DBS named world’s best digital bank

NEW DELHI: DBS Bank has received worldwide recognition for its digital agenda, becoming the first bank to be named World’s Best Digital Bank at the prestigious Euromoney Awards for Excellence.

According to Euromoney, “the award for the world’s best digital bank was one of the hardest-fought of all”, with BBVA, Citi and ING named as other strong contenders for this hotly contested award. In the end, DBS pipped the others for the global award because of all-pervasive nature of its digital transformation.

"DBS is doing this better than any other bank. It is demonstrably the case that digital innovation pervades every part of DBS, from consumer to corporate, SMEs to transaction banking and even DBS Foundation," said Clive Horwood, editor of Euromoney magazine.

DBS’ win marks the first time a Singapore as well as Asian bank has won a global accolade from Euromoney, one of the world’s leading financial publications. Euromoney also named DBS Asia’s Best Bank, another first for a Singapore bank.

Said Piyush Gupta, CEO of DBS Bank, “At DBS, we believe that banks tomorrow will look fundamentally different from banks today. That’s why we&nbs p;have spent the past three years deeply immersed in the digital agenda. This has been an all-encompassing journey, whether it is changing the culture and mindsets of our people, re-architecting our technology infrastructure, or leveraging Big Data, biometrics and AI to make banking simple and seamless for customers. Winning Euromoney’s World’s Best Digital Bank award is great encouragement to us, and testament to the strides we’ve made in re-imagining banking.”

In April, DBS launched digibank in India, the country’s first mobile-only bank. Digibank is branchless, paperless and signatureless, and leverages a combination of groundbreaking technology such as biometrics and artificial intelligence to revolution ise the overall customer experience.

In its other markets, DBS’ retail, wealth and corporate customers are also increasingly engaging with the bank digitally. In 2015, 16% of DBS’ new wealth customers opened accounts with the bank digitally. 51% of SME customers in Singapore did the same through DBS’ Online Account Opening Service. Today, over 90% of the bank’s remittances are also done by customers digitally using DBS Remit. The bank will also be introducing voice biometric authentication at its Singapore Customer Centre by the end of this year.

To create a “fintech-like” workforce, the bank encourages its people to embrace a digital mindset through experiential learning and experimentation through programmes such as hackathons. Last year, more than 2,000 employees gained exposure to digital culture, agile methodology and other digital concepts.

More recently, DBS was the first Singapore bank to pilot cloud-based productivity technology, Office 365, in the workplace, with plans to extend this to its entire workforce of 22,000 by year-end.

Established in 1969 in London, Euromoney Institutional Investor is one of Europe’s largest business and financial publishers. The Euromoney Awards for Excellence was introduced in 1991 and is recognised as the benchmark for leading firms in financial services.