Journal
What a Malaysian introducer letter usually fails to say
The introducer letters we are shown in Cheras are often a page and a half. They name the parties, a courtesy or overrun share, and a commencement date. They are silent on duration, on who may send a name, on whether a quotation that fails still earns a courtesy, and on what happens when the person who signed has moved to another floor.
That silence is not always careless. Some brokerages prefer a short letter because the relationship is older than the firm’s current stationery. The difficulty arrives years later, when accounts is still paying on a standing instruction and nobody can point to a sentence that justifies it.
Before a partner meeting we read the letter aloud with the principal. We mark every absence. Absence is not the same as prohibition, but it is a poor thing to discover while the other side is already sitting down. If the letter never defined ‘referred business’, the working file will show how the office has in fact treated it: bound only, or quoted also, or anything with that surname in the diary.
We are not solicitors. We do not redraft the letter unless you separately ask a lawyer to. What we will do is put the current practice next to the current paper, so the conversation is about the gap rather than about last year’s lunch.
If your letters still live in a ring file behind the receptionist, bring the file to the intake call on video, or leave it out for the on-site days. A missing letter is itself a finding. Staff will have been honouring a memory.