Why? “To provide clarity to the various teams within Finance on our mission. A differentiated capability within D (Deliver Core Finance) is our Enterprise Performance Management system, which is designed in-house. This is the foundation of how we manage the bank, including funds transfer pricing (see Why DBS outperformed local and foreign peers) as well as our investor communications,” replies Chng.
As part of the CFO role, Chng oversees a few areas that DBS has articulated during its investor days, such as digital value capture, performance management architecture and managing through journeys. These aren’t just McKinsey speak.
Digital value capture
DBS unveiled its digital value capture methodology in its first investor day in 2017. “In 2017, we recognised that we were already very digital, but the market couldn’t see this. So we asked ourselves, ‘How do we quantify the value created in a way that people can understand?’”
Chng replies that DBS decided to focus on areas where the bank had granular data, namely, Singapore and Hong Kong’s consumer banking and SME segments.
“Within that, we looked at behaviour that differentiates a digital customer from a traditional customer. We started to tag these customers. We know how much it costs to acquire a digital customer versus a traditional customer. We know it’s a lot cheaper to transact digitally. We know that with digital, you can engage the customer better. We built an ecosystem where customers can be onboarded cheaper, transact faster, and they stay much more engaged with you,” says Chng.
“Because we have actually digitalised these functions, it’s a lot easier for people to buy unit trusts, or other products, depending on their own risk profile. Our CEO wanted DVC to be driven by Finance, because it has to be linked back to our P&L,” she adds.
See also: Why DBS outperformed local and global peers
Piyush Gupta, DBS’s former Group CEO from 2009 to 2025, was digitally inclined. In fact, in the early 2000s, he started a tech company, which didn’t work out before he returned to banking. Some 10 years ago, at a Christmas party, Gupta jokingly referred to DBS as the Digital Bank of Singapore. And that was his challenge — for DBS to act like a tech start-up.
How would Digital Bank of Singapore affect its investors? “We began to report digital value capture. It was very well received by the market, because the analysts can then actually say, if I can take this model and imply more digitalisation, conversion and lower cost to serve, then I should get to a lower cost to income ratio and therefore higher ROE. Overall, a simplified narrative, backed by hard numbers that were easy for the market to extrapolate and thus value,” Chng says. “We told the market in 2017 that as customers become more digital, ROE improves, because the cost-to-income ratio will be lower.”
Managing through journeys
Banking is complicated. DBS has many sector heads and many products under the various sectors — real estate, energy, wealth management, global transaction services, trade, retail and so on, and in different geographies. For instance, DBS Hong Kong and DBS India are locally incorporated subsidiaries.
DBS needs different management information systems (MIS) to drive its various business decisions. Technology cuts across the bank and is a cost. Chng says the bank has to allocate the cost so that when it launches a product, Financ will know how much the product actually costs by dividing the income by its proportion of cost.
“Keeping solutions centred around customers, DBS introduced a programme called Managing Through Journeys. It scaled to include over 60 impactful customer journeys, each led by a senior leader, addressing major pain points like account opening and ATM waiting times. Simultaneously, DBS scaled up cloud migration, invested in automation, and developed microservices to support modular architecture, allowing components to be swapped out upon ageing,” McKinsey says in a case study on DBS.
“With Managing Through Journeys, cross-functional teams (business, technology, operations, support) are organised horizontally to focus on specific customer journeys such as account opening. They have common KPIs, which include customer outcomes and financial metrics, so performance is aligned. The ability to break down vertical silos and run the organisation in a horizontal manner enables much better customer experience,” Chng adds.
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She adds that when Gupta set her a task to produce a horizontal P&L to support managing through journeys, “it was a tall order. Essentially, we had to capture income at a customer level that in the past might have come from two different units or vertical silos. The Performance Management Architecture enabled that.”
An MIT-Sloane study says DBS’s performance management architecture is built on a balanced scorecard that aligns organisational, business, and employee goals. The architecture integrates financial, customer, and employee performance, and uses data-driven insights, AI, and a strategic focus on digitisation and sustainability to drive performance and reward outcomes.
“We have a group scorecard, which Piyush used to call DBS’ secret sauce. Finance and Group Planning support the group scorecard. We run an honest, balanced scorecard system. We compare our performance against that of our competitors; we compare against our budget, and with the previous year’s performance. It also has longer-term priorities that we are working on in the current year to enable the delivery of business outcomes in future periods. Our scorecard process is very rigorous; it is cascaded down the entire organisation, driving organisational alignment,” says Chng.
“Whatever the market hears in terms of guidance, our digital value capture methodology or managing through journeys, our Enterprise Performance Management System is key; they are designed in-house. We use the best-in-class data analytics and infrastructure to form the core of regulatory reporting and business needs,” Chng adds. “The finance function has been able to get the business to recognise the numbers, believe in them, and drive business outcomes.”
With the system, Chng and the current Group CEO Tan Su Shan are able to guide income, earnings, dividends and capital return.
