Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) is transforming itself into a digitally advanced powerhouse where cutting-edge technology supports highly personalised customer relationships that once relied on face-to-face meetings with branch managers.

Long relegated to back-office support, technology now sits “front and centre” as the primary way the bank differentiates itself and serves customers who increasingly demand seamless digital experiences, according to Praveen Raina, OCBC’s head of group operations and technology.

To power that transformation, OCBC has identified artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum technology as critical enablers. AI is now embedded across the bank to help increase revenue, reduce risk, and enhance productivity. The bank is simultaneously researching the use of quantum technologies to reshape banking.

Yet, advanced capabilities mean little without reliability. As customers shift from branch counters to digital platforms and mobile apps, system resilience has become non-negotiable. Innovation must rest on a foundation of dependability, which is the bedrock on which OCBC builds its technology strategy.

Pragmatism underpins this approach. Raina explains: “System resilience is like human health. We all wish to be healthy, but from time to time, we fall sick. Systems are like that, too.” Excellence is the goal, but preparedness is the path. OCBC enforces strict guardrails and conducts rigorous disaster recovery exercises to ensure operational readiness even during unexpected incidents.

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Technology, however, is only as good as the people behind it. Without the right skills, even the most advanced tools cannot deliver results. That is why a core pillar of OCBC’s strategy is investing in upskilling and reskilling its workforce to ensure employees are future-ready.

This mindset anchors OCBC’s priorities of pushing the frontier of emerging technologies, keeping its core infrastructure rock solid, and empowering its people to thrive in this new digital age.

AI in action

The impact of OCBC’s AI deployment is already measurable. The bank now runs over 300 AI use cases, including personalising credit card deals and detecting fraud, with about six million decisions made by AI daily. Raina shares that employees using AI tools see productivity gains of 30 to 40 percentage points compared to traditional methods, and those improvements extend from engineering teams to operations staff.

One of the most immediate gains is in helping engineers modernise critical systems built in the early 1980s. Like many organisations, OCBC operates monolithic systems so reliable that they have run virtually untouched for decades. The paradox? That very reliability meant there was little reason to alter them, and finding programmers who still understand the ageing code has become nearly impossible.

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“Even though our core banking system has been running since late ‘70s and early ‘80s, it has been so reliable that we don’t touch it. But we now have to modernise it, and the first challenge is finding someone who can do so because the code is so old,” says Raina.

By leveraging different AI modules and tools, OCBC can now tackle what seemed insurmountable. “AI helps us relook at this whole system and suggest how we can modernise it faster. It enables engineers to do something that previously was always a challenge.”

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The quantum leap

While AI delivers immediate returns, OCBC is taking a longer view on quantum computing. In July, the bank began year-long research collaborations with the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU), and Singapore Management University (SMU) to advance quantum research aimed at real-world financial applications.

The collaborations target specific applications: NUS’s Centre for Quantum Technologies will work on accelerating Monte Carlo simulations for derivative pricing, SMU will apply quantum machine learning to enhance fraud detection, and NTU will deploy post-quantum cryptography to strengthen data security.

The multi-university approach reflects Raina’s philosophy that research institutions have the brightest minds without commercial pressures, and these partnerships train OCBC’s workforce, even if breakthroughs prove elusive. The bank applies similar logic when offering nearly 100 internship spots annually to polytechnic students, building Singapore’s broader technology ecosystem while developing potential future employees.

“The industry-academia exchange is deeply meaningful to us,” Raina says. “By working closely with NUS, NTU, and SMU, in addition to our existing partnerships with key ecosystem players, we bring the reality of innovative quantum applications and solutions closer to life than before.”

OCBC first developed a quantum roadmap in 2021. Around 50 employees now possess at least intermediate proficiency in quantum technology, with the bank aiming to train more than 100 employees at that level by 2026.

The effort reflects a bet that early investment in quantum talent will pay off when the technology matures. Quantum computing remains costly and largely in the hands of governments and tech giants, but Raina draws parallels to AI’s trajectory. AI research existed in universities for decades before achieving its “ChatGPT moment”, the breakthrough that catalysed explosive mainstream adoption over the past two years.

While OCBC built its own on-premise infrastructure to learn and maintain control over AI systems, Raina expects quantum access to come through state-owned facilities or cloud providers, given its heavy infrastructure demands. Singapore’s progressive stance on emerging technologies, he adds, could give local banks an edge when quantum eventually scales.

While quantum’s breakthrough moment remains unpredictable, Raina is betting on its convergence with AI. “All roads are leading towards quantum getting its moment. When quantum and AI are put together, it’s a thousand-times multiplier of what can be achieved.”

Betting without certainty

OCBC’s willingness to invest in emerging technologies stems from hard-won lessons. When its IT team was preparing to launch its application programming interface (API) platform years ago, board members questioned the return on investment. Raina’s response was resolute: “I don’t know what the return is going to be, but if we don’t do it, we’ll be left behind.”

That bet paid off. Today, most OCBC corporate customers and payment trails run on that API platform, validating Raina’s early vision. The bank now applies the same forward-looking logic to AI and quantum, even as Raina acknowledges a recent study suggesting the majority of generative AI projects amount to noise as organisations figure out useful applications.

“We don’t know what we don’t know,” Raina says, describing the bank’s experimental approach. “With new technology, not everything is clear. But, we have more to lose from not doing anything.”

That philosophy extends to workforce development. OCBC is training 100 senior leaders in coaching by 2027 so that executives can have “objective and informed discussions about technology initiatives rather than emotional debates”, says Raina. Fifty-two have begun their coaching journey since September 2023.

The 10x ambition

The bank has set ambitious AI targets for 2027. It aims for 75% of customer service requests to be AI-assisted, every employee to benefit from AI support, a 20% lift in staff productivity, and a doubling of AI-driven revenue.

To support that vision, the bank is transforming its technology stack. It is building a new core banking system in-house and rolling it out gradually — starting with smaller markets before tackling Singapore’s complex operations. “We’ve started with our smallest market, then go a little bigger before scaling further. By the time we come to Singapore, we know exactly what works and what doesn’t,” shares Raina.

The phased approach reflects OCBC’s philosophy of upgrading while systems still work. “Just like a car, the best time to change it is when it’s still working. If it cannot take us far, then we need to change it.” Resilience drives its build-versus-buy decisions. “If I want things to be resilient, I need to know how it works. We get our hands dirty by building,” he adds, though some systems remain outside the bank’s core expertise.

That focus underpins OCBC’s “10x initiative”, which challenges every employee to deliver ten times their baseline productivity. The aim, Raina says, is collective uplift. “If each one of us can produce 10 times, we uplift the whole firm.”

As OCBC transforms, the line between a bank and a technology firm is blurring fast. AI now works alongside human judgement to enhance decision-making with speed and precision, while quantum promises to redefine what is computationally possible. Regardless of when the next breakthrough arrives, OCBC is positioning itself with the resilience, speed, and technological foundation to capitalise on whichever innovation reshapes banking next.