Empower the workforce to drive innovation

THE late management guru Peter Drucker defined innovation as the task of endowing human and material resources with new and greater wealth-producing capacity. By that measure, banking, which is one of the most conservative sectors, should be at the bottom of the innovation pole. But that's not true in all cases.

Early this year, DBS rolled out the banking industry's first digital audit confirmation solution on its online corporate banking platform, DBS Ideal. Called DBS Audit Confirmation, the solution allows the bank's customers, especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs), to verify their financial positions and balances, with automated confirmations sent to their auditors. What's so innovative about this? It cuts processing time for audit confirmations to under 24 hours compared to the industry's norm of at least seven days.

"The goal should be to delight customers at every interaction by treating them better than they expect, acknowledging that a customer's impression of the organisation is only as good as their last experience," DBS CEO Piyush Gupta was quoted in a study conducted early this year by Oxford Economics and the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) that polled 3,000 CEOs from 50 countries (including Singapore). "The bar has been raised higher. The big change is hyper-digitalisation."