Sebastian has over 30 years in the banking business with a strong track record in building brands and franchises across multiple markets. He is highly experienced in managing complex situations and leading through times of economic volatility. In these challenging times, Sebastian is sharing us the ideas behind “Live more, Bank less” and the bank’s commitment to sustainability.
1/ DBS’ brand promise is “Live more, Bank less”. How is DBS enabling its customers to really live more and bank less?
In fact, this is a statement that we came up a few years ago. When we started our road to digitisation, we saw that one of the most significant problems of customers were that they were spending too much time dealing with the bank's processes. With digitisation, we have solved a substantial amount of that pain, as we have moved a lot of those processes, and a lot of those interactions with a bank digitally.
Therefore, they have more time to do their own personal activities, their own personal hobbies, their own personal planning, socialising, family time, and the rest. And that is why this statement is a true statement of intent that makes life better for the people spending less time at the bank activities and processes.
So currently we acquire approximately 40% of our customers digitally. Now can you imagine the power of a customer opening an account without going to the bank and without spending enormous amount of hours writing forms and documents. Now they can do that in a few minutes and get it done. On top of that, we have in the last few years, partner with many other companies that are not necessarily into banking. Through our API connectivity, we now bring many other industries and activities like e-commerce, travel and entertainment into our own platform, thus allowing the customers to rapidly interact through the bank to many other activities that they would have otherwise do it separately. That ecosystem creation has a tremendous amount of power in alleviating all of the pain points that customers have.
2/ Sustainability is high up on the agenda of DBS, can you tell us more about DBS’ approach to sustainability?
Sustainability now is centered in our strategic priorities for long term. That is the reason why we collectively came up with our long term vision of being the best bank for a better world. There are three pillars where DBS drives sustainability.
Our first pillar centers on responsible financing. We have set up long term goals in order to reduce the support and financing of companies that have not established programmes of sustainability in their own areas of concern. We have also created programmes to support companies in financing as they transition into sustainable goals. As a group, we have raised our sustainable financing targets to about SG$50 billion by 2024.
Our second pillar on sustainability rests on the appropriate business practices. We plan to reduce operational carbon emissions to zero by the year 2022. All our business practices are aligned in supporting all these our sustainability objectives of the United Nations, in terms of being a responsible employer, in terms of being a responsible operational company reducing unnecessary processes, reducing paper, reducing unnecessary energy wastage and the rest.
Another pillar is about social impact. We have for many years now, being a very active member in supporting social enterprises and being a force for good. Not only through DBS Foundation, but also with the power of more than 4,000 employees who supports social enterprise and socially impactful activities across Hong Kong.