Why DBS is doubling down on intelligent banking

Innovation is a word that’s often synonymous with startups, but that doesn’t mean corporations are precluded from being innovative as well.

Take Singapore-headquartered DBS Bank, for instance. In 1997, before the widespread adoption of the internet, it became the first bank in the region to launch comprehensive internet banking.

Photo credit: Deyoadutrys

At the recent Singapore Fintech Festival, DBS CEO Piyush Gupta touted the bank as a “tech company offering financial services.” One example supporting his case is DBS’ latest innovation. In September 2020, it launched a full suite of intelligent banking solutions powered by AI and big data.

“The term ‘intelligent banking’ is something that was created by our CEO,” says DBS head of analytics and innovation Arjay Gavankar. “We’re trying to create experiences for customers by combining all the data science and analytics, studying the customer’s needs, and converting that data into something that is highly personalized to them and comes to them at the right time and place.”

What’s so intelligent about intelligent banking?

DBS’ intelligent banking solutions are driven by its ethos: “Live more, bank less.”

“Whether you’re a dentist, an advertising industry executive, a technologist, or working in government, you don’t have a lot of time,” argues Gavankar. “And patterns have changed, particularly this year. If you’re busy with your work, your money shouldn’t get in the way of your ability to focus on that.”

Thelissa Marques, who heads DBS’ intelligent bank team, concurs, adding that by giving customers information at the time that they need it, DBS “helps them spend less time dealing with finances and more time living life.”

DBS achieves this with a number of services. Its DBS digibank app has a range of features aimed at informing, guiding, and enabling customers to better navigate their everyday finances. For instance, its personalized financial planning feature, the Nav Planner, allows customers to plan and monitor their financial goals by providing insights and recommendations that are tailored to their life stages and financial circumstances. The app also automatically notifies customers when unusual or higher-than-normal bill payments are being made to ensure they don’t accidentally overpay on any automated payments.

Photo credit: DBS Bank

To make its services more intuitive, the bank developed what it calls “smart triggers” for the DBS iWealth app, its all-in-one wealth management tool. For example, proactive triggers are sent to customers to alert them to foreign exchange pricing movements based on their portfolio holdings and previous activities. More of such triggers are being planned going forward.

“Intelligent banking is the idea that all the different things we’ve built over the years are more powerful when combined together in ways that represent an understanding of what the customer is trying to achieve,” says Gavankar.

And the driving force behind that is a whole lot of data.

“We have a data warehouse where our customer data is stored. We use this to build the data science models that power the intelligent bank features that customers see,” says Marques. An engine then powers the consumer journey and the insights that users see on the bank’s platform. “Then there’s what we call presentment, which are different ways of displaying information to customers in the app, depending on the journey they’re going through and the right time for them to see that information. All of that is connected.”

DBS currently rolls out some 13 million everyday banking insights every month, and more than 2 million customers have used these insights for their daily banking needs.

Always start with the customer

In order to build such intuitive services, Marques says that the team always develops its digital banking solutions with the customer in mind.

“Before we define what features to build, we try to figure out what intelligence means to our customers,” she explains. “We also look at what global tech leaders are doing and talk to customers to find out the customer blind spots we might be able to solve through intelligent banking.”

These blind spots could range from things that users miss in their regular banking activities to recurring information that they might find difficult to track on their own. DBS then looks into the best ways to communicate these insights to their customers, whether it’s through SMS, email, or push notifications.

“As soon as we nudge them or alert them to something, we also need to think if there’s a relevant action they would need to take and if we can take them straight there,” adds Marques.

Once the team crafts the entire user journey of a feature, it checks back with customers to gather feedback on their experience and allows users to give feedback on each individual nudge they see.

Staying ahead of the competition

The banking industry is highly competitive, and Marques and Gavankar both agree that it’s only a matter of time until other banks develop similar intelligent features for their own mobile apps.

If DBS hears of competitors developing something new, Gavankar says, the team will monitor it, try to understand it, keep up with it, and attempt to pull ahead of it if they can.

“Some fintechs and non-banks are doing very interesting things around intelligent features, so we take inspiration from them,” he says. The bank’s goal, according to the executive, is to create new ideas that do not yet exist.

However, just monitoring the competition isn’t enough. DBS’ real edge, Gavankar says, is in its team’s constant curiosity.

“Sometimes we just watch people living their lives and see what role money plays in what they’re doing,” he explains. “There needs to be a constant hunger. We have to balance the delivery of the existing ideas we have, the measurement of how they are being received, and their improvement and enhancement wherever we find the opportunity to do so, with the constant seeking of new ideas.”

With new insights features and smart shortcuts on its digibank app, DBS’ intelligent banking solutions can better understand and anticipate users’ needs to help manage their finances and investment.

Find out more about DBS Bank’s digital banking solutions on its website.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.