As part of OCBC's group CEO Tan Teck Long’s Next Frontier strategy, its consumer banking wealth management segment aims to onboard 600 relationship managers (RM) within three years. According to Sunny Quek, group managing director, head, global consumer financial services at OCBC, each RM is able to serve 250-300 customers so that OCBC's consumer banking wealth management segment doubles revenue by 2029.
To raise the number of customers RMs can serve by multiples, and to grow the customer base, OCBC has launched OCBC WoW (whole of wealth) which incorporates two avatars, Wendy and Wayne, delivering hyper-personalised wealth management services on a real-time basis, 24/7.
On July 1, OCBC unveiled avatar banking to transform the way it engages customers. Over time, OCBC WoW will leverage its AI-native environment to extend its range of products and services to meet customers’ increasingly sophisticated needs and build deeper and stickier relationships.
With AI, Digital, Data (ADD) at the core of the Next Frontier corporate strategy, OCBC will intensify the build-up of its AI-native environment to support a test-and-learn culture. This approach enables rapid, low-cost experimentation through prototyping, allowing promising ideas to be quickly refined and scaled into agile, high-impact execution.
Spanning wealth management to becoming a daily go-to news destination, and from lifestyle rewards to core banking services, OCBC WoW aims to establish itself as a “digital financial companion” seamlessly integrated into customers’ everyday lives.
In its beta version, Wendy and Wayne will show customers their investment portfolios, and deliver personalised market news and data combined with OCBC Group insights and top investment ideas across markets, geographies, currencies and themes. OCBC WoW anticipates customer needs and incorporates advanced portfolio intelligence.
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OCBC WoW enhances OCBC wealth advisors’ understanding of the investment needs of customers, enabling pro-active engagement with timely, relevant and tailored support. This encourages customers to invest more through OCBC, thus enlarging the share of customers’ wallet in OCBC’s ‘Whole-of-Wealth’ push.
The point of OCBC WoW avatar banking is to get customers to transact more. The bottomline of OCBC’s new initiative is to grow the bank’s topline. More RMs imply more customers, a larger bank and more revenue. Neither Quek or Tan gave any hint of their revenue target.
Part of Next Frontier
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“When we crafted our Next Frontier strategy [we knew] that we are going to operate in a very complex and uncertain world. How do we navigate that? We need capabilities and good insights. Asia continues to see rising trade, rising investment, rising wealth. This gives the bank the opportunity to intermediate capital and investment flows, trade flows, and wealth flows. We also see a booming tech sector, as well as continued interest in sustainability. This means that we can finance digital infrastructure, like the data centres, the tech supply chain, as well as renewables and the greening of industry,” says Tan in a media briefing.
As part of Next Frontier, in its franchise shift, OCBC plans a localised strategy to grow the local franchise. “We split our franchises into two groups. The first, the twin hubs, Singapore and Hong Kong; the other group, Asean domestic market, comprises Malaysia and Indonesia. Right in the centre, occupying a very prominent space is ADD, at our core, AI digital and data,” Tan explains.
AI is a tool, Tan continues. Hence, OCBC is building data lakes. Currently, he believes in focusing on “a customer-centric process, end to end, digitise where we need to digitise, re-engineer the process for digitisation, leverage data analytics better, and when AI is fit for purpose, we lock in the AI. The more we digitise, the more data capability we have as AI develops, we can plug in AI easier.”
