David Gledhill, CIO, DBS Bank
These steps laid the foundation for us to take our solutions into the future.
2. Embedding Ourselves into the Customer Journey
The next shift we took was putting ourselves in the shoes of the customer to identify their real ‘job to be done’. For example, a customer isn’t simply trying to find the best mortgage loan, he or she is actually looking to build a home or start a family. This changes the way we engage with our customers and how we create products for them.
The success of digibank in India is a true testament of how we managed to use this new found perspective to scale our operations. Digibank allows customers to create a mobile wallet in 90 seconds and open an account with us without having to step into a bank branch. With this one-of-a-kind experience, we have acquired more than 2.3 million customers in just three years at only one-fifth the resources required for a traditional bank set-up– purely based on the insight that what people need are banking services and not physical banks.
3. Creating a 27,000-Person Start-Up
Our people are our biggest assets at DBS. While modern technology has helped to transform the banking sector, we are ultimately still a people-driven business.
By creating a robust workplace and dynamic culture, we flipped the organisation inside out and created what we regard as the ‘27,000-person start-up’, where we can work like a start-up and scale like a large enterprise.
With that in mind, we built on five essential characteristics to drive this change.
(i) Be customer obsessed,
(ii) Be data-driven,
(iii) Dare to experiment more,
(iv) Adopt an agile way of working, and
(v) Become a learning organisation.
We then created programmes to spark curiosity and encourage employees to learn. The Gandalf scholarship programme is one example. Employees are given SGD 1,000 to learn a new skill and they return to share their learnings with their peers. This practice of peer-to-peer learning has seen over 130 employees teach more than 14,700 of their colleagues through various methods of ‘teach-backs’.
Tapping into our wealth of bank talents, we launched a Back to School series regionally where subject-matter experts conducted classes that engaged over 10,000employees. These topics include agile, data, digital business models, personal branding, and cloud.
We also introduced DBS Startup Xchange, DBS UNI. CORN, Idea Vault and Hackathons to identify top talents and drive innovative problem-solving.
Our approach to developing our hardware and heartware has resonated strongly with our people, and has resulted in a complete transformation from the front office to the back. Since then, we have conducted over 1,000 experiments and launched many industry firsts including DBS Hack2Hire, a two-part hackathon to bring in top technology talent and; DBS Developers Portal, the world’s largest banking API developer platform.
Being recognised as the Best Bank in the World by Global Finance and The Banker’s Global Bank of the Year is only the tip of the iceberg. We look forward to driving more sustainable outcomes and pushing the boundaries of what it means to Live More, Bank Less for our employees and customers.
