OCBC to cut wealth onboarding to 15 business days with agentic AI; simple cases in one day

[SINGAPORE] OCBC is looking to cut onboarding time across all its wealth clients to 15 business days using agentic artificial intelligence.

Depending on the client profile, straightforward cases could also potentially be onboarded within a day, the bank announced on Wednesday (Jul 29).

Loretta Yuen, OCBC’s head of group legal and compliance, said: “This is a paradigm shift for compliance, where we are not just enabling business, but originating opportunities.”

This follows announcements by the Monetary Authority of Singapore to reduce account opening timelines in the private banking industry to within a month by the end of 2026.

OCBC noted that it has been working to cut onboarding time, with its current average more than 30 days, compared with the current industry median of around six weeks.

Among the other local banks, DBS can complete the onboarding process and open accounts within a week, depending on the new client’s profile, a spokesperson said.

The spokesperson noted that AI implementation at the bank has led to 20 per cent more new high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients in the first five months of this year. Overall onboarding turnaround time also fell by half.

Meanwhile, UOB can open simple cases in seven calendar days, having reduced the median account opening turnaround time for private banking clients over the past six months, said its chief operating officer Alex Sim.

He said the bank’s median turnaround time was “well within industry guidelines” as at end-June.

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OCBC’s platform, called Helios, comprises five separate agents. It will move the due-diligence process to before the relationship manager meets a prospective customer.

It will provide relationship managers with individuals’ key data, information and credit-risk profiles upfront, while highlighting information gaps.

This enables relationship managers to quickly obtain the missing data from customers, and reduces the back-and-forth between the customer, relationship manager and the bank’s compliant unit.

The time freed up for the compliance unit will also allow for a pivot to advisory research or perform more AI-related analyses.

The current industry practice is for know-your-customer screenings and risk assessments to be conducted only after the relationship manager submits source of wealth information.

Jason Moo, chief executive at OCBC’s private banking arm Bank of Singapore (BOS), said: “The beauty of the system was it was built by (the bank’s) compliance (unit).

“It wasn’t built by the tech person or from the business side, (the compliance team) can build their standards already into the system,” he added.

BOS has tested the platform on a quarter of its relationship managers over the past five months.

The platform is set to be rolled out across BOS by the third quarter of 2026. OCBC also plans to extend Helios to its premier private clients by the end of 2026.

Four of the five agents are already in play.

The first agent conducts prospect research, which supports pre-onboarding due diligence. The second is in charge of onboarding recommendation, which highlights remaining profile gaps.

The next one is a leads generator, which identifies associates of current prospects and helps relationship managers identify higher-quality leads.

The fourth is an independent agent that checks the other agents for accuracy.

OCBC noted that most information will be verified and checked by this agent, and whatever remains will be checked by a human.

The fifth agent that looks at ongoing monitoring of existing clients is set to be ready by the first half of 2027.