Asia's best bank for transaction services 2020: DBS

DBS takes the award for Asia’s best bank for transaction services this year. 

In 2019, revenues generated by the bank’s global transaction services (GTS) team, under the leadership of group head of global transaction services John Laurens, jumped 8% year on year, to S$2.6 billion ($1.9 billion), with income generated by the division up 12% year on year in 2019, against an Asia-Pacific average of just 4%, according to data from Crisil’s Coalition Index. 

The Singapore lender clearly benefits from its formidable digital strength, as do its customers. By the end of March 2020, it had implemented 184 corporate and institutional banking application programming interfaces; corporate API call volumes rose more than 11-fold in 2019, to 7.4 million from 658,000 a year earlier. 

DBS is ranked number one for PayNow receipts in Singapore, controlling more than 50% of the market: 48,000 individuals and companies signed up in 2019. 

It was the first bank in the city state to implement cheque repricing, and in February 2020 the bank completed its first trade finance transaction on Singapore’s Networked Trade Platform, a $3.5 million letter of credit issued by two local corporates. 

As you would expect from an institution that wins this year’s award for Asia’s best bank, DBS is also a regional powerhouse in transaction services. Its GTS division posted a 10% year-on-year increase in revenues in India in 2019, a figure that rises to 12% in Hong Kong and Indonesia, and 17% in Singapore. 

And it continues to innovate, rolling out services that make life more frictionless and that blur the line between bank and customer. 

DBS Rapid enables firms to integrate instant payments directly into their business processes, by piggybacking on local payments systems: Bersama in Indonesia, UPI in India, CUP in China and Hong Kong’s Faster Payment System.

DBS Max allows companies in India, Hong Kong and Singapore to settle and receive payments using QR technology, a programme also adopted by Singapore Airlines. 

And last year, the bank teamed up with City Developments, a Singapore based property firm, to create an application that enables tenants to pay a range of bills – from rent to car-parking fees – more conveniently and efficiently.