Aim Is To 'Embed The Bank In A Customer's Journey'

DBS Bank is known for its high level of digitization. Alfian Sharifuddin, MD and head of Technology and Operations, DBS India, gives details of the bank’s efforts in India:

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N. Mohan: What is the significance of holding hackathons? Have these really helped the bank?

Alfian Sharifuddin: We use hackathons for our recruitment. For example, we launched Hack2Hire last year in Singapore and India, to hire developers. Hacker in Her, a women-only hackathon, and Game of Codes, a campus recruitment hackathon, are 2 programs that are unique to the India market. These programs have helped us attract the crème de la crème of talent. This is a 48-hour session, where we give an offer letter to all selected candidates at the end of the process.

Which are the major technologies that are used at DBS Bank’s Asia Hub for Innovation and the applications that are developed? Can you narrate instances where these applications were successfully used in the digitization process at the bank?

Some of the latest technologies that are being used include micro-services for better resiliency, chaos engineering for better resiliency, open APIs for ecosystem / partner integration and a whole platform built on cloud-native technologies. We also use integrated SDKs for specialized services such as soft token, chat bots and credit risk assessment. All these SDKs when integrated with our app, have enhanced our digital offering. We also use insights from customer data and feedback to make better decisions on our products / offerings. We are working on multiple AI / ML technologies for future enablement of product offerings.

DBS Bank has been working on migrating to cloud-optimized technology in a big way, especially its recent use of the technology for data centers. Which are the major areas where cloud technology is being used and what are the perceptible benefits? Has the bank been able to shift a major portion of its workload to the cloud as planned?