In the past year, banks prioritized innovation through digital platforms and AI, driving improved service, security, and analytical capabilities. Global Finance announces the 2025 Innovators from Asia-Pacific.
Regional Winners
Most Innovative Bank in Asia-Pacific| TAIPEI FUBON BANK
In 2024, the Taiwan bank introduced IntelliChat, a chatbot enabled by Gen AI, designed to handle customer-service queries. It has improved the retail-user experience at the bank by reducing previously long wait times for account information. Waiting to speak with a specialist or chatbot took an average of 27 seconds before implementation, compared with 20 seconds after implementation. At the same time, call volume increased from 176 calls per day to 208 calls per day.
AI is also being used to sharpen the bank’s marketing efforts. LeikaAI, an in-house solution that optimizes marketing-audience selection, has replaced manual marketing processes based on structured query language. It can generate precise customer segments in 20 minutes that would have required three or four days to complete earlier.
Meanwhile, the bank introduced a new version of its mobile banking app that integrates banking, securities, property insurance, and life insurance services. Using predictive modeling, the app is also able to personalize recommendations for customers.
Most Innovative Financial Technology Company in Asia-Pacific | KASIKORN BUSINESS-TECHNOLOGY GROUP
A depository institution’s core banking system is its backbone—the back-end information-technology system that processes daily banking transactions and updates financial accounts and records.
Thailand’s Kasikornbank, also known as KBank, set before itself a daunting task: Create an entirely new core banking system without impacting the continued working of the incumbent system. More than 2,000 applications and interfaces would be affected during the process.
The new system was developed by KBank’s technology arm, KBTG, and went live in October 2024 after 22 months of work involving 1,000 employees. It has increased KBank’s transaction capacity by 50% and now supports up to 60 million customer accounts.
Mobile banking transactions at KBank have surged in recent years, necessitating the upgrade. K PLUS, one of the bank’s mobile apps, already has 23 million users and accounts for 30% of all financial transactions in Thailand.
Innovations In Finance Globally From Asia-Pacific
Intelligent Risk Prevention Solution Based on Collateral Management| CHINA CENTRAL DEPOSITORY & CLEARING
Implemented last year, CCDC’s risk prevention solution uses high-tech algorithms to automate and optimize collateral management within China’s bond market, the world’s second largest. It does so by applying robotic process automation and optical character recognition technologies to previously manual processes.
The risk prevention tool has improved operational efficiency by approximately 50%, according to CCDC, while reducing human error risks and improving resource allocation. CCDC clients can now use up to 20.9% of their holding assets as collateral, a high percentage for any platform.
AI-Powered Green Fintech for Sustainable Financing Business| CTBC BANK
Launched last November, this Scope 3 emission management solution from Taiwan’s CTBC Bank addresses the challenges facing financial institutions seeking to manage (Scope 3) greenhouse gas emissions. Partnering with Evercomm, a provider of digital sustainability solutions, the platform enables banks to measure the carbon impact of their financing decisions and track their sustainability targets.
Based on the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s AI in Green Fintech initiative, the platform uses publicly available ESG information and high-tech robotic process automation tools to extract the necessary emissions data.
Customer Service Officer (CSO) Assistant| DBS
DBS, a leader in innovation, uses AI to free its customer service officers from some of their most operationally taxing chores. The automated CSO Assistant transcribes and summarizes live customer calls and includes an email triaging tool that has already prioritized more than 48,000 offline messages.
Launched last August, CSO Assistant has improved the effectiveness of some 1,000 CSOs across Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and India, according to DBS, reducing the average time required to handle a single call by at least 5% while capturing conversations with customers more accurately.
Transforming Payment Process with Tokenization| OCBC
OCBC partnered with the Land Transport Authority of Singapore (LTA) last November to implement a blockchainbased solution for disbursing advance payments to LTA’s contractors. These can amount to millions of dollars and are critical to defraying contractors’ heavy upfront capital outlays.
Payments by LTA are now disbursed automatically almost immediately, once the blockchain’s smart contracts have verified that agreed-upon conditions have been met. Payments are also more transparent, secure, and traceable, for payer and payee alike. To date, over $22 million has been disbursed to LTA’s main and sub-contractors.
