Driven by rapid digitisation, Indian enterprises are increasingly deploying multi-gateway strategies to handle mounting transaction volumes and guarantee seamless payment experiences. However, managing fragmented payment channels often introduces operational friction, elevated integration expenses, and tied-up working capital. To solve these systemic hurdles, DBS Bank India recently expanded its merchant collection platform, DBS MAX, in partnership with Juspay to offer full-suite collections orchestration, intelligent payment routing, and gateway-agnostic tokenisation.
In an exclusive interaction with FE B2B BFSI, Divyesh Dalal, Managing Director and Country Head – Global Transaction Services, Corporate Banking - Financial Institutions and SMEs at DBS Bank India, unpacks how the bank is reimagining corporate transaction banking. He shares insights on doubling the bank's SME asset book between FY23 and FY26, leveraging GST and bank statement analytics for cash-flow-based underwriting, and expanding digital liquidity solutions across non-metro industrial clusters.
Edited Excerpts:Q. What specific lift in transaction approval rates and reduction in developer hours is Collections Orchestration delivering to merchants through DBS MAX?
With the ubiquity of online businesses and rising consumer comfort with digital payments, adopting multiple gateways has become standard practice for merchants seeking to support growing transaction volumes and maintain payment resilience. Through our expanded DBS MAX platform powered by our partnership with Juspay, we offer intelligent payment routing based on merchant-defined rules and real-time payment performance, providing access to multiple aggregators via a single integration.
Unlike pure-play payment aggregators that focus strictly on front-end acceptance, DBS integrates collection flows directly into clients' treasury and ERP workflows. This single-dashboard, single-integration architecture significantly cuts developer setup hours, lowers management complexity, and eliminates the need to maintain separate tech stacks for individual gateways. By dynamically selecting the most efficient path for every transaction, our intelligent routing achieves higher transaction approval rates, provides superior system uptime, and incorporates automated reconciliation, liquidity management, and treasury capabilities into a unified operating model.Q. How does your gateway-agnostic tokenisation and offer management module prevent merchant lock-in across payment aggregators and reduce revenue drop-offs during recurring B2B billing cycles?
The collections orchestration engine on DBS MAX fundamentally decouples a merchant’s underlying payment infrastructure from individual payment service providers (PSPs). This gateway-agnostic structure allows businesses to switch or reconfigure payment partners without forcing end-customers to re-enter payment credentials, effectively eliminating vendor lock-in and migration friction.
For recurring B2B billing and mandate renewals, revenue leakages typically stem from technical drops, expired card credentials, or authentication friction. By pairing tokenisation with automated retry logic and intelligent routing, we preserve payment continuity, reduce failed renewals, and minimise involuntary churn, thereby protecting recurring revenue streams. Furthermore, our underlying API platform, DBS RAPID, embeds banking functions including real-time collections, notifications, automated statement delivery, FX services, and balance reporting directly into client ERPs to prevent revenue drop-offs across the entire billing lifecycle.Q. How much faster are merchants clearing funds when combining Collections Orchestration with DBS MAX, and what operational cost savings does the unified dashboard yield?
Traditional settlement cycles like T+2 or T+3 create considerable working capital drag due to manual reconciliation across disconnected payment provider portals. DBS MAX shifts businesses away from fragmented manual interventions toward automated, real-time digital workflows. For eligible transactions, enabling real-time or near real-time settlement significantly accelerates access to funds, enhancing instant cash-flow visibility and optimising liquidity management.
Operationally, the unified dashboard consolidates collections, refunds, and multi-gateway reporting under a single interface. This centralised framework removes the heavy administrative overhead of auditing disparate aggregator statements, offering actionable transaction analytics while lowering reconciliation overhead and operational expenditure for client finance teams.Q. What is your current SME portfolio growth trajectory, and how are transaction insights from platforms like DBS IDEAL aiding cash-flow-based underwriting?
Driven by robust demand across micro, small, and medium enterprise segments, our focused strategy has enabled us to more than double our SME asset book over the three-year period from FY2023 to FY2026. We view strong risk management as the bedrock of this continuous, high-momentum asset growth.
To sustain this trajectory, we utilise real-time transaction insights from our business banking platform, DBS IDEAL, as a foundational element of our cash-flow-based credit assessment model. Instead of relying solely on historical financial statements, our proprietary risk assessment engines analyse bank statements and GST data to evaluate actual business health. As an industry, banks are moving towards deploying AI and machine learning to analyse transaction data to spot cash flow trends and early risk signals in real time to offer SMEs real-time financing based on their actual transaction behaviour.Q. How is DBS expanding digital cash management tools to Tier-2 and Tier-3 industrial clusters such as Surat or Ludhiana, and what footprint do you hold across non-metro markets?
We have actively extended our digital transaction banking capabilities beyond metro hubs into emerging Tier-2 and Tier-3 industrial clusters where export activity and SME growth are surging. Today, our physical presence spans over 180 SME-focused locations, giving us coverage across more than 70% of the addressable SME market in India.
By combining this physical footprint with our digital platforms DBS IDEAL, DBS RAPID, and DBS MAX, business owners in regional manufacturing centers like Surat and Ludhiana can perform complex treasury and cash management operations on-the-go without visiting a physical branch. Non-metro SMEs represent a meaningful and steadily expanding share of our total client portfolio as industrial and trading activity decentralises across India, and we expect this segment to drive a significant portion of our future growth.
As feature in Financial Express
World’s Best Bank 2025, 2021, 2019, Euromoney
World’s Best Bank for Customer Experience 2025, Euromoney
World’s Best Bank for Corporate Responsibility 2025, 2023, Euromoney
Asia’s Safest Bank, 2009 – 2025, Global Finance
Best Bank in the World 2022, Global Finance
India’s Best International Bank 2021, Asiamoney
World’s Best Banks - #1 in India 2021, Forbes
World’s Safest Commercial Bank 2021, Global Finance
