The world’s best

The world’s best

Honoured to be recognised by the world’s top financial publications

The world’s best

 

Most Innovative Bank 2023 – Global (1 of 5 global winners)

Content first published by Global Finance on 31 May 2023

With wins in nine award categories this year, DBS has not lost its appetite for innovation. Even more impressive, the nominations honored multiple areas of the bank, putting this Asian powerhouse among the world's most innovative banks yet again.

Middle-office technology rarely gets noticed but has huge potential for impact. Finding no off-the-shelf solution in the marketplace, DBS developed AutoFin (automated financial analysis), which leverages computer vision, natural language processing and deep learning technologies to ease the analysis and client writing tasks so that relationship managers can spend more time nurturing client relationships. The DBS Data Protection Analytics team now deploys ML and data visualization to detect misuse and abuse of customer information. And the bank’s Geolocation Real-Time Fraud Detection is an industry-first tool that cross-checks customer locations with the point-of-sale terminals where payment transactions occur.

User experience was another fertile area of innovation at DBS last year. The bank built an API to automate manual processing and provide instant updates to customers. The Intelligent Business Process Manager is the first API in banking to consolidate and incorporate different technologies, systems and platforms. The digitization of a consumer banking customer’s journey, meanwhile, is Singapore’s first digital application and onboarding vehicle for unsecured financial products such as renovation loans and debt consolidation.

Finally, the DBS Digital Currency Unit in the fall unveiled DBS Purpose Bound Money, Singapore’s first programmable money built on a public blockchain, which enables a client to program, launch and distribute conditional vouchers.

 

Most Innovative Bank 2023 – Asia-Pacific

An innovation stand-out, global honoree DBS also takes the regional award for Asia-Pacific. Customers across Asia are enthusiastically digital, and the bank focused this year, on a variety of innovations that introduce efficiencies to process customer requests and resolve issues faster, enhancing the customer journey through automation, fraud detection and paperless processes.

Innovations for customers include digital applications for unsecured financial products and a digital onboarding journey that expedites processes and reduces resource waste. Also, the bank optimizes automated approval and servicing for credit cards and unsecured lending. AutoFIN, an industry first, uses various technologies to produce a customer’s financial analysis report within minutes.

The bank made significant strides with fraud detection, using geolocation to see if the customer is physically in the same location as the point-of-sale terminal registering the transaction. The bank employs machine learning and data visualization to identify misuses of business applications and protect against data loss.

DBS is improving internal operations with application programming interfaces (APIs) that automate manual processes and provide a seamless experience to help employees address customer requests more quickly. The bank also streamlined its ATM networks by using machine learning and operations research to automate cash supply management so that ATMs have the requisite cash available while minimizing trips to load the machines.

 

Banking on Innovation: Q&A with DBS Chief Data and Transformation Officer Nimish Panchmatia

Content first published by Global Finance on 7 June 2023

Nimish Panchmatia: Innovation creates value by doing things differently to get better results. Today, DBS serves new customers in new markets with new products via new channels—innovating is table stakes when there are so many new competitors.

Our people are our greatest asset and the driving force behind our transformation. We rewired our organization to adopt the speed, nimbleness and mindset of startup culture. We established experiential learning platforms, introduced new ways of working, redesigned office spaces and fostered ecosystem partnerships to encourage experimentation and innovation.

Over 18,000 of our employees picked up data skill sets, with another 2,000 employees upskilling in data science and business intelligence. About 3,000 employees also enrolled in DBS DeepRacer League, a gamified program to learn basic AI/ML skills. For DBS, business-as-usual is innovation-as-usual.

Panchmatia: Our key differentiators are the bank’s focus on developing hardware and our culture that enables innovation. We built up the technology infrastructure while empowering employees to transform and adapt to tech-enabled ways of working.

On the hardware side, we are digital to the core. One crucial aspect was re-architecting our technology stack by investing in cloud infrastructure and ensuring our applications are cloud-ready, especially applications focusing on data and analytics. Our cloud infrastructure provides the computing power necessary to drive other initiatives and enables us to quickly ramp up areas like data-driven, industrializing AI/ML capabilities and blockchain technology. Being able to move between different service providers and computing models made us nimbler.

Panchmatia: Our proprietary innovation framework—the Innovation Pyramid—provides the basis for all major innovations and ecosystem partnerships across the bank. It clarifies processes, adds cadence and quality controls to ensure new projects have ambition, and nudges employees across the group to continually look at the current landscape and what’s next and best for our customers.

We regularly run hackathons, experiments and workshops to encourage innovative ideas. We challenge portfolio leaders to embody ambitious innovation by conceptualizing new products that don’t exist to meet customer needs, for example. One such new product was our DBS Digital Exchange that was launched in December 2020; we became the first bank in Asia to launch a digital asset exchange.

Panchmatia: One improvement we made was to use AI/ML technologies to decrease call volumes at customer centers while improving the customer experience. This initiative focused on tracking and monitoring the real-time journey of all customer interactions through the mobile app; applying AI-enabled methods to detect and predict customer challenges; developing an experimentation platform to set up, deploy and manage interventions; and driving proactive, personalized and automatic interventions tailored to each customer’s journey.

Now we can detect early warning signs of degradation of services and customer challenges to resolve these issues faster. Our data and analytics help our product teams improve customer journeys.

With these new capabilities, we’ve realized substantial productivity improvements in our customer center. DBS India’s customer base grew nearly six times over the past four years and the number of financial transactions grew over 12 times, yet our headcount for our customer center didn’t change during this period.

Panchmatia: Everywhere! Technology and innovation are all-encompassing and provide the foundation for the bank of the future. When we started our transformation journey in 2014, we focused on enabling our customers to “Live more, bank less.” Since then, we’ve been rethinking how we operate and creating new products and services that make banking joyful and frictionless. As a result of our AI/ML initiatives, our 2022 revenue uplift was about 150 million Singapore dollars—more than double 2021's uplift. We expect this figure to grow in the next five years as we continue to roll out AI/ML across more functions in the bank.

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