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Questions We Would Ask.

What is Vircle? How does Vircle work? Is Vircle safe?

Frequently asked questions

General Information

What is Vircle?

Vircle-short of Visible Circle, is a state-of-the-art parental control payments platform which allows you as a parent and wallet user to onboard and register children under your account and give them allowance digitally tied to a Vircle card or school card.

Vircle is the 1st of its kind parental control platform approved in Malaysia under the Financial Services Act 2013, governed throught the Electronic Money Instrument (EMI) regulations of Bank Negara Malaysia.

Using Vircle, you can safely provide spend approvals to your Child from your Vircle Wallet and track their spending and consumption.



Now, how does this help me as a parent?

Our 1st Launch is targeted for Parents, Kids and the cashless school environment where mobile phones are not allowed. Through Vircle, parents can digitally provide spend approvals to their children, have control and visibility of what their children spend and consume at school. Digital approvals are either mapped to the kids existing student cards, wearable devices or contactless cards supplied by Vircle through your child's school.

With Vircle you get to digitally control in real time any form of allwance you give your child and at the same time have visility on how they are spending it, what they buy with their money and so on. You can then use that data to have conversations with your child on nurturing better spending habits.



How does Vircle work?

With a Vircle app on the phone, Parents can select to approve for their kids several types of spend approval, depending on what your school supports:


Cash Approvals – You set a specific cash amount kids are allowed to spend and the limits, enabling children to spend on whatever they want within the limits you set.

Item Approvals* – You select specific items kids are allowed to purchase or pick up in any stores within the school.

Meal Plan Approvals* – You to pre-select and pay school meal plans by term and keep track of your child's consumption.

*Only available at supporting schools.

Your child then uses his or her school card, Vircle Wearable OR Vircle QR Card to scan their identity at a specific store and spend. When they spend on a cash approval, you will get feedback on exactly what they had purchased. For Item approval, you will know exactly what item was picked up at the designated store. For all food consumption, food nutrition value is scored and shared with you in your transaction history.



What is Allowance Given, Available Balance and Parent Wallet?

Parent Wallet : This is where all your top up money goes. Its safe and secure and your child has NO access the money you have in Parent wallet.

Allowance Given : Whenever you approve an allowance for your child to spend, the amount is set aside in the allowance given bucket. This money still sits with you but your child has permission to use it. If your child's allowance expires, the amount automatically reduces in allowance given and money goes back to Parent Wallet.

Available Balance : Available balance is a summary of how much money from your ewallet you can still allocate to your children.

In Simple math, Available Balance = Parent Wallet - Allowance Given.



What are the steps required to fully use Vircle?

Follow the following steps to be fully ready to use Vircle. You may find guide videos on our website www.vircle.com which may help you through the process.

Step 1: Download the Vircle App from the Google Play Store or Apple App Store.

Step 2: Register for a Vircle Account, Choose “Sign up” once your app has fully loaded. You will also be required to activate your Ewalet during this process.


Step 3: Add a V Friend. You would have received an welcome pack from us, distributed through the school which contains a QR code specific to your child. Follow the instruction and register your child’s personal details and health input.

Step 4: You will now see your Child listed under Vircles Page. Click on your Child’s photo and you will see details of approvals your child has. To provide your child a “V Give”, click on the Green icon on the low right side of your screen such as the following:

within your childs approval and it shall start the V Give approval process.

Step 5: Now that you have given a V Give approval, DO NOT forget to top up your wallet with money, else when you child tries to spend the approval, it will be rejected. Click on the Vircle logo at the center of your app or Go to Settings->Top Up Wallet and top up your wallet.

Step 6: Now you are ready, you can go back to each approval you have given and see how your child has spent and on what he or she has spent. For Food spending, you will now have visibility on nutrition score of what your child has eaten in school.

Why am I asked for my personal details such as NRIC or passport number?

Vircle uses the Electronic Wallet (E-wallet) technology to store your money digitally. E-Wallet is regulated by Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) under the Financial Services Act 2013 (FSA). As part of this regulation, we are legally required to know our customers through a legal and valid idenitity when storing and paying using the E-wallet.

This is to make sure your money is safe and it is not used for money luandering purposes. For this reason, we are legally obliged to collect and securely store your identity data, which is protected through our Terms of use and privacy policy.



Can I have multiple Vircle Apps?

As per BNM regulations, each mobile number may ONLY be linked to 1 Vircle Account. If you wish to have multiple Vircle Accounts, you may do so using a separate mobile number and phone.



Would 2 parents be allowed to manage a single Vircle V Friend (child)?

NO, only 1 parent is allowed to manage a child at this moment. Your child's payment card must be tied to only 1 Wallet at a time as required by regulators. As a primary parent, you can remove your child from your account via Friend Details -> Settings -> "remove friend" then your spouse may scan the child's QR code given originally by the school to add your child into your spouse's account. This is done to safeguard your Childs' security as we do not want a 3rd party person in future to add your child to their application and have access to your child's information or give them money without a parents approval.



What happens if my child loses the Vircle card or School ID card linked to Vircle

You Have 2 options:

1) Stop all allowance - No one can use your money

From your main screen,

a) Tap on child profile -> You will be taken into child profile page

b) You can see all allowance, tap each of it and Hit "Stop"

c) Confirm and the allowances will be removed from your child's approvals

2) Freeze card

From your main screen,

a) Tap on child profile -> You will be taken into child profile page

b) Select "Manage Card:

c) Tap on Freeze card, when its done, it will show "Unfreeze card"

d) You can unfreeze this card once you have found the physical card

If the card is lost, obtain a new card from school and they will link it to you child's account.



How does Vircle Protect privacy?

Vircle is governed by several laws of the country. Under the PDPA Act, we are legally bound to protect your identity, not disclose or sell any raw personal data to any 3rd parties. On the Wallet side, we are governed by the BNM Financial Services Act 2013, which has strict compliance requirements on data privacy. On technology security, all money movement, wallet top ups are done through secure PCI DSS security infrastructure. In layman terms, PCI DSS is bank grade security infrstructure and processes which needs to be adhered to before central banks allows our banking partners to operate. As a service provider, we have strict requirement to meet before we are allowed to integrate with these banking partner. How do we use user data? We use data generated from this platform to enrich you, our customers with insights on diet, wellbeing, spending and more. Hence, we process your consumption data to provider powerfull insights and intelligence back to you. We would from time to time share data with our partner schools and research partners but only anonymize data (example % of users, data based on collective age groups of users etc), i.e we will NOT share any identifiable personal data about you, our customer, or your V Friends (your child) to any 3rd parties. We would on certain circumstances be required to share actual personal data with regulators as stipulated under the laws of the country and that too only through formal investigative enquiries . Rest assured as a startup, we intend to grow big, trust worthy and note worthy on our social impact to society, we strife to take every steps required to continue to gain that trust from you.



What is a pre-paid meal plan?

Prepaid meal plans are weekly, monthly or term based meal plans your child's school may offer via Vircle. If your Child's school offers this, it shall be visible under your approval type. Prepaid meal plans are paid in advance via the Vircle app and will appear in our transaction history as "In-App Purchase". All prepaid meal plans are NON refundable by the store owner. As such please make sure you only purchase them when you have decided to put your child on a pre-paid meal plan or as mandated by your child's school.



I lost my phone, would i lose my money?

NO, dont worry. Your e-wallet funds sits in a safe trust account and cash out is NOT allowed from Vircle unless when you close your account. Just re-download Vircle application on your new phone and login with your existing Vircle credentials.



What do i need to use the Vircle user app?

You will need an Android Smartphone running Android version 7 and above OR Apple Iphone running iOS version 11.0 and above Starting with IPhone 8 Plus. These are mostly phones that have released late 2017 onwards. Vircle will not work on older OS version as it's been mandated by Bank Negara Malaysia that all new payment service providers must adhered to strict Android and iOS security needs.



Health & Wellbeing

How do I know if my child's meals are healthy?

Vircle brings expert nutritionists to review and grade every food item sold in your child's school canteen. We collect many nutrition details and nutrition content through these grading. To begin with, we provide a nutrition score display back to parents using what is called the Food Traffic light rating.

The Traffic Light ratings are an internationally recorgnized model and tells you if a product is low (green), medium (amber), or high (red) in these food components, based on widely-accepted nutritional standards.

Red – indicates a less healthy choice; fine for an occasional treat, but think about how often you choose it and how much of it you eat.

Amber – this choice is OK, but going for choices labelled green is better.

Green – a healthier choice."



How do I find out more info on this Traffic Light rating system?

Pls refer to this webpage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light_rating_system



How do I enter my child's allergies in the app?

When you onboard your child onto the app, you will be required to key in personal details of your child into the app. this includes regulatory information we are required to capature by Bank Negara Malaysia and you will also be prompted to set your childs health and well being data which helps us better provide for your child's needs.

Health and wellbeing data collected from you includes your Childs' weight, height, allergy details and also specific notes you woud like to write to any store owner whom interacts with you child.

If for example your child has limited ability in learning, hearing or speaking and you would like a store owner to take extra caution, you may add these into notes and when your child interacts with the store owner, these notes will be displayed to the store owner.



Why does the app not have information on preservatives, colouring, additives and allergens?

At this stage Vircle does not include information on colours, preservatives, additives, or allergens. However we are collecting additional ingredient information, working closely with canteen operators at your Child’s school and our nutritionists to better profile the food quality. We intend to have these additional data in the upcoming versions of the app will aim to include even more functionality.



Why should I be concerned about choosing healthy food for my child?

Many everyday school foods can be high in salt, fat (including saturated fat) and sugar. They can also be high in energy (kilojoules), thanks to growing portion sizes. All these factors can contribute to health problems like obesity, hypertension (high blood pressure), type 2 diabetes and high blood cholesterol. In turn, these can lead to a greater risk of heart attack, stroke and some cancers. These conditions develop during childhood and would be even worse during adulthood. Making even small changes to our diets, like consuming less salt, sugar, fat (especially saturated fat) and energy (kilojoules), can prevent many of these health problems.



What has Vircle got to do with Health?

Childhod Obesity and Malnourishment is one of the biggest challenges of modern day with up to 1.65M Malayian kids and up to 30% of Asian kids expected to be Obese or malnourished by 2025. There is ample literature showing that this has direct impact on academic achievement of kids in schools. The founders are parents of young children too and we felt its a big enough problem to quiet over 20 years of our corporate careers and invest all our live savings to look into this issue. We wish to address this problem by helping parents gain insights into eating habits of children in school, followed by other powerfull analytics and guidance which impact a kids academic acheivements. thus far, this has been a challenge to researchers and clinicians due to the following; 1- lack of entry points to collect data which helps detect children's eating habits and nutrition intake early on to predict and give parents early indication of problems to come. 2- lack of an entry point to guide parents into corrective actions early on to build healthy eating and nurturing habits, inclusive of financial literacy for the young. Parents usually turn to help when their kids show symptoms but usually there are time bound signs which can be picked up by our AI engine which we train based on the food consumption of kids. 3 - General lack of awareness of what is right and wrong. Proactive education. Hence we built a cashless solution which is NOT just focussed on cashless but one which works with our Partner schools to analyze all food items being sold in school, nutrition content of those food and eating habits of kids which may have long term impact of a Childs' well being. This is then profiled against the Ministry of Healthy Recommended Nutrition Intake which is tailored to your Childs age, gender, BMI value etc. Vircle is a "Cashless Solution with a mission", a mission to enrich the life of the people that matters to us, our Kids. Vircle - The Circle that Matters!