Time to tighten digital banking metrics

THE heightened pressure on Singapore banks to prove their mettle amid Big Tech disruption means an ongoing rewrite in how digital banking is showing off richer returns.

How digitalisation is being measured by banks in dollar terms can now be sharpened, with data recently revealed by UOB offering a nuanced perspective on how far digital banking can go in acquiring customers.

At its recent corporate day event, UOB found through a survey of consumer customers in Singapore that in all cases to do with wealth, deposit, and loan products, the offline channel - branches or call centres - is still preferred at the purchasing stage. The exception is with credit cards.

This comes even as the data consistently showed that more consumers preferred using digital channels to research and compare consumer products in the market. This is intuitive, given the power of Google. More also preferred offline channels for ongoing transaction services than offl…