Introduction

Amid growing geopolitical uncertainty and an increasingly challenging business climate, DBS continued focusing on innovation to retain our competitive advantage. We adopted a barbell strategy that spurs innovation and experimentation with new technologies on one end, while keeping a vigilant eye on resilience and risks on the other.

Driving innovation

Digitalisation has become table stakes for financial institutions, and many digital initiatives we embarked on over the past few years are now par for the course. To retain our lead and widen the gap between us and our competitors, we must continue creating differentiated technology innovations.

Our artificial intelligence (AI)/ machine learning (ML) business use cases increased by seven times to 260, enabling us to achieve about SGD 150 million in revenue in 2022. We aspire to achieve SGD 1 billion in the next five years. Our AI deployments made it possible to deliver tailored customer experiences. About 3 million customers from NAV Planner, our intuitive digital advisory tool, benefitted from hyper-personalised nudges.

These capabilities are enabled by our in-house designed solutions including ADA, a data analytics platform, ALAN, an award-winning AI knowledge management hub, and our hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure. ADA and ALAN shorten the time required to build and deploy AI models, improving our operations and decision-making.

Evolve PavedCloud, our DBS designed public cloud solution, enables public cloud adoption, and allows developers to deploy and manage applications securely and consistently. Public cloud adoption has increased over 17 times in the last four years. CloudOps, a self-service technology marketplace, automates and enhances the efficiency of private cloud operations, and offers platform visualisation.

Evolve PavedCloud and CloudOps have garnered strong market interest, especially among financial institutions and government bodies embarking on their own cloud transformation journeys.

FIX Marketplace, Asia’s first digital and automated fixed-income execution platform, directly connects issuers with investors. This promotes synergy, democratises capital allocation, and results in cost benefits and time efficiencies. Over 80 trades, amounting to SGD 16 billion of issuances in various currencies have been executed.

Riding on the successes of our blockchain-based businesses DBS Digital Exchange, Climate Impact X and Partior, we are developing commercial use cases with new financial engagement models and distributed ledger technology. Project Orchid, in collaboration with Open Government Products, uses tokenised SGD to facilitate live transactions with selected merchants, while Project Guardian tests the feasibility of Decentralised Finance (DeFi) trading for tokenised securities against tokenised cash. In Project Dunbar, we are exploring a common platform for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) to enable greater efficiency for wholesale cross-border payments.

We are continuously exploring metaverse use cases to provide value-added services to our customers. DBS is the first bank in Singapore to partner The Sandbox – one of the largest metaverses on the Ethereum blockchain – and launch DBS BetterWorld, where we will demonstrate how technology can be used as a force for good. Technology & Operations (T&O) was also the first in the bank to hold our townhall in the metaverse, setting the stage for further metaverse experiments across the bank.

Balancing innovation with resilience

Even as we innovate, we continue being vigilant in building resilience and identifying potential technology threats. The evolving risk landscape makes Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) more vital than ever.

These changes occur against a backdrop of cutbacks in technology companies which enabled us to opportunistically acquire technology talents. We have doubled our efforts to diversify our technology workforce as we maintain continuity and tribal knowledge within technology teams.

DBS was one of the first banks in Asia to set up an SRE practice. This enabled a secure acceleration of our release cadence, which increased by 50 times to 64,000 releases a month. Our Centre of Excellence creates software development toolkits which are embedded with SRE principles and will be plugged into our development process to increase resilience.

Our multi-year application transformation programme to modernise the bank’s applications not only increases customer confidence in DBS’ systems, but also reduces employee toil. Through it, we have achieved faster time to market, sustainable efficiency, and automated recovery.

With a hybrid-work future, cybersecurity efforts must be strengthened to address the larger attack surface and potential gaps in work processes. Our multi-layered defence includes micro-segmentation of our networks, and multi-factor authentication.

To safeguard customers from fraud, we deployed AI technology to detect and take prompt actions against phishing or scam attempts, with real-time pre-transaction blocking. We worked with the authorities and partners to implement new solutions, such as registering with the SMS Sender ID Registry to provide a secure banking experience.

We are growing our own timber and deepening our innovation DNA across three technological hubs in Asia. Our technology hubs in Singapore sit under DBS Tech Singapore, while DBS Asia Hub 2 has been rebranded as DBS Tech India. DBS Tech China, our third technological hub will open in Guangzhou in mid-2024 and entrench our expanded presence in the Greater Bay Area. These hubs will facilitate continuous innovation, provide diversity, and hone our talents as they learn from each other.

While we innovate at scale, it must be done in a safe and reliable manner. Our multi-year effort to re-engineer operations has resulted in a unified data-driven control tower, integrated workflows and workbenches. We have eliminated manual work and improved connectivity, efficiency and resiliency, and are able to manage operational risks with greater control, and provide insights for pre-emptive actions. Supporting this journey are our reusable digital assets, and automation, which have elevated customer and employee experiences.

Cultivating a diverse, future-ready workforce

We reorganised the way we work through Managing through Journeys, where Technology, Business, Operations, and Support Units work together in cross-functional teams and share technology prioritisation, goals and KPIs. This drives alignment, accelerates the cross-pollination of knowledge and skills, and leads to greater business impact.

Apart from redesigning the way we work, we recognise that our people are the driving force behind DBS’ transformation, and have implemented initiatives to foster a culture of innovation, growth, and customer centricity through life-long learning. Tech Academy further builds technical expertise through in-house curriculums developed by our subject matter experts. Since 2021, employees have completed 178,000 sessions across 82 modules. The Distinguished Engineers (DE) Programme offers an alternative career path to the management track, and sees conferred engineers sharing their deep tech expertise with fellow colleagues. Separately, over 9,000 employees have taken data and AI upskilling courses, while 7,000 have attended our SRE Training Programme. Our Operations team is equally zealous in their efforts, with more than 4,400 of them learning to re-engineer our operations.

Equal emphasis is placed on leadership skills. Through Transformational Leadership Circle sessions, over 90 T&O leaders learned how to provide psychological safety, and push for a growth mindset, collaboration, feedback, and courageous conversations. They are on track to impact 1,200 more employees.

We are actively nurturing the next generation of talents. The DBS Fintech Apprenticeship Programme prepares polytechnic students for technology roles in the bank through masterclasses and mentorship by the DE engineers. We have groomed nearly 700 graduates with less than two years of work experience to become technologists through the Skill Enhancement Education and Development (SEED) programme. In addition, we helped over 300 mid-career Singaporeans build lasting fintech careers through the Technology in Finance Immersion Programme.

Banking sustainably for a better world

We continue delivering positive impact towards a more sustainable future. We achieved our net-zero operational carbon emissions goal across the markets we operate in, and are on track for our operations in Singapore to solely rely on renewable energy by 2030. DBS Newton Green, Singapore’s first net-zero building by a bank, achieved net zero within three months of its opening.

To educate customers about their carbon footprint, we launched a Carbon Calculator in digibank. This industry-first initiative in Singapore enables customers to monitor and offset their carbon footprint, which is calculated through tracking their credit and debit card purchases. Carbon Calculator impacted 430,000 unique customers within the first eight months of its launch, and has offset 740 tonnes of carbon.

In closing

Our digital transformation investments over the last decade have equipped us well for the journey ahead. We are strongly positioned with multiple world-class digital platforms, a capacity for continuous innovation, and a future-ready workforce that entrenches us as a different kind of bank.

We continue experimenting with new technologies such as human-like conversational AI, digital twins, and 5G, which could revolutionise banking. We are also keeping a pulse on the next wave of breakthroughs in areas such as human/ machine interfaces, and augmented and virtual reality technologies.

We expect these technologies to converge and bring forth extraordinary use cases. As we further tune our digital operations for greater agility, and deploy cutting-edge technologies in our offerings, we remain steadfast in our focus on our customers. We are strengthening an exceptional banking ecosystem that they trust and rely on, while delivering truly differentiated customer experiences that set us apart from the rest.