2024 overview

2024 was a year of transition in many ways. Since joining in May, I’ve been impressed by how our digital transformation, which began over a decade ago, has put us on the front foot with a modern technology stack and advanced infrastructure. However, we could do more to bolster our technology resiliency.

Our technology teams continued to execute against the technology resiliency roadmap in the areas of change management, system resilience, incident management and technology risk governance and oversight. With added steer from the Board and our Group Management Committee, we made further progress in strengthening the bank’s technology resiliency.

At the same time, we continued to invest in our microservices architecture and cloud infrastructure to enable greater scalability and cost optimisation, while leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) to further drive hyper-personalised services and operational efficiencies.

Going forward, there is room for growth in terms of designing for modern systems, further automating our technology system development and management, as well as embedding a stronger tech risk culture. We have encapsulated our ambitions as R.I.S.E. (Resiliency, Innovation, Speed, Efficiency) and will continue to be a partner in driving the business forward. Balancing resiliency and cost efficiency with speed and innovation will be a key focus for technology this year as we continue elevating customer experience.

Building resilience and increasing oversight

The four key themes of technology resiliency – change management, system resilience, incident management and technology risk governance and oversight – were embedded in our Technology Risk Management Uplift (T-Up) programme. We have largely delivered on the programme objectives and since transitioned our efforts to ensuring a sustained focus on technology resiliency in Singapore and our core markets.

System resilience

Over the past year, we further rearchitected seven key systems at the front and backends. By decoupling more shared systems, key services can be accessed through alternative channels which ensure that our customers can continue to fulfil their banking needs, even in the event of system disruptions. We also designed additional reconciliation solutions with automated recovery, so that customers and merchants can be assured of transaction certainty at any point in time. Additionally, we have enabled more concurrent mobile banking logins to better handle unexpected surges in customer login volumes.

With a simplified technology architecture standard, patterns and configuration, we optimised our systems for high availability, rapid recovery and transaction certainty. We also established aligned architecture standards for critical applications in our technology stack across infrastructure, middleware and databases to allow for critical workloads in Singapore and in our core markets to recover data swiftly in the event of a disruption.

Notably, in May 2024, we successfully held a technology disaster recovery (DR) drill involving two key components. To test operational rigour in the event of an incident, we conducted a DR flip where we flipped over to our secondary data centre and back to our primary data centre over one week. The second component was the transfer of workloads or operations from one mainframe site to another, an essential component in disaster recovery and ensuring business continuity. This drill was a first in Singapore among large local banks, and its success affirmed our efforts to bolster our system resiliency. We have since conducted similar exercises for three other scenarios involving critical apps to boost our readiness.

Change management

We remain committed to intensifying testing rigour around our applications and reducing the risks arising from changes. Since establishing our near-production test environment, we have put over 100 applications through this testing regime to reduce our margin of error before production and ensure that there isn’t any downstream impact. Our Architecture Review Committee complements this by strengthening governance against established architecture standards.

We also introduced a Testing Centre of Excellence (COE) to further improve our quality of software development. It outlines best practices for user stories alongside test case creation, approaches and processes across all applications and has already shown tremendous impact driving test automation. Other defined COEs established best practices for other technologies, ensuring better quality of service and vendor management.

To enhance the lifecycle management of third-party vendors, we formed a Technology Vendor Governance and Strategy forum, which meets quarterly to review key risks or issues identified from critical technology vendors and to ensure strategic alignment with our critical vendors. Through this, we have been able to achieve greater system oversight leading to more reliable services for our customers.

Incident management

In managing incidents, it is important to detect anomalies early to mount an effective response and minimise impact. Over the past year, we enhanced our end-to-end monitoring across customer, application and infrastructure levels, covering a broad spectrum of indicators including service performance. The added visibility into key customer journeys and potential negative customer impact translates to a smoother customer experience.

We are also benefitting from consolidated command centres and defined operational procedures to enable faster incident detection, escalation and recovery. We continue to improve our customers’ experience through timely notifications and by refining error messages during system maintenance and incidents.

Tech risk governance and oversight

To further improve technology risk governance and oversight, we have enriched resources across multiple lines of defence such as technology risk management, Site Reliability Engineering and IT audit. We continue to reinforce a strong technology risk mindset by rolling out initiatives to strengthen the right behaviours in our employees, including a guide that encourages questioning to ensure critical issues are addressed. By overlaying key risk indicators and better risk assessment, we have enhanced monitoring oversight and intervention capabilities for critical applications.

Our technology risk control library serves as an important part of our enhanced technology risk and control self-assessment process. We review the library periodically to ensure there is consistent and current information reflecting the bank’s risk landscape and the evolving technology landscape.

Becoming an AI-fuelled bank

DBS has worked with AI for over a decade, allowing us to industrialise the use of data analytics and AI/ ML across the bank. In 2024, we derived SGD 750 million in economic impact from more than 370 use cases powered by over 1,500 models. We expect this figure to exceed SGD 1 billion in 2025. We have also begun to leverage Gen AI to boost employee productivity and strengthen resiliency.

JIRA Assist

We developed JIRA Assist as a Gen AI tool to help our business analysts and testers curate user stories and test cases from plain text requirements. By leveraging historical and current project experiences across the bank, JIRA Assist suggests alternative user stories and acceptance criteria that may otherwise have been overlooked. We also tap on behavioural driven development frameworks to provide clear guidance on test case design and user functionalities to our developers.

AI-powered change risk scoring

We now use AI-based risk scoring to check 100% of change requests compared to 5% previously. This has improved productivity, tightened change management, and improved system resiliency, resulting in an 81% decrease in the monthly average number of incidents caused by change requests. By training our own ML model on past change requests, we have improved the accuracy in classifying change requests and reduced potential human bias.

Enhancing operational productivity through Gen AI

By digitalising our operations through our Operations Processes and Platform Re-engineering programme, over 80% of addressable processes are now done through workflows. This has eliminated over 1.3 million employee hours of manual work to date and reduced risk incidents by 15% year-on-year, even with an increase in transaction volume.

Additionally, our Customer Service Officers (CSOs) in Singapore, Hong Kong, India and Taiwan now serve customers aided by a CSO Assistant, an in-house developed Gen AI tool that transcribes, summarises and recommends solutions for customer queries in real time. We expect this to reduce call handling time by up to 20%, directly benefitting our customers and freeing up CSOs to deepen customer engagement. Beyond these examples, we have identified several Gen AI use cases to further transform our operations even as we actively explore customer-facing pilots such as a Gen AI- powered chatbot for corporate and SME customers in Singapore.

Investing in our people

Based on my engagement with our technology teams, I’m convinced that our people are equipped with the right skillsets and technological expertise. Nevertheless, we continue to invest in our employees’ development by offering more diverse career pathways and robust development programmes.

Diverse career pathways

Developed specifically for technologists, the DBS technology career pathways give our technologists a clear and structured view of how they can develop their careers with the bank. Our six technical tracks incorporate detailed skills maps and development plans, taking reference from the Infocomm Media Development Authority, as well as other leading financial institutions and technology firms.

Our technology certificate programme maps out clear role-based learning pathways to guide career progression, enable consistency in upskilling and enhance proficiency levels for identified roles. This ensures that employees are continually trained in competencies that are fit-for- role. We partnered an external learning vendor to implement an industry-recognised certification to validate our employees’ upskilling efforts.

Revamped Distinguished Engineer Programme Our Distinguished Engineer

Our Distinguished Engineer Programme (DEP) was created to deepen our technical expertise and recognise outstanding engineering talent and runs alongside other bank-wide talent programmes. The DEP offers structured career progression pathways through specialised technical tracks, allowing us to build a pool of deep technology expertise and entrench our position as a technology-driven company. We have further enhanced the DEP development plan by incorporating “Fellow” as the apex title, representing the highest level of technical expertise and leadership.

In closing

As we continue our journey forward, we are committed to our vision of making banking joyful and enabling customers to Live more, Bank less. Fuelled by our deep technology expertise, we will maintain the delicate balance between resiliency and cost efficiency with speed and innovation to deliver a differentiated customer experience.