2023 overview

2023 was an eventful year for Technology and Operations, with the digital disruptions underscoring the need for technological enhancements, particularly in areas such as improving digital service availability and recovery. The shift from a monolithic mainframe to a cloud-native, microservices-based approach in our digital transformation journey enabled us to be more nimble and increased the speed of execution. However, this created a more complex infrastructure requiring additional operational rigour and oversight. The six-month pause on non-essential IT activities imposed by the regulator is an opportune period for us to redirect our resources towards improving and tightening our processes in change management, system resilience, incident management, and technology risk governance.

Despite the digital disruptions, there were significant achievements, including the successful integration of Citigroup Inc.’s consumer banking business in Taiwan (Citi Consumer Taiwan) and the launch of new products in DBS Bank India. We also adopted new ways of working in a horizontal organisation by Managing through Journeys (MtJs) and incorporating Gen AI to improve our services.

Driving the resiliency and reliability of our technology

To effectively manage the complex tapestry of technology risks and strengthen the bank’s capabilities, we are implementing a comprehensive roadmap through the Technology Risk Management Uplift programme (T-Up), which is chaired by the CEO. Through the T-Up programme, we are putting in place a more stringent process for change management. We are also establishing clear ownership and management of digital disruptions within the bank and with our service providers. We have reinforced governance by dedicating resources to technology risk oversight and monitoring the implementation of remedial measures. This roadmap will culminate in improved service availability and reliability.

Change management

DBS has a microservices architecture, which is supported via a number of third-party systems. While this is the preferred architecture for most modern technology companies, the one challenge it poses is that a bug in one part of the ecosystem could result in previously unknown problems elsewhere. This underscores the importance of doing more rigorous and comprehensive testing before we put any software into production. We have since tightened our change management controls and created a near-production test environment to allow for more robust testing of key services before going live with new changes or releases.

System resilience

We recognise that customers expect to have access to key services such as balance enquiry and digital payments in an uninterrupted manner. To ensure that these services have minimal downtime, for critical applications, we have now added hot standby capabilities to supplement existing active-active configurations. Additionally, today, some of our services are delivered through common/ shared systems, which can potentially result in single points of failure. To prevent this, we are decoupling these shared systems at both the front and back ends so that key services are always available on at least one channel. This will be completed by 1Q 2024.

To complement our engagement with vendors, we have established 10 Centres of Excellence (COEs) that house expertise across different domains. The COEs will drive standardisation of architecture and reuse of assets, uphold quality service delivery, and develop competency for shared application software and services.

Our mobile applications have been enhanced to detect and remove the presence of malware. Our cybersecurity control environment is regularly tested and attained the highest tier of preparedness for the Cyber Trust mark.

Incident management

When incidents arise, we have to recover services more quickly. Having early warning indicators, and a process to review internal alerts proactively, enable us to take preventive actions in a timely manner. In the last year, having built comprehensive diagnostic capabilities, real-time monitoring data and alerts are now being leveraged as part of our incident management process. This encompasses a comprehensive view starting with the end-to-end customer journey through the applications and infrastructure levels to detect and drill down issues in real time and identify solutions swiftly.

We have centralised our command centre to enable faster identification, triaging and initiation of recovery protocols. Playbooks for technology operations teams and Crisis Situation Managers have been updated with a sharper focus on rapid restoration of alternate systems to minimise interruption of our digital services. These capabilities are available in Singapore and will be rolled out across all our markets in 2024.

Technology risk governance and oversight

To strengthen technology risk governance and oversight, the bank formed a new subcommittee of the Board Risk Management Committee (BRMC) called the BRMC Technology Risk Committee. The bank also transferred the Technology Risk Management team to the Risk Management Group, reporting to the Chief Risk Officer, to enhance independent checks and balances. In addition, we bolstered our Site Reliability Engineering team with new leadership and established a dedicated Quality Assurance (QA) function. The QA function serves as an independent layer of checks on change management within Group Technology. In addition, we are reinforcing a strong technology risk and control mindset among our technology teams, ensuring an equal emphasis across delivery, innovation and resilience.

Executing integrations for continued business growth

The integration of Citi Consumer Taiwan with DBS Bank Taiwan has solidified our position as the largest foreign bank in the market. This complex exercise encompassed enhancements to local systems, testing operational readiness, ensuring smooth network performance, and facilitating transactions like cheque handling. As a result of this integration, we welcomed 3,000 new employees into DBS. We will optimise the post-integration processes and deliver integrated solutions across a comprehensive range of services, from credit card onboarding to remittance.

To build a competitive position in the rapidly growing Indian market, through the integration of Lakshmi Vilas Bank, we expanded our product suite to include gold loans and retail depository accounts, and introduced new products such as proprietary credit cards and affordable housing loans. The India team also executed a data onshoring project to meet regulatory requirements. The integration expanded our network to over 520 branches and 900 ATMs, further growing our physical presence in India.

Generating value from technology

Digitalising operations

Our Operations Processes and Platform Re-engineering programme has improved employee productivity by over a million hours since 2021. The digitalisation of operations has contributed to a 54% reduction in risk incidents despite a doubling in transaction volumes.

Our workflow system, called Intelligent Business Process Management, reduces manual hand-offs and digitalises our processes. Over 1,100 processes have been standardised and digitalised, reducing risk and manual effort. For instance, Treasury Market Operations have achieved a digitalisation rate of 85%, Institutional Banking Group Operations 80%, and Consumer Banking Group Operations 67%. We will see further improvement in our digitalisation rates as we roll out these processes in different markets. We are confident that Gen AI capabilities will further streamline and automate our processes, providing smoother customer journeys and reducing employee toil.

AI and Gen AI

Our investments in building AI capabilities enable the pervasive use of AI throughout the bank. Today, we have over 800 models and 350 use cases delivering SGD 370 million in economic benefit, more than twice the value in 2022. In particular, our AI-driven real-time digital fraud prevention solution flags potentially fraudulent transactions in under 10 milliseconds.

In 2023, DBS experimented with Gen AI to drive innovation and enhance operational efficiency. An enterprise Gen AI platform equipped with robust safeguards enabled employees to develop use cases and assess the efficacy of prototypes developed. All Gen AI pilots undergo risk assessments and added human oversight.

Our experiments in areas such as summarisation, generative communications, personalised wealth advisory, contact centre, coding and development show promising outcomes. For instance, integrating Gen AI to assist our Customer Service Officers with real-time transcription and call summarisation will reduce the average call handling time by up to 20%.

In addition to our principles for responsible use of data, we continue enhancing our artificial intelligence and machine learning model governance with the implementation of the Fairness, Ethics, Accountability and Transparency principles from the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Nurturing our next generation of talents

We are committed to cultivating a diverse, future-ready workforce by fostering a culture of innovation, growth and customer centricity in our employees. The DBS Future Tech Academy, designed to build deep technical expertise and thought leadership, has registered over 200,000 module completions. We have strengthened manpower resources by bolstering our bench strength, accelerating onboarding, and providing upskilling opportunities for future roles.

These efforts have yielded positive results, with our regional Technology and Operations engagement score increasing by three percentage points to a record 91%. This is higher than the APAC Best Employer benchmark by six percentage points, and the APAC Financial Services Institution benchmark by 18 percentage points. The uplift was driven by improved survey follow-ups, enhanced rewards and recognition, as well as learning and growth opportunities through internal mobility.

Upskilling for emerging roles

It is essential to enable our employees to fully leverage AI. Our Data Chapter team develops learning pathways that equip employees to be AI-ready with relevant skills and tools, and enables them to incorporate AI and Gen AI techniques into our bank-wide processes. More than 2,900 employees benefitted from upskilling across four future operations roles. Additionally, 90% of our Operations employees have completed more than 75% of their two-year role-based Structured Learning Roadmaps curriculum.

Women in Tech

As we advance our Women in Tech agenda, we are heartened that two of our technologists were recognised in the SG100WIT hall of fame last year. We also partnered with United Women Singapore to pilot a series of workshops for female students in secondary schools, covering topics like blockchain, smart contracts and cryptocurrency.

Committing to joyful banking and seamless customer journeys

Our commitment to making banking joyful and seamless remains unwavering. We are making good progress in delivering on our technology resiliency roadmap, which will improve our digital service availability and reliability. We continue to invest in our people and technology to ensure a differentiated customer experience.