DBS to invest S$300m in 2022 to boost 'intelligent banking' capabilities

DBS will invest S$300 million next year to boost its digital-banking capabilities for its wealth and retail customers, the bank announced on Tuesday.

The investment, which represents a 14 per cent year-on-year increase, will go towards bolstering tech talent and infrastructure, using predictive technology in more financial solutions, and scaling the bank's online and offline capabilities across the region.

Much of these involve scaling up on "intelligent banking", which DBS refers to as integrating and analysing relevant data to present unique recommendations for different customers.

These capabilities have been extended to the bank's relationship managers and financial advisors through a new, centralised platform called DBS Client Connect, which enables these frontline staff provide customers with more meaningful and "hyper-personalised" advisory.

For example, if the technology tracks that a customer has been browsing certain types of articles on its website, the platform sends a "nudge" to his or her relationship manager to follow up on the customer's interests.

Before this, relationship managers were having to look up multiple platforms to get information for their customers. Client Connect consolidates all the data and converts them into insights.

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Frontline staff serving DBS Treasures customers, typically accredited investors with S$350,000 in investible assets, have been using the platform since July. It will be available to the bank's retail and wealth segments in Singapore by the end of this year, and be phased into Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Indonesia and China over the next two years.

DBS will also continue to scale similar capabilities on its digital banking platforms to support its growing pool of self-directed customers. Currently, the DBS digibank app alerts users on stock movements and forex rates, and recommends potential stocks of interest. DBS said on Tuesday that 9 in 10 users who started an equity trade upon being alerted to a stock that they may like completed the transaction in the same session.

Upcoming new prompts include personalised alerts for customers when ex-dividend dates for stocks in their portfolio approach, or when companies of interest are due to release their corporate earnings. Forex rates alerts that are currently available to forex traders will also be extended to the bank's remittance service.

Starting next year, similar personalised prompts and insights will also be rolled out on DBS' PayLah! platform, which has over two million users.

On whether personalised notifications lead to higher investment returns for customers, DBS' group head of consumer banking and wealth management Sim S. Lim said on Tuesday that it is too early to make a conclusive assessment. The extent of customer engagement could be a proxy for making such an inference, he added.

"Eventually, if we see good traction, and people are using (the feature) more, and there are more engagements, that means the experience must be positive. And I suspect that the customers would have had a higher return," he said.

As for the translation into value for the bank, Lim said a comparison of growth rates could be telling. "Let's say, we grow 20 per cent on this particular investment and the market median is 15 per cent. We are 500 basis points, or five percentage points higher than market. Then we know that our intelligent banking is really delivering results," he said.