How to Check a Malaysian Company Before You Give Credit: The RM40.80 SSM Search, Step by Step

The SSM half of a pre-credit check on a Malaysian company costs RM40.80 and takes about twenty minutes.

An SSM e-Info Company Profile is RM15.40. The Company Charges search is RM25.40. Together that is RM40.80, and those two documents answer most of what you need to know before you release goods, mobilise to site, or agree payment terms with somebody you have never traded with.

What follows is the sequence, the real prices as at September 2026, and the four places where the search quietly fails to tell you what you assumed it was telling you.

What SSM actually charges

Prices come straight from SSM's own e-Info price list, in the NON-CTC column. They are correct as at 10 September 2026, and you should re-check them before building any of these figures into an internal process.

Certified true copies cost more, but not by a fixed multiple. A Company Profile is RM15.40 uncertified and RM30.80 certified, exactly double. The RM25.40 register extracts are RM40.80 certified, around 60% more.

The fixed period Financial Comparison products, at 2, 3, 5 and 10 years, are sold uncertified only. The separate Financial Historical Comparison is available both ways, at RM25.40 uncertified and RM40.80 certified.

Product	Price, NON-CTC	What it is for
Company Profile (ROC)	RM15.40	Identity, status, capital, directors, shareholders
Company Charges	RM25.40	Who already has security over the assets
Particulars of Directors/Officers	RM25.40	Current board, where the profile is not enough
Particulars of Shareholders	RM25.40	Ownership, and who really controls the company
Financial Comparison, 2 years	RM25.40	Direction of travel over two filings
Financial Comparison, 3 years	RM35.40	Enough to see a trend rather than one bad year
Financial Comparison, 5 years	RM55.40	A cycle, for a counterparty you will carry for years
Financial Comparison, 10 years	RM105.40	Rarely worth it outside a dispute
Attestation of Company Good Standing	RM105.40	When a third party demands formal proof

Most write-ups quote only the 2 year and 10 year financial comparisons and describe everything between as an upper limit. That hides two products. The 3 year comparison at RM35.40 is usually the right buy, because two filings cannot distinguish a bad year from a decline.

One practical detail people get caught by. SSM's FAQ states that a purchased document is only available in the system for seven days from the transaction date. Download it and file it the same day, or you pay again.

Where you buy	What it costs	What you get	When to use it
SSM e-Search	Free	A basic lookup on a registration number	Confirming a number you were given resolves at all
SSM e-Info	Published price list	The documents themselves, priced per product	Almost every check in this guide
SSM MyDATA	Not published on SSM's own pages	Overlapping products to e-Info	An alternative SSM portal. Confirm the price before you commit
Unofficial resellers	More, and variable	Sometimes the same document, sometimes a summary of it	Never, if you can avoid it

The free search, and exactly what it will not do

SSM runs a lookup called e-Search, and almost every guide online describes it wrongly.

Two errors are common. The first is that e-Search only covers sole proprietorships and partnerships. That is wrong: the registration type dropdown offers company registration numbers in both the old and new formats, business registration numbers in both formats, and LLP registration numbers.

The second error is more expensive. Several well ranked pages tell you that you can search e-Search by company name.

SSM's own e-Search page has exactly two inputs: a registration type dropdown and a registration number field. There is no name field and no name option.

So if all you have is a name on a purchase order, e-Search cannot help you. You need the e-Info or MyDATA portals, where a name lookup is free once you have a registered account, though the document itself is not.

SSM does not publish what fields e-Search returns, and the secondary sources that claim to know disagree with each other. Treat it as basic identification data and nothing more.

Use it as a first pass on a registration number, then buy the profile for anything you intend to rely on.

What a Company Profile returns, and what is sold separately

A Company Profile is the identity document: who the company is, what its registration number and status are, its share capital, and its directors, officers and shareholders. Check the sample PDF on the e-Info product page for the current field list, because the layout has changed over the years.

Note what is not in that list. Charges are a separate purchase. So are multi-year financials.

SSM's Bahasa Malaysia product page describes the profile more generously and appears to include both, which contradicts the English page as at September 2026. Buy the separate products rather than relying on which page is right.

Buy the profile expecting identity, status, capital and people. Buy anything financial or security related as its own product.

The charges search, and what it tells you about your position

This is the RM25.40 that most suppliers skip and should not.

A charge is security a company has granted over its property or undertaking, typically a debenture in favour of a bank. If there is a registered debenture, the bank ranks ahead of you on those assets. You are an unsecured creditor standing behind it, and the charges search is how you find that out before you decide the size of the exposure rather than after.

Under SSM's Guidelines for Registration of Charges, a statement of particulars must be lodged within 30 days from the date of creation of the charge, under section 352 of the Companies Act 2016. Lodging late requires a court order extending time.

Two things follow for you as a supplier. A charge created in the last month may not appear yet, so a clean search is a snapshot rather than a guarantee. And a charge that was never registered is generally understood to be void against the liquidator and other creditors, which sounds helpful until you remember that it only helps in a liquidation you did not want to be in.

Is this company already dying?

Three free or cheap checks, in the order they are worth running.

MDI e-Insolvensi

Jabatan Insolvensi Malaysia's e-Insolvensi portal offers an individual bankruptcy status search and a company winding up status search. Both, not just bankruptcy, which is how it is usually described. Payment is through internet banking, and MDI does not publish the fee on the portal page.

Striking off notices

SSM publishes batch lists of companies it proposes to strike off, stated to be published pursuant to section 551(1) of the Companies Act 2016. The Registrar may strike the name off after thirty days from publication of that notification.

This is free, it is on SSM's own site, and it is the earliest formal signal that a company has stopped filing.

Winding up petitions

Under rule 24 of the Companies (Winding-Up) Rules 1972, a petition has to be advertised in the Gazette and in local newspapers seven clear days before the hearing, or such longer time as the court directs. That means a petition is public before any order is made. A creditor watching the advertisements sees trouble earlier than one who runs a status check, because a status check only shows you what has already happened.

The CCRIS question, answered properly

You cannot pull your customer's CCRIS report. Bank Negara Malaysia's own CCRIS FAQ answers this directly: "The CCRIS Report can only be furnished to the person who is the owner of the information." That refusal extends to a guarantor asking for the borrower's report and to a borrower asking for the guarantor's.

Plenty of pages stop there and leave the reader thinking there is nothing to be done. There is.

The company's own directors or authorised representatives can obtain the company's report with the right corporate documents. So ask them for it. Requesting that a prospective customer produce their own CCRIS extract as part of a credit application is legitimate, it is what banks do, and a refusal is itself informative.

Credit reporting agencies are the other route, and they operate under the Credit Reporting Agencies Act 2010. An agency cannot carry on credit reporting business unless it is registered, and it must obtain the subject's consent before disclosing a credit report to a subscriber.

Credit application forms commonly carry a consent clause, and that clause is what the credit reporting agency route depends on. Worth checking yours has one.

The litigation search and its blind spots

A CTOS e-court search tells you whether your counterparty is being sued, which is often the most current signal available. It has two limits that CTOS publishes itself.

CTOS states that it "is only applicable to cases from 2010 onwards", and that it "does not cover cases in Perlis, Sabah, and Sarawak".

The second limit is the one that costs money. Sabah and Sarawak carry a large share of Malaysian construction, plantation and logistics counterparties.

A clean e-court result on an East Malaysian company tells you almost nothing, and a credit process that treats it as a green light is quietly running unmeasured risk. CTOS states the report is available in one working day, so this is not an instant check you can run while a customer waits on the phone.

What each check cannot tell you

Every check in this guide has a blind spot, and the blind spots are where the losses live. Read this before you treat a clean set of results as an answer.

The check	What it tells you	What it does not tell you
Company Profile	Identity, status, capital, directors and shareholders	Whether the company is paying anyone
Company Charges	Whether a lender already holds security over the assets	A charge created in the last 30 days, which may not be lodged yet
MDI e-Insolvensi	Whether a formal insolvency process has started	Trouble that has not reached a court yet
Striking off notifications	That the company has stopped filing	Anything about its trading position
CTOS e-court search	Suits filed against the company from 2010 onwards	Anything in Perlis, Sabah or Sarawak, at all
Financial Comparison	Direction of travel across filed years	The current position, which can be a year or more ahead

The twenty minute SSM checklist

Run these in order. The first three take a few minutes each and answer most of the question.

Step	Where	Cost	What kills the deal
1. Run the registration number you were given through e-Search	SSM e-Search	Free	The number does not resolve at all
2. Buy the Company Profile	SSM e-Info	RM15.40	Status is not active, or issued capital is trivial against the exposure
3. Buy the Company Charges search	SSM e-Info	RM25.40	A debenture over the whole undertaking, with nothing left for you
4. Check winding up and bankruptcy status	MDI e-Insolvensi	Paid, fee not shown on the portal page	Any live proceeding
5. Check the striking off notifications	SSM notification page	Free	The company appears in a batch
6. Order a litigation search	CTOS e-court	Subscription	Writs from other suppliers. Remember the East Malaysia gap
7. Ask the customer for their own CCRIS extract and trade references	Your credit application form	Free	Refusal, or an extract that does not match what they told you

Seven steps. Three are free, two come to RM40.80 together, and two more, the MDI status check and the CTOS litigation search, cost money that neither publishes on a per search basis.

Set against a first order you are about to ship on 60 day terms, none of that is a budget decision.

One warning about where you buy

The search results for SSM company searches are heavily populated by unofficial resellers. Some charge more for the same document, and some sell you a summary of it rather than the document itself.

Buy from SSM's own portals, and check the domain before you pay.

SSM operates two authorised information portals, e-Info and MyDATA. e-Info publishes a full price list. MyDATA does not publish prices at all, which is why every figure in this guide is an e-Info figure and is labelled as one.

FAQ

Can I check a Malaysian company for free?

Partly. e-Search gives you a basic lookup on a registration number, and SSM's striking off notifications are free to browse. Anything that tells you about the company's finances, its security position or its litigation costs money.

How current are the accounts I can buy from SSM?

Less current than you would expect. A private company has six months from its financial year end to circulate its financial statements and thirty days after that to lodge them, so filed accounts are already around seven months old when they arrive. By the time you buy them they can easily be a year or more out of date, and still perfectly compliant.

Does a clean SSM search mean the company is safe to give credit to?

No. It means nothing adverse had been recorded at the moment you looked.

A charge created in the last thirty days may not have been lodged yet, an East Malaysian writ will not appear at all in a CTOS e-court search, and a company can be paying nobody without any of it reaching a public register.

What should I ask for when the search comes back thin?

Management accounts, three months of bank statements, two or three trade references you actually call, and a director's guarantee whose value depends heavily on its own wording. Large buyers publish their own credit application requirements, and they are a useful benchmark for what you are entitled to ask.

Do I need the customer's permission for any of this?

Not for the SSM searches, which are public records. Yes for anything involving a credit reporting agency, and yes for CCRIS, which only the subject can obtain. That is why the consent clause in the credit application form matters more than any single search.

Foundation Conclusion

A pre-credit check is cheap, public, and most suppliers still skip the RM25.40 that tells them whether a bank already ranks ahead of them.

The search tells you who you are dealing with. What it cannot do is transfer the exposure, and on project work that job belongs to the contract: retention, bonds, deposits and the insurance schedule.

Foundation is a specialist property and engineering insurance intermediary. We help operators insure the risks that compliance is designed to manage.

Talk to our risk specialists about contract security for your next project

A counterparty check is one half of the exercise. The other half is what happens contractually when the counterparty fails anyway: retention, bonds, payment security, and whether your own insurance responds to a loss on a site you no longer control.

If you are a contractor rather than a supplier, the same question runs in reverse and the answer is usually a bond. Our guides on what bond underwriters actually check and letters of guarantee cover that side. For contractors verifying a subcontractor rather than a customer, start with subcontractor insurance verification and the CIDB registration check.

One thing to be clear about. None of the covers below answers a customer who simply does not pay, and any page suggesting otherwise is selling you the wrong product.

What they do respond to is physical loss or damage, which is the exposure a failed counterparty tends to leave sitting with you on a half finished site or on goods already released. That is CAR and EAR territory, and goods in transit and stock throughput cover for the goods. Whether either responds in your particular case is a question for the schedule, not the product name.

Disclaimer: This article provides general guidance based on the Companies Act 2016, the Credit Reporting Agencies Act 2010, and published SSM and Bank Negara Malaysia information and insurance coverage available in the Malaysian market as of September 2026. Regulations may be amended and policy terms vary by insurer. Always verify requirements with SSM, Bank Negara Malaysia or the relevant agency, or consult qualified professionals, before making decisions.