DRIVING DIGITAL

TRANSFORMATION AT
THE DBS BANK
Business Models for Digital
Economy Case Study Submission

Group 8, Section F
ASHISH (318) | KANIKKA (329) | KESHAV (332) | KRITIKA (333) |
KESHAV SAXENA
PAYAL (342) | VIBHOR (367) |

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CONTENT

1. Draw and discuss the evolution timeline of the DBS from Mr. Gupta taking over
its charge. ............................................................................................................. 3
2. Two what extent the DBS is in Digital business? Discuss this in line with the
definition of digital business covered in the class. ................................................. 5
3. The DBS’s digital transformation is grounded on which three most important
and fundamental philosophical shifts that helped it reach new heights. ................. 6
4. The manifesto “less banking and more living” justified which aspects of the DBS
and how it is achieved? ......................................................................................... 7
5. What are the key digital capabilities that were implemented in DBS to drive it to
become number one digital bank? ........................................................................ 7
6. Explain the statement “the DBS’s expansion to India become a success not only
in India but helped DBS to become more digital”................................................... 8
7. Explain why, Hackathon can be made an element in digital transformation? In
addition, draw the virtuous cycle Hackathon creates to generate idea and bring
innovation. ............................................................................................................ 8
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1. Draw and discuss the evolution timeline of the DBS from Mr. Gupta taking over its
charge.

Piyush Gupta initiated structuring of thought processes and later drove investment in digitization of
bank’s operations internally and externally. Initially, the focus was employee participation in devising
better processes and later it switched to creating an entrepreneurial mindset by giving employees
an opportunity to design new technological solutions through engagement in Hackathons. A timeline
of all the events are described below:
November 2009: Recruitment of Piyush Gupta
Piyush Gupta, a 27-year old with previous stint in Citibank, became the CEO of DBS Holdings
to help the bank achieve its vision to become ‘Asian bank of choice for new Asia’. At the time,
western markets were hit by the financial crisis of 2008 with less exposure to Asian counterparts.
As per one of the surveys, DBS was ranked last among top five banks in Singapore.

2010-11: First wave of changes that refined the path to achieve the vision
❖ Process Improvement Event (PIE) Methodology to improve customer satisfaction: Driving
insights from Customer Satisfaction Survey conducted by Singapore Management University,
Gupta pushed focus to process improvement and thereafter Paul Cohan (Chief operating
officer of Technology and Operations) devised PIE. PIE included a process entailing current
state mapping, a waste walk, future state mapping, an action plan, documentation and an out-
brief, and took five days to complete. This resulted in DBS saving 230 million customer hours
in process between 2010 and 2013.
❖ Refined new corporate strategy: Piyush came up with a new strategy to achieve the vision
resting on five pillars namely- Asian relationships, Asian insights, Asian innovation, Asian
connectivity, and Asian service. Cobban and a colleague worked to understand the definition
of Asian service by interacting with different key stakeholders such as employees, customers
and experts, and therefore came up with the RED (respectful, easy to deal with, and
dependable’ program. Employees – 2000 frontline staff, 700 middle managers and 250 top
managers – were trained as part of the program. RED intranet stories, awareness sessions,
customer hours and training hours were incorporated into bank’s scorecards to measure the
impact of the program.
As a result of these two initiatives, the bank ended up securing the first place (up from fifth) in
the same survey discussed above in 2012.
2012: Human-centered design (HCD) leads organizational change with focus on customer
centricity
❖ Process Improvement was seen as the responsibility of the Operations team and the project
teams paid not much heed to customers’ perspective while redesigning processes. Raju Nair,
a member of Cobban’s team, came us with the idea of ‘Customer Journeys’ to tackle such
problems and focused on incorporating customers’ activities, expectations, emotions and
needs. The organization started to place rather more focus on customer.
❖ HCD: It is a problem-solving approach that borrows principles of human psychology to better
understand humans. Nair attended immersive training program on HCD with a small team in
Pennsylvania and tested some projects using the principles and tools learned. Success of
such projects was shared with Gupta and David Gledhill (Head of technology and operations).
Thereafter, HCD lab was launched in July 2013. Several trainings were conducted:
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▪ In 2013, 15 ‘CJ design events’ were conducted, and 100 CJs were included in the group
scorecard for 2015.
▪ In two years, 43 two-day trainings on the subject were conducted and more than 700
employees were trained. These workshops helped employees understand human
behavior better and design best suited solutions.

2012-13: Revamping the IT infrastructure

Gledhill realized that the spending and effort related to IT infrastructure was misguided. Hence,
he aligned the budgets on three priorities: resilience (building core IT systems with fundamental
targets for a well-functioning organization such as 100% availability, 100% backup and 100%
security), nimbleness (expanding to growing emerging markets) and innovation (exploring new
business opportunities through technology). Within the second priority, a red-amber-green
matrix was built with countries in columns and capabilities in rows to make aware the current
position and track the progress to enter new markets. This helped the bank to roll out best-in
class banking platform across 12 countries in a short period of 12 months.

2013-14: New investments in digitization

DBS realized that expansion into new markets required digital banking solutions and not as
much traditional large physical presence as was hyped by its competitors. As a result, in early
2014, the bank announced to invest $200 million over next three years to expand into markets
though digital banking.

2014-2015: Setup of Digibank and organizing Hackathons focussing on the entrepreneurial

mindset
Digibank - a part of DBS – was set up to advance the digital transformation program. As pf June
2015, 30 people were employed in Singapore in areas of products, user experience, copywriting,
analytics, business development and partnerships, and project management. 20 people were
recruited in India, where the initiative was to be launched. This organization was characterized
by flat hierarchy and ability to draw resources from each and every DBS division. All the divisions
continuously interacted with the team to provide insights and Gupta was enthusiastically
involved as he devoted several hours a week.
❖ Expansion in India: As discussed above, Digibank was focusing on creating a mobile solution
for the Indian market. It was physically present in 12 regions but wanted to attract customers by
removing the catch phrase bank (as in physical bank) from the picture and instead relying on
handling monetary transactions. Customers at the end of the day wanted to save time, be called
by their names, get best advice and have some peace of mind. The mobile solution entailed
development of a partner network to ensure a seamless experience for the customers. Three
categories of partners were identified- partnership with merchants to acquire new customers and
become part of their lives, physical infrastructure partners (ATM networks and KYC vendors)
and start-up firms with innovative solutions capable of being embedded in digital banking. The
launch was planned in September 2015.
❖ Hackathons that changed perspective: A pilot hackathon was launched in October 2014
whereby start-up entrepreneurs and executive talent worked together to address a business
challenge, develop an initial prototype, get feedback from customers, code a basic mobile app,
get more customer feedback and then on day 3 pitch the solution to top DBS executives. This
event gave an opportunity to executive talent to break free from the daily monotony and work in
a rather unstructured pressured environment focused on devising technological solutions. It
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gave a new perspective of being on the field and driving change first-hand to these participating
executives.
Another three hackathons were organized. These hackathons resulted in creation of 50
prototypes surrounding SME banking, digital banking and other supporting business functions.
Two of these were turned live for India while 10 others were under review.

Now the organization was facing the challenge of embedding the hackathon driven experience
of executives in the real time working environment. Hackathons served as a means to drive the
philosophy of the company that rested on digital transformation but in turn required substantial
investment of time, effort and energy to build scalable and sustainable models. Hackathons may
bring out solutions but testing feasibility and implementation was another ball game altogether.
Overall, DBS had come a long way in digitally transforming its internal operations and external
interaction platforms to serve customers better. Now the question to be addressed was to scale
this digital growth even further with involvement of the executives and develop an intrapreneurial
setup.

2. Two what extent the DBS is in Digital business? Discuss this in line with the definition
of digital business covered in the class.

Digital business can be broadly defined as a business which reimagines the

customer journey and provides them immense satisfaction and experience by
embracing the latest technologies into its solutions. It means providing values to its
customers by providing solution to a problem.
DBS is in line with this strategy and it can be validated by following points. The CEO
Piyush Gupta was determined to put customer satisfaction over any other goals like
cost and resources concerns. A few initiatives which were taken by DBS in order to
achieve the same are –
1. Process Improvement Event: Their main focus was process management and they worked
on it by streamlining internal processes. A new process improvement event methodology
was introduced which was well-defined in terms of waste-management, future mapping and
action plans, reduce customer hours etc. The pillars of its vision “Asian bank of the choice
for new Asia” were – Asian relationships, Asian innovations, Asian connectivity, and Asian
service.
2. Customer Service (RED Program): The customer service was made a top priority which was
defined as RED program, i.e. ‘respectful, easy to deal with, and dependable’.
These initiatives helped DBS bagged the coveted first place among the banks in the 2012
Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore.
3. Human-centered Design (HCD): HCD became a core element of the organizational change
methodology at DBS. They shifted from “Process Improvement” to “Customer Journey”. The
bank moved away from the thinking that “process” was the responsibility of operations and
“customer” was that of business. It was a creative approach towards problem solving rooted
understanding people’s behaviors, needs, and emotions to provide better products and
services.
4. Suite of digital offerings: The rapid assimilation of digital technologies into people’s lives
was changing their expectations. And this was a challenge to track and work towards
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addressing the changing behaviors and expectations of customers. They started building
offerings like online remittances, home-buying applications for retail customers.
5. They believed and worked towards the bold vision of future – “banking is necessary but
banks are not”. Their culture was driven by “creativity and innovation” towards providing
solutions to the problems of customers. They understood that money was important in
people’s lives and they would like to happily forget about banking in their day-to-day lives.
They focused on their main goal which was to embed the jobs concerning money to be
done in a seamless and invisible way. Their motto was: “less banking and more living.”
6. Building out the ecosystem: They were not just into the mobile banking but they were
plugged into the ecosystem by having partnerships across different categories, i.e.
a) Partners that would drive customer acquisition and embed the new banking system into
their everyday lives.
b) Partners who would provide physical infrastructure to support the experience of digital
banking
c) Partners that would enrich and extend the value proposition of DBS by plugging
innovative solutions into the DBS core digital banking platform.

3. The DBS’s digital transformation is grounded on which three most important and
fundamental philosophical shifts that helped it reach new heights.

DBS based its transformation where they wanted to become “The best bank in the Asia”. The top
management came up with the solution of RED.
RED, short for ‘Respectful, Easy to deal with, and Dependable’, was used to incorporate
philosophical change in the company inside and initiate their process improvement through it. To
fulfil the RED, it depended upon these three factors also, Customer Mapping, Digitalization and
Company Culture.
• Customer Mapping
As given in the case, shifting the language from process improvement to customer journey
helped change the perception of the program in DBS. Customer Mapping helped DBS to have
deep understanding of people’s needs, behavior and emotions. As in RED, all three
components are depended upon customer feeling the respect, ease of dealing with bank and
have their needs depend upon the bank.
• Digitalization
To become easy to deal with and dependable required a holistic and huge changes in the IT
infrastructure to strengthen the back end to support the front end. Also, the plans to launch
an app to make customer service easy required high level of digitization to make it easy for
customers.
• Company Culture
To achieve the goal, company also needed its employees to have the same mindset and
exhibit the desired company culture. This was done by attracting talents with certain mindset,
flexible, digitally savvy, adaptable and work independently. They tried to bring two cultures
into one, the corporate and start up into one roof. This led to success of the transformation
process as the company employees fully backed the transformation.
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4. The manifesto “less banking and more living” justified which aspects of the DBS and
how it is achieved?

The manifesto “less banking and more living” justifies the theme of DBS to simplify and digitalize the
process of banking so that people can take care of their banking chores easily. It is known that few
people enjoy the process of banking and the perception of banking is lots of paperwork, standing in
line and waiting for their turn. So, DBS Bank came out with this concept in 2014 when the bank was
adopting innovation and digital banking in its core processes in a big way, along with keeping its
branding and marketing strategy in pace. The bank took its deeply-ingrained customer journey
philosophy to the next level by explicating the idea of making banking invisible, but ensuring that
quality of services provided are at their best.

The Bank decided to create a new unit Digibank to implement its ambitious plan of digital
transformation, creating new business models, entering new markets and creating new revenue
streams in the process. Digibank started with attracting top talent with a particular mindset-flexible,
digitally savvy and capable of adapting on the fly and working independently. It led to the creation of
start-up culture. It designed and developed a mobile banking solution. Along with it, it focused on
developing a partner network to support the launch and ultimately ensure a seamless banking
experience. Partnerships is what differentiates Digibank from others, as they are fully involved in the
ecosystem. Further, hackathons were organized to generate ideas for a given business challenge
and develop customer solutions.

5. What are the key digital capabilities that were implemented in DBS to drive it to
become number one digital bank?
To make DBS “Asian Bank of Choice”, there was a need to revamp the IT infrastructure of the bank
and also to digitize the banking process to save customer hours. The IT department set up their
three key priorities to achieve this target; resilience, nimbleness and innovation.

• They first built a resilient world-class core IT system. A major part of cash reserves was used for
this and they had targets of 100% availability, backup and security
• DBS decided to expand outside Singapore and Hong Kong and also in emerging markets for
nimbleness.

In only 12 months DBS was able to roll out a best-in-class banking platform across 12 countries
after the platform was in place DBS started paying attention towards digitization. DBS Decided that
entering a new market with the digital banking solution was the only viable solution for growth.
To head start its digitizing process, DBS had two options. Either they could establish a
separate company and staffing it from diverse talent outside of banking industry, or they could
expand the responsibilities of the current e-business team that was developing solutions for the
Singapore and Hong Kong markets. Taking up a hybrid approach, DBS went ahead with a new unit
– DIGIBANK – which was a part of DBS and had significant decision-making rights and autonomy.
For staff and the digital bank DBS had two options. From outside the bank DBS looked at
Google and Apple's previous employees while from inside the bank DBS wanted people who
were flexible, digitally savvy, capable of adapting and working independently. DBS brought together
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to distinct cultures - corporate and start-up. Digibank employed 30 people in Singapore as of 2015
in diverse areas such as copywriting Analytics business development and partnerships
The development of mobile banking solution in India was a major step towards digitization of
the Bank's operations. the partner network to support the Digital solution of DBS in India laid ground
for physical infrastructure, customer acquisition, and innovative solutions into the DBS ko digital
banking platform.
The hackathons organized by DBS was spearheading intrapreneurship efforts. the five-day
hackathon involved top level executives and generated new ideas and prototypes the success of
initial hackathons paved way for more hackathons across countries. bye 2015 DBS had about half
of its top talent pool at the level of vice president, senior Vice President it, and executive director do
master classes and hackathons all of these programs were helpful in digitizing the operations at
DBS and making it the number one digital bank.

6. Explain the statement “the DBS’s expansion to India become a success not only in
India but helped DBS to become more digital”.

The main focus of Digibank was to develop a digital banking solution for the Indian market. At that
time, it was only nominally present in India at that time with around 12 branches across major cities.
• After brainstorming the key needs of the customers, the major requirements of the customers
were figured out. These were deposits, payments, investments and loans and to simplify the
process for these requirements, DBS went ahead with the motto for Digital Banking solution as
‘less banking, more living’ and they created a mobile solution for the customer needs.
• DBS also developed a partner network to support its mobile solution and thus ensure a seamless
banking experience for the customer. This was done by a dedicated team in Singapore
developing strategy and process to carry out the program. They looked out for 3 types of partners
– (i) Partners that would drive customer acquisition, (ii) Partners that would provide physical
infrastructure for the digital banking experience, and (iii) Partners that would provide innovative
solutions to DBS’s value propositions.
• DBS also started Hackathons in the organization to give a boost to their ‘intrapreneurship’ efforts
and have a start-up culture in the bank. After the success of initial pilot, more hackathons were
organized in India as well where senior level executives took part in the event and gave birth to
new ideas and prototypes.
All of these steps made DBS a success in India and also helped DBS become more digital while
being in synergy with the priorities of IT department of resilience, nimbleness and innovation. DBS’
services were available digitally to Indian customers and it paved the way for upcoming digitization
of the bank’s operations across the Asian region.

7. Explain why, Hackathon can be made an element in digital transformation? In

addition, draw the virtuous cycle Hackathon creates to generate idea and bring
innovation.

HACKATHON: Hackathon, is a combination of the words “hack” and “marathon” and is typically seen
as interactive sessions of one or two days where eager tech entrepreneurs and software developers
combine forces to create new applications or features. At DBS, the Hackathon was a three-day
event which brought along executives (Vice Presidents etc) and start-up together to generate ideas
for a business challenge. Participants would come, ideate, interact and then experiment their ideas.
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HACKATHON: WHY CAN IT BE AN ELEMENT IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION?

Hackathon works on the principle of ideate, prototype, build, and validate, code, more ideation and
so on. It gives senior executives and start-up a chance to come together and learn, do and again
learn and do, coupled with grueling ideation sessions and long coding nights. Large companies, hold
internal Hackathon to promote new product innovation by the engineering staff and break through
organizational inertia. For example, Facebook’s like button was conceived as part of a Hackathon.
Hackathon is envisioned for not only innovation but as a means to greatly accelerate the process of
digital transformation. By its nature of short powerful change and innovate session, it enables large
organizations to innovate processes and products at the speed of startups.
At DBS the Hackathon’s attracted about 120 vice president’s and more than 40 start-ups which led
to a total of 50 prototypes in various areas of banking, marketing etc. It helps the organization to step
out of the corporate world and create MVP’s from prototypes in a speedy and agile manner which
helps employees to learn more, do more and get involved in revamping the organization. It helps to
break down the walls between different departments like marketing, product and services etc. and
helps to create an achievable idea and solve problems which an organization is struggling to solve
from a long time. For example, in banking industry if students, entrepreneurs, coders and developers
work together to design and develop innovative solutions addressing business challenges like
Blockchain, AI, Chat Bots, Big Data or WealthTec it would accelerate the digital transformation of
the bank.

VIRTUOUS CYCLE OF HACKATHON:

In order to keep the burner of learning and doing going, frequent meet-ups posts Hackathon are
required also post and pre-Hackathon planning leads to greater results. Virtuous cycle means if
something good starts to happen it will lead to other good things whereas the initial one continues.
As Hackathon gives executives and employees to innovate, come out of their corporate culture and
implement hypothetical ideas and discussions it motivates and attract more and more no of
employees. It’s basic working principle allows them to ideate, build, validate, code and do more
ideation, coding and come up with new prototypes which adds to innovation in the organization.

REPEAT (LEARN AND REDO, ADD NEW FEATURES)

IDEATE COLLABORATE DESIGN RAPID TESTING GOOD

PROTOTYPE APPLICATIONS