DBS
Digitise or perish, says DBS Bank, and Singapore’s largest bank has backed up its rhetoric by aiming to become an Asian fintech hothouse. It has renovated a 16,000 sq ft space on the island and called it DBS Asia X, filling it with funky ‘project pods’ and spaces to attract, as it describes, ‘the best and brightest FinTech startups’.
The bank says it has run over 1,000 fintech experiments since 2015, encouraging employees to regard themselves as ‘intrapreneurs’ rather than working for a bureaucracy with 22,000-plus staff in Singapore. It wants to be regarded as an incubator, incorporating its sharpest fintech output into its mainstream operations, while trying to nurturing new industry leaders as businesses in their own right.
DBS’s online and mobile banking users tally more than 3 million and 2.2 million respectively, an increase of 3% and 69% respectively from 2015-2016.
DBS’s PayLah! has become the fastest-growing personal mobile wallet in Singapore, with more than 450,000 users, 50% more than 2015/16. The bank boasts that it takes just three seconds to transfer money between DBS accounts, and no more than two hours to an account at another Singapore bank.
“This year, we will further our digital agenda by continuing with the rollout of digibank, a mobile only bank, (and) pressing ahead with customer journeys and becoming more data-driven,” DBS says.