Building on our resilience for the future

2025 was a transformative year for DBS Technology. We redefined our technology roadmap, reimagined our operating model and redoubled our commitment towards managing risk and strengthening resiliency.

At the beginning of the year, we launched our Tech Future Town blueprint, a three-year plan to build future-ready technology capabilities to drive faster recovery, fortify security and optimise resource allocation. Our approach is anchored on our R.I.S.E. framework – Resiliency, Innovation, Security and Efficiency – with architecture principles at its core. These include how we align our technology infrastructure with business objectives, use modular and reusable systems, work with vendors, employ AI in our engineering and automate processes. Ultimately, these lay the foundation for enhancing scalability, security and agility.

We also transformed how technology works throughout our software development and technology systems to support our drive to be an AI-enabled bank with a heart. AI has been a powerful catalyst in accelerating automation at scale, from use case generation and code development to deployment and monitoring. We embed efficiency and resilience into every stage. AI also powers incident management and infrastructure operations, enabling predictive insights and faster recovery. This creates a seamless, human-centric and adaptive operating model that empowers teams to improve quality and resiliency, reduce complexity and scale innovation.

Complementing our technological enhancement is our Tech Risk Culture Programme which enhances the robust risk culture that underpins our ability to provide critical financial services in our markets. As risks evolve, our employees are empowered to continue upholding the highest compliance standards and innovate responsibly without compromising resiliency and security.

Resilience – Turning commitment into measurable impact

We continued to embed resiliency as a shared responsibility. Our approach is anchored on our Predict, Prevent, Detect and Recover framework to deliver resilience by design:

• Predict: We strengthened our ability to anticipate potential risks through proactive risk identification and assessment. Our structured approach which includes a unified risk taxonomy and enhanced metrics enables us to identify emerging issues early.
• Prevent: We tightened end-to-end change management and automated credential management. Policy enforcement is being increasingly automated, while our technology risk culture continues to reinforce accountability and compliance.
• Detect: We deployed tiered observability dashboards with a customer journey lens in our core markets to identify anomalies before customers are impacted. Real-time correlation of application and infrastructure signals also enable faster identification.
• Recover: We defined and implemented alternate recovery pathways across our markets. We also successfully executed recovery flips for critical applications and validated our readiness for diverse scenarios through industry-wide tabletop exercises and third-party drills.

As a critical part of our Tech Future Town roadmap, we began a multi-year mainframe transformation to enhance resiliency and scalability. Concurrently, we advanced re-platforming initiatives across our core markets, simplifying architecture and reducing operational risk.

Innovation – Scaling AI to power enterprise transformation

Innovation remains key to how DBS delivers technology and business value. Our enterprise data and analytics platform, ADA, continued to deliver secure, governed and scalable data utility, with code deployment time cut by 25% and model deployment cycles reduced to between seven and 10 weeks. We enabled the implementation of over 2,000 AI models across more than 430 use cases. In 2025, our data analytics and AI/ ML initiatives delivered economic value of approximately SGD 1 billion.

We also introduced a Gen AI framework which provided standards for reusable components, governance guardrails, workflow capabilities and prompt engineering. This enabled teams to design, deploy and scale Gen AI applications responsibly, unlocking tangible business outcomes. These include Gen AI-powered adverse news screening tools that boost productivity and DBS Joy, our corporate banking chatbot which delivers seamless 24/7 customer support to our corporate and SME customers.

Beyond AI, we advanced our innovation journey on digital assets. This includes tokenising and distributing structured notes on a public blockchain, broadening investor access. We continued participating in government and industry initiatives around wholesale payments, programmable money and the tokenisation of financial assets to expand our tokenisation capabilities and to integrate digital asset solutions with our banking offerings. We further strengthened our innovation engine by embedding automation, standardising workflows, and integrating governance across our technology lifecycle.

Our enhanced technology operating workflows form the backbone of our enterprise technology strategy – enabling DBS to innovate responsibly at speed and to adopt more resilient, future-ready operating models.

Security – Building trust through continuous vigilance

We remain committed to robust cybersecurity that is well-adapted for the evolving cyber threat environment. Our focus remains on safeguarding systems, data and the trust placed in us by customers and employees.

Our cybersecurity strategy employs a multi-layered defence across key channels for continuous protection and rapid response to evolving threats. In 2025, we advanced this commitment with initiatives designed to reduce risk and improve resilience:

• Proactive defences: We regularly assess and refine our security posture to anticipate emerging risks by leveraging external threat intelligence and industry insights. This allows us to identify patterns, benchmark best practices, and adapt our defences to evolving global threat landscapes.
• Faster threat response: We fortified our processes to swiftly address malicious activity and protect customers through enhanced monitoring, real-time alerts and streamlined incident response protocols.

Our cybersecurity efforts were validated externally through certifications such as the Cyber Trust Mark Advocate – the highest tier – by the Cybersecurity Agency of Singapore, ISO27001 and Data Protection Trustmark. These highlight our alignment with industry best practices. We also achieved SOC2 (System and Organisation Controls) Type 2 certification, a rigorous independent audit that affirmed our adherence to the highest standards of data security and privacy. Additionally, we received the Association of Information Security Professionals Cybersecurity Enterprises MNC (End User) award in recognition of our contributions to cybersecurity in Singapore and the robustness of our programme.

We will continue to embed cybersecurity into our technology culture and processes and collaborate across teams to safeguard the security of our digital and banking infrastructure.

Efficiency – Driving scale through automation

We leveraged automation to transform the way we build, deploy and operate technology. Today, most production deployments put through our Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/ Deployment pipeline, as well as over 85% of regression testing are automated. These advancements enabled us to deliver new features and enhancements to our customers faster, with greater consistency and quality.

As we embedded automation across the delivery lifecycle, we engaged our workforce through targeted change communications, including e-newsletters and technology talks. This led to strong adoption of our automation toolset, with over 90% of employees confident that these tools alleviate workload and enable focus on higher-value tasks such as customer solutioning. By removing bottlenecks and streamlining processes, we accelerated our transformation and reinforced our commitment to operational excellence.

Investing in our people – Empowering growth in a tech-driven future

Our people remain at the heart of our transformation. Since 2024, we redoubled efforts to strengthen our technology risk culture by cultivating proactive risk management, open communication and a shared sense of responsibility. This safeguards the bank’s interests as a critical financial service in our core markets and enables us to continue meeting regulatory expectations.

We worked with behavioural experts to identify desirable traits and positive risk behaviours to inculcate in our technology workforce. Workshops were conducted across all levels to shape interventions to cultivate these behaviours and embed them in daily operations. We aim to promote psychological safety, transparency and clear accountability, which enables us to uphold the highest compliance standards, promote responsible innovation and drive efficiency through automation in a safe and transparent environment. In doing so, we are building future-ready teams equipped to meet evolving technology trends and regulatory demands.

We also fostered an inclusive environment by establishing channels that encourage and recognise early risk identification and resolution, celebrating employees for exemplary risk management. We also continued to uplift capabilities and strengthen our risk mindset through targeted learning programmes, including incident-based reviews, technology risk awareness sessions and workshops on key risk areas.

To prepare our workforce for the AI era, we launched an AI upskilling curriculum for developers and project managers in 2025. This provides a structured pathway to build future-ready skills through four key pillars: technical skills (focusing on business domain knowledge; AI (drawing from external expertise as well as training on the bank’s in-house AI tools); change management (curated from bank-wide leadership and personal effectiveness offerings) and soft skills. We incorporated training for role-based prompt engineering and workflow automation to maximise the effectiveness of AI tools including DevAI and Jira Assistant. By focusing on continuous learning and responsible innovation, we create clear pathways for career growth and empower our people to thrive in an AI-enabled future.

In closing

In 2026, we will continue building on the substantial progress made in our ongoing technology transformation. We are deepening our commitment to adopting technology responsibly, strengthening operational resilience and scaling AI-driven innovation across the enterprise. Our R.I.S.E. framework has set us on the right path to fortify trust with our customers by delivering dependable banking services and equipping our technology workforce with future-ready skills for an AI-enabled world. Together, we are creating the next chapter of banking driven by agility, responsibility and purpose.