OCBC to spend over $770m a year on AI-ready infrastructure

OCBC group CEO Tan Teck Long / Photo credit: Yen Meng Jiin, Business Times

With additional reporting by Melissa Goh

OCBC is going big on AI even as it increases the number of its human advisers in a bid to deepen its wealth push.

Southeast Asia’s second-largest bank is launching an app for its wealth customers that features digital avatars that act as 24/7 advisers. It is also set to hire 600 relationship managers over the next three years for its consumer banking business, the bank said.

These are part of initiatives under the lender’s “next frontier” strategy, which aims to use AI, digital tools, and data to boost growth.

The new app, called OCBC WoW, will include two avatars that can provide hyper-personalized wealth management services in real time.

OCBC group chief executive Tan Teck Long said in a press briefing that the bank created its “avatar banking” product at a “fraction” of the cost of using “traditional technology.” The CEO did not provide any specific figures.

The bank said it is using a “mixture of LLMs” to power OCBC WoW, and that responses provided by the avatar come from its proprietary in-house research.

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OCBC believes this AI-native environment, where it uses the tech to tailor news and advice to the needs and preferences of individual customers, will help meet their increasingly sophisticated demands and build deeper and stickier relationships.

When asked how avatars differ from human advisers, Tan noted that the revenue and number of transactions linked to each are “going to be very different.”

Customers, for instance, may talk to the avatar about simple things, but want to bounce off more complex ideas or transactions with a human relationship manager, Tan said.

“Humans still want the human touch, so that’s where the relationship manager comes in,” Sunny Quek, head of global consumer financial services at OCBC, noted.

Quek added that the launch was giving the consumer banking division the confidence to bring forward a target of doubling the division’s wealth income by a year, from 2030 to 2029.