Singapore-based OCBC Bank is advancing its customer engagement strategy by integrating artificial intelligence (AI), digital technology, and data analytics to transform traditional banking interactions into proactive, personalised experiences. The bank’s initiative marks a shift from transactional banking toward building continuous, contextual relationships with customers.
Sunny Quek, head of global consumer financial services at OCBC, highlighted that the industry’s next evolution involves linking fragmented customer touchpoints into a unified, seamless engagement. According to Quek, this requires not only technological integration but also redesigning customer service processes to anticipate needs and address issues before they escalate.
Since establishing a dedicated AI unit in 2018, OCBC has continued to innovate, most recently with the launch of Avatar Banking by OCBC WoW (Whole-of-Wealth), an AI-driven wealth management app aimed at affluent clients. Featuring avatars Wendy and Wayne as digital financial assistants, the app provides users with real-time, hyper-personalised market insights, portfolio analyses, and investment ideas via natural language interactions. This development enables customers to engage with their wealth management more flexibly, beyond traditional scheduled meetings with relationship managers.
Central to OCBC’s strategy is viewing AI, digital, and data not as ends themselves but as enablers that reduce friction and simplify banking. The bank plans to invest more than US$1 billion annually in technology over the next three years to deepen this approach. By leveraging AI and data analytics, OCBC is moving from reactive problem-solving to proactive prevention, identifying behavioral patterns and potential pain points across customer journeys.
OCBC has also introduced a Customer Centric Experience Design process to ensure customer needs guide new initiatives from inception, employing early stakeholder engagement and data-driven decision-making. The aim is to reduce customer effort—minimising repetitive information requests, channel switching, or unnecessary delays—considered a more reliable predictor of loyalty and advocacy than customer satisfaction alone.
Generative AI is deployed across millions of customer interactions to identify recurring issues and emerging trends, enabling the bank to address root causes in product design, communication, or operations rather than merely treating symptoms. Findings are shared regionally through service dashboards, allowing best practices to spread quickly and problems to be resolved promptly.
Practical innovations stemming from data insights include an Online Call feature within the OCBC app, designed to help customers abroad avoid costly international call charges when seeking support. Since customers are already authenticated on the app, this feature streamlines issue resolution, especially for card transaction problems overseas.
Despite the growing role of technology, OCBC maintains a focus on human judgment and empathy, particularly in complex advisory conversations. Technology is intended to augment—not replace—relationship managers by providing timely, relevant insights that enable them to concentrate on high-value client interactions. The bank has invested heavily in staff training, with three in five employees gaining proficiency in AI, digital, and data skills. Its use of generative AI to coach wealth advisers has led to increased sales productivity and revenue gains.
Looking ahead, OCBC plans to hire 600 additional relationship managers over the next three years to meet the demand for more sophisticated wealth management services. This effort aligns with the bank’s broader "Next Frontier" strategy, which aims to embed innovation across all business units and markets. By combining technological advancements with a customer-centric approach, OCBC seeks to forge enduring customer relationships based on trust, anticipating needs, and reducing friction in banking interactions.