The point of OCBC WoW is to get customers to transact more. The bottom line of OCBC’s new initiative is to grow the bank’s topline. More RMs imply more customers and more revenue.
Quek expects to double the consumer bank’s wealth income by 2029. OCBC does not break out its wealth income between Bank of Singapore, OCBC Private Bank and the consumer bank. Wealth management income in FY2025 was $5.6 billion. The net fees from wealth management in FY2025 for the group (which includes Bank of Singapore) were $1.44 billion; the bank (which may not include Bank of Singapore) recorded $498 million in wealth management fees, according to OCBC’s FY2025 annual report.
When asked about tech spend, Tan says: “We don’t have a specific AI spend.” However, he acknowledges that the bank is likely to spend $1 billion “every year for the next few years”.
The point of OCBC WoW is not about cost but about increasing revenue, though numbers were not shared during the media briefing.
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“We think about AI lowering our cost. We think of data ethics complementing the AI, so what we want is to do the same things at lower cost,” Tan says.
Part of Next Frontier
“When we crafted our Next Frontier strategy [we knew] that we were 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, investment and wealth flows. This allows the bank to intermediate capital, investment, trade and wealth flows. We also see a booming tech sector and 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.
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As part of its franchise shift, Next Frontier plans a localised strategy to expand its geographic franchise. “We split our franchises into two groups. The first are the twin hubs, Singapore and Hong Kong; the other group, the 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, with AI as a tool and part of ADD.
OCBC is building data lakes as part of the ADD strategy. Currently, Tan 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 more easily.”
As Tan sees it, the more the bank digitises, the more data capability it will have as AI develops. “Why is it that we do not use AI at the beginning? That’s because not all AIs are equal. Some AI does the job very well; some does not and some is really expensive to implement. Under the franchise shift in Singapore, one of the strategies which we are adopting is to leverage our three brands (OCBC, Bank of Singapore and Great Eastern Holdings). What we want to do is harness their products and curate value propositions for our customers where relevant, to support the whole of wealth strategy,” he elaborates.
Tan spent three decades at DBS, the last 12 of which were during Piyush Gupta’s tenure as group CEO. Gupta had introduced the concept of digital value capture in 2017. Part of the process involved using DBS’s data lakes to understand the cost of acquiring a digital customer and the transactions they make. Based on the data, DBS found that, in consumer banking, customers began to show interest in its wealth products.
Avatar banking
The beta version of the OCBC WoW app will be released to a selected group of employees and customers on an invitation-only basis. Customers who are invited to sample OCBC WoW are currently served by OCBC Premier Private Client wealth advisors. These are customers with at least $1.5 million in assets under management. Subsequent phases of the beta version will be progressively rolled out, with enhancements driven by “iterative prototyping” and user feedback.
The new platform is built on four technology architecture layers. The first layer comprises data ingestion of real-time market data, OCBC research and insights, and customers’ portfolios, transaction data and behaviour sets; the second layer integrates the AI deterministic guardrails into the platform;
The third layer involves using AI agents to build intelligence at scale; the last layer generates the output modules that customers see and experience.
Earlier this year, OCBC’s consumer banking unit rolled out a Gen AI-powered skills training programme for its wealth advisor force in Singapore. Within the first three months of training, wealth advisors demonstrated a high level of customer engagement, securing twice as many weekly client appointments as peers who had not yet completed the programme. There was also a 50% uplift in revenue compared with the previous three months.
