Q1: Reflecting on 2025, what were your bank’s major milestones from an operational perspective, and how did you achieve them? Conversely, what were the setbacks and challenges encountered along the way, and what measures were taken to surmount them? How have those lessons shaped your 2026 strategy?

2025 was marked by a record performance for our wealth management business, with strong investment products, bancassurance sales and traction in managed solutions.

Overall, assets under management rose 19% in constant-currency terms to S$488 billion, with record net inflows of S$39 billion from both new and existing clients, which speaks to our clients’ trust and confidence in us to grow their wealth. Our bank-backed multi-family office VCC also surpassed US$1 billion in AUM since its debut two years ago.

In this context, we invested in strengthening our infrastructure and control frameworks to match the increasing breadth and sophistication of our offerings. For example, the client onboarding process was streamlined further, and we enhanced our product risk governance to ensure robust oversight of newer and more complex solutions. At the same time, we upgraded our platforms, such as expanding our digibank capabilities and launching a dedicated platform for EAM-managed clients, to improve efficiency and client experience.

Rapid growth and increased complexity stemming from a broader product shelf and rising client expectations placed additional strain on frontline and support teams. To address these challenges, we took several measures. We established a dedicated support team to expeditiously handle day-to-day personal banking needs for private banking clients, allowing our front office teams to focus on higher-value client engagement. We continued to improve our processes, for instance, largely automating credit file reviews and improving end-to-end workflows and workbenches. We also integrated our DBS-GPT, our AI-powered enterprise search, into private banking processes to improve information retrieval and reduce manual work.

The lesson from 2025 is clear: sustained growth must be matched with operational excellence. Our 2026 strategy builds on this, and we will continue to automate, leverage AI, improve workflows and strengthen controls, so that scale comes with productivity gains, adequate risk management and a consistent client experience.

Q2: As private banks invest in upgrading their KYC systems and scaling AI capabilities, how are you addressing the operational challenges of integrating these technologies while driving measurable KPIs in revenue growth and delivering hyper-personalised client experiences?

We address the operational challenges of integrating AI for KYC and other capabilities by embedding responsible AI within its operations. This approach is anchored by an in-house technology platform that serves as the bank’s central engine for all AI initiatives, ensuring AI models are trained on high-quality, well-governed data. 

Our PURE framework guides every AI use case from conception to deployment, ensuring applications are Purposeful, Unsurprising, Respectful, and Explainable. This robust governance, coupled with human-supervised oversight, defined escalation paths and audit trails, ensures strategic control and accountability, reinforcing that responsibility remains with people and systems. We also heavily invest in upskilling our employees on tailored learning roadmaps to ensure effective human oversight and collaboration with AI.

The benefits of leveraging AI are tangible. To drive hyper-personalised client experiences and revenue growth, we use artificial intelligence to deliver timely insights, triggered by client behaviour, portfolio drift, or market signals, to both clients and relationship managers. These triggers can initiate personalised outreach or offer investment suggestions aligned with the bank’s chief investment office views, thereby sharpening advice, increasing productivity and client satisfaction.

For instance, we observed that the adoption of legacy planning solutions increased by 30% after the introduction of corresponding AI-powered nudges. For KYC, the use of AI for adverse news screening, information summarization or analysis of KYC information or documentation improves both efficiency and quality. These contribute to enhanced efficiency, enabling the teams to focus their time on more value-added activities.