Putting the customer first

THERE is a story that DBS chief Piyush Gupta likes to tell, and it goes like this: in 2012, DBS ATMs in the Bugis area were hit by a card skimming fraud that resulted in about a million bucks in unauthorised withdrawals.

The regulators bayed for blood. As it turned out, a staff at the bank's operations team had turned off a security feature known as a jitter, which slows down the card from being spat out from the machine. It does this to distort the information copied from the magnetic strip of cards. (Fraudsters install a device to copy the card information found on the ATMs, and make purchases or make withdrawals off those stolen card numbers.)

"When we got skimmed, the regulator came to us and said, 'hey who turned the jitter off, and you should hold the person accountable and punish him'," says Mr Gupta.