee policy in 2019; in 2020, support for the eTunai Rakyat initiative and a place in the DuitNow QR network, which let users pay at more merchants; and in 2021 GO+, which it calls its first financial-services product, together with a move into insurance through CarInsure. GOinvest and the GOpinjam loan service followed in 2022, the year TNG Digital says TNG eWallet became the first Malaysian e-wallet accepted for payments in mainland China. In 2023 came a Touch ’n Go eWallet Visa card, the GOrewards loyalty programme and the GOremit remittance service.

The company’s entries for 2025 and 2026 turn toward business users and visitors: a TNG Digital Business Account for micro businesses and gig workers, access for tourists from nine ASEAN countries, work with the UNHCR on digital financial access for refugees in Malaysia, and, in 2026, the EPOS360 and EPOS360 BlueTap point-of-sale terminals made with EPOS. The company says it received the Putra Brand Awards 2023 title of Brand of the Year and a platinum People’s Choice award in the e-commerce category.

Scale comes from the company’s own figures. In a written reply to The Star, published on 6 August 2025, TNG Digital said it had 29.8 million registered users at March 2025 and 14.9 million average transacting users, and that GO+, a micro-investment feature for wallet balances, served nearly 3.6 million active users. By June 2026 the company was citing more than 26 million verified users and 13.5 million monthly active users, Marketing-Interactive reported.

How Asian e-wallets present themselves.

Asian e-wallets and payment apps tend to present themselves first through a small square: the app icon. Bright blues, greens, pinks, purples and oranges are common choices, often with a single letter or a short word set in a rounded sans, because the icon has to be found quickly on a crowded phone screen and read at the size of a fingertip. The same colour usually carries through to buttons, cards and the bar at the top of the home screen.

The QR code is the other recurring image. Many wallets grew up around scanning a printed code at a shop counter, and national standards such as QRIS in Indonesia and QR Ph in the Philippines mean one code can often be read by several apps. Marketing pages show phones held over codes, stickers on stall fronts and receipts on screen, so the payment itself becomes part of the identity.

Names and taglines often lean on the local language and on everyday speech. Product families frequently share a prefix or a letter, so that savings, credit, insurance and investment features read as parts of one app. Promotions bring their own visual layer: cashback badges, countdown timers, vouchers and, for some brands, mascots or illustrated characters that soften a financial product.

Behind the consumer screens sit two other audiences. Websites usually divide into pages on transfers, bills, mobile top-ups, micro-loans and pay-later credit for users, and pages on QR acceptance, payouts and point-of-sale tools for merchants. A third layer of newsroom, regulatory and investor pages has grown as several of these companies have joined stock exchanges, and those pages tend to use a quieter version of the same palette.

A glitched icon and “a new chapter.”

Ownership is shared. The Star reported on 6 August 2025 that CIMB Group, through its wholly owned Touch ’n Go Sdn Bhd, held 45.01% of TNG Digital, with Antfin Singapore Holding at 23%, Alipay Singapore Holdings at 11.62%, Lazadapay Holdings at 11.38%, ASP Malaysia LP at 5.99% and AIA Bhd at 3%. CIMB said then that TNG Digital had turned profitable and was in no rush to list on the stock market; TNG Digital said it had recorded quarterly profits since the third quarter of 2024.

The identity was tested in public in June 2026. Marketing-Interactive reported on 4 June that the app had swapped its familiar icon for a “glitched” version, that its Instagram, TikTok and Xiaohongshu profiles had taken glitched pictures and cleared their feeds, and that a single teaser video ended with the words “A new chapter begins. Coming soon.” A day later the same title reported the reveal: a refreshed app with a search-first home screen built around four hubs, GOfinance, Near me, Bills and Transport, a bottom navigation bar redrawn for one-handed use, and a 40-second brand film, “One app, semua onz,” that follows five characters. A TNG Digital spokesperson told the magazine the cyberpunk-styled teaser deliberately disrupted the app icon, which the company counts among its most recognisable brand assets, to make users look at the platform again.

For a design guide, Touch ’n Go eWallet shows how a name first printed on a toll card can carry over to a phone app, with the app icon becoming the brand’s most visible signal. Compare Grab, the Southeast Asian super-app, and GCash, the Philippine e-wallet. For this guide we use a deep toll-lane blue, a bright sky blue and a signal yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Touch ’n Go eWallet’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.