AI-backed cognitive banking makes personal finance fun

Intelligent banking is the ultimate business goal for banks but is also difficult to achieve.
Here’s how DBS Bank India is trying to get it right.How can we make banking invisible? How can we make it joyful? How can we make banking services intuitive and seamless?These are the questions the senior management at DBS Bank pondered as they set out to reimagine banking in the digital era.Live more, Bank less. It’s an apt message the bank is sending out to its customers. And it gives you a sense of their unbridled ambition to ride the customer- centric innovation wave in every way.The customers today overwhelmingly prefer ease of use, service and support. Now, and well into the future, banks will have to accelerate the adoption of new intelligent tools and technologies powering futuristic changes in value capture and creation.Banking is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end. Today, banking does not have to be a discreet independent activity. It’s an activity that is seamlessly embedded into customer's lives.So that’s precisely what DBS Bank India has been striving to do with a clutch of intelligent technologies like IPA and data science to make banking invisible, seamless and joyful.

Sneha Jha, Editor-Special Projects, ETCIO spoke to Prashant Joshi, Managing Director & Head-Consumer Banking Group, DBS Bank India to unpack how the bank is rethinking the whole construct around this new paradigm shift and how he intends to use it to take it to the next level with invisible banking.
Part of his charter is to innovate, implement and launch new customer focused intelligent banking initiatives which not only foster value creation but also automate and scale value capture to offer the customers variety, relevance, context and the scope of purposeful and efficacious engagement with the bank. And he is leveraging intelligent banking capabilities in a very definitive way to turn the possible into the practical.DBS Bank India is trying to reimagine banking in pretty substantial and profound ways to make it fast, natural, effortless and invisible. How are you bolstering your intelligent banking capabilities across digital banking services to create a bank that is centered around its customers in location and context? What are you doing to create and capture value as a bank that understands and pre-empts its customers' needs, while simplifying its transactions with the customer?At DBS Bank India, we are committed to providing customers with a unique and seamless banking experience that allows them to 'Live more, Bank less.' This brand promise reflects our belief that we must deliver banking that is so simple, intelligent, and efficient that our customers have more time for what is important to them in their lives.digibank by DBS is India’s first digital bank. Launched in 2016, it features a comprehensive suite of banking services allowing users to save, pay, remit, invest, borrow, and get insured through a paperless, straight-through, and intuitive process.The digibank app hosts many digital-first features such as soft token authentication obviating the need for OTP; 24x7 chat with digibot for daily banking needs and online dispute resolution; instant onboarding for mutual fund investments; same-day remittance with zero processing fees in major corridors; and access to instant personal loans in just 5 clicks. DBS Bank India also allows customers to complete their digital KYC via a video-based customer identification process.On the investment front, we have recently launched digiPortfolio, which combines Morningstar expertise and data intelligence to provide research-backed investment solutions and help the customers choose a ready-made portfolio of mutual funds suited to their risk appetite.The banking sector is a high engagement sector. There are quite a bit of customer interactions and transactions as users engage with you on a variety of digital real estates like the app, online, wearables, and social media. How does it help you build deeper insights that are more contextual and relevant to the stated and latent needs of your customers?DBS Bank India's AI-backed cognitive banking makes managing personal finance quick, easy, and fun, leading to higher engagement and customer retention. We combine predictive analytics and customer behavior patterns to transform data into personalized offerings to get an understanding of customers’ individual investments and preferences.Since the AI-powered insights have been featured on the digibank app, we have seen sustained growth in customer engagement, with 56% repeat usage of the feature month-on-month. Also, digibank has been complementing our physical branch network of ~530 branches spread across 19 states in India, contributing to more than 67% of customer acquisitions.The bank operates with a phygital model that helps its customers get the best of both worlds as they can transact digitally and have access to a branch for complex transactions. According to our findings, the engaged customer has shown a 17% higher product take-up rate.In this way, our cognitive banking lets customers experience a smarter relationship with money with alerts, analyses, insights & investment information tailored to their habits and goals.How do you tap into the more granular transaction level data and apply cognitive capabilities to it for becoming more strategically relevant to your customers and to help them stay in control of their finances by offering them personalized financial planning insights, efficient expense management, and nudging them to make timely investments?

digibank by DBS Bank India has also been recognised for providing one of the best digital consumer experiences using cognitive banking-an AI-powered intelligent and innovative money management feature that helps users with hyper-personalized financial solutions.It assists with predictive insights about their spending patterns and recommendations on monthly budget requirements, enabling them to better manage their finances. This includes intuitive features such as monthly cash flow analysis, duplicate transaction alerts, upcoming payments, and FD maturities. We have generated over 25.3M Insights since the launch for our 0.7M customers, with an engagement rate of 70%.Uno, our machine learning powered recommendation engine, shares relevant insights with customers– guiding them on the right product with a relevant offer, and delivering a message through the appropriate channel at the right time.DBS Bank India has been successful in its digital transformation because of a pervasive culture of experimentation, agility, and innovation focused on leveraging data, AI, and technology to redefine and reimagine a more joyful customer experience.Interview of Prashant Joshi, Managing Director & Head-Consumer Banking Group, DBS Bank India As featured in ET CIO

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