Digital solutions are helping corporates manage global shifts, says Aaron Chiew, head of IBG Digital Channels for the Institutional Banking Group at DBS Bank.
Global Finance: How is your digital focus helping clients react to ongoing global shifts?
Aaron Chiew: Corporates are facing multiple complexities today. Supply chain disruptions, Asia’s rising middle-income population and the rapid digitalization of financial services have led to a fundamental shift in consumer behavior and the way corporates approach treasury, liquidity and supply chain management. Having embarked on our digital transformation journey since 2014, DBS has been able to quickly roll out digital solutions to help clients address pain points and capture new opportunities that are emerging from these global shifts.
We leverage digitalization around four key focus areas for our clients. The first is to simplify relationship onboarding and make banking with DBS even easier. We transformed small and midsize enterprise [SME] onboarding with enhanced self-service experiences, such as digital and mobile-led onboarding to reduce paperwork and visits to bank branches. We also transformed large corporate onboarding by introducing a Transition Management Suite for clients to integrate their existing bank’s instruction files with us.
The second is to enable effortless transactions for our clients to meet growing global demand for cross-border payments, e-commerce transactions and 24/7 on-demand services. With a single bank account and API integration with DBS Globesend, financial institutions and payment service providers can route their clients’ payments through our global payout network, connecting them with over three billion accounts and digital wallets covering 132 currencies across 190 markets.
The third is to enable dependable servicing by creating new service elements to establish end-to-end service excellence. For instance, DBS launched a Supplier Hub to enhance connectivity across buyer/supplier ecosystems. The Supplier Hub cut the time required to onboard a clients’ supplier under its supplier finance program from two weeks to as little as 30 minutes, while providing suppliers full visibility over their invoices and payments.
The fourth is to protect our clients by ensuring strong digital risk-control processes and investing in malware threat protection to address growing cybersecurity risks. Last year, we implemented enhanced security features in our corporate banking application to proactively protect clients from other applications with risky permission settings, or when screen-sharing is detected.
Collectively, these initiatives enable us to better support clients through the ups and downs and across business cycles. Our clients recognize the value proposition of these initiatives, as reflected in our strong corporate customer-satisfaction ratings across our digital channels, growth in our digital customer acquisition and expanded market share for digital transactions amid an increasingly competitive environment.
GF: How are you bringing accessibility to APIs?
Chiew: Digitalization is an enabler for businesses to capture new opportunities emerging from ongoing global shifts. However, not every business, especially SMEs, has the capability or resources to do so quickly.
With our Digital Onboarding Portal, we are empowering clients in their digital transformation by providing a dedicated storefront to access a comprehensive library of around 180 types of highly modular APIs. These APIs integrate real-time processing of payments, receivables and information enquiries into our clients’ business workflows, enabling them to rapidly scale their digital propositions. On the portal, clients can also learn how each API works and the benefits it brings, lowering the barrier to entry for SMEs seeking to embark on digitalization.
GF: How is generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) benefiting corporate banking?
Chiew: DBS recently announced it would equip its Customer Service Officer workforce in Singapore with a GenAI-powered virtual assistant—CSO Assistant—before the end of 2024. CSO Assistant transcribes customer queries in real-time and does “live” searches on the bank’s knowledge base to quickly retrieve query-specific information. This enables CSOs to to deliver solutions faster—by as much as a 20% reduction in call-handling times.
Beyond customer queries, we are leveraging GenAI to provide clients with transformative efficiencies. For instance, GenAI has enabled us to transform paper-based Banker’s Guarantee, or BG, processes. By inputting BG text documents into an AI playground, GenAI can provide appropriate prompts and reduce the manual effort required to review BG text, allowing the optimization of operations resources toward higher-value opportunities.
