1000m ISSUE

PIYUSH GUPTA

The author is GEO,

DBSgroup

Just the tip of the icebergA digital agenda will proactively overturn all traditional notions of banking

Inmid July, I was in London to receive anaward on behalf of OBS for 'World's Best Dig-ital Bank'. The award marked the first time

a Singapore and Asian bank won in a global cat-egory by financial publication Euromoney. Webeat out strong global contenders for the award.But perhaps most satisfying of all is that theaward represents the future of banking.

Over the last three years, OBS has been deeplyimmersed in a digital agenda, driven by thebelief that our industry is undergoing cataclys-mic disruption and that, unless we transformand, that too, quickly, our lunch will be eaten.

The winds of change are driven by severaltrends. The first is mobile computing, whichis changing the nature of the game, because itallows banking to be integrated into people'slives instead of being a detached activity. Thesecond is Big Data, which enables banks to intro-duce products and services that could not beimagined before. The third is social or the net-work economy, which dramatically changes theway economic agents - whether individuals ormerchants - interact. As an example, banks havehistorically been lenders of money, and consum-ers the borrowers. Today, consumers lend moneyto other consumers in peer to peer networks.

Additionally, the use of artificial intelligence(Allwill enable banks to engage with customersdifferently. For example, AI can handle customerqueries or process big data that helps in decision-making. Finally, the ability to leverage cloud com-puting will also be a game-changer, in that it willgive banks greater flexibility to experiment, scaleand more rapidly bring new features to market.

Compounding the threat to banks is theencroachment into our turf of FinTechs such asTencent and Alipay. While disruptive technol-ogy is a challenge, we believe we can turn thediscontinuity into an opportunity for growth.In fact, we think there is a reasonable change inthe world of tomorrow that we can build out aretail banking franchise based purely on digital.For us, digital has become a burning platformin both an offensive and defensive way. Whatit does require though is for us to re-imaginebanking. And that is exactly what we did withthe launch of digibank, India's first mobile-onlybank, in April.

In many ways, digibank represents what webelieve is the future of banking:• It is a bank that has no paper, and requires no

forms and no signature; a bank that is hassle-free, giving customers time to do things in theirlives they'd rather do.• It is a bank that has been created for mobile; abank that travels with the customer, and knowshis or her location and therefore provides oppor-tunities, ideas and deals based on that data.• It is a bank that is manned not by a customerservice agent, but leverages artificial intelligence,which one can talk to in natural language.• It is a bank that learns as it goes along, and getsto know the customer better and better.• It is a bank that does not need branches anda large operations infrastructure ... and thus hasa cost point much lower than that of any tradi-tional bank, the benefits of which can be passedon to consumers.• It is a bank with tremendous security: that doesnot rely on one-touch password and the vagariesof today's cyber-security issues ... but dynamicinbuilt security that makes it safe.

We believe digibank is in many ways a uniqueworld first because it brings together four

ground-breaking technologies: biometrics, nat-ural language technology, artificial intelligenceand dynamic security. And India was our choiceof a go-to market for this new first because:• It boasts the world's fastest growing economyand a growing need for financial services;• It has the planet's biggest population of mil-lennials, with two-thirds of Indians below theage of 35;• There are more than 684 million mobile phoneusers in India - of which 204 million are smart-phone users;• The combination of the [an Dhan Yojanaprogramme (National Mission for FinancialInclusion), Aadhaar (national identification pro-gramme) and the proliferation of mobile havemade direct identification of every person inIndia possible. Together with a series of new-age digital infrastructure called the 'India stack',which includes Aadhaar authentication andeKYC, eSign and Digilocker, Unified PaymentsInterface, and consent architecture - with cor-responding public APIS, India's infrastructureleads the way for digital solutions.

What we've seen is just the tip of the ice-berg. Banking is on the cusp of massive change.With digibank, we seek to proactively overturnall traditional notions of banking. •

·172·JULY 18-31, 2016