Digitalisation is a double-edged sword: OCBC’s chief executive Helen Wong
SINGAPORE – Going digital can bring great benefits to bank customers, but it is a double-edged sword given the increasing dangers of online scams, noted OCBC chief executive Helen Wong on Thursday.
Ms Wong told The Straits Times that banks tread a fine line when adopting new technologies: “Everything has to be really well tested before it can be released because it impacts a lot of people and their hard-earned cash.”
She cited data showing that practically all the bank’s consumer accounts were set up online last year, while in the first six months of 2023, around 97 per cent of consumer transactions were performed digitally.
“A lot of this is about our customers’ convenience,” said Ms Wong, who was speaking on the sidelines of the two-day Asia Future Summit 2023 conference at The Ritz-Carlton, which featured around 20 local and international speakers and 300 or so delegates from the public and private sectors.
Still, this newspaper reported last month that at least $10 million was lost by more than 750 scam victims in the first half of 2023, due to unauthorised banking transactions performed by malicious software.
Ms Wong said these crimes were partly a function of how successful Singapore is as a financial centre: “We handle billions of transactions each day; the ease and the efficiency of these money flows make it an attractive place for fraudsters to try and execute their scams.”
However, she noted that it is in the tech sphere itself where solutions to these cyber crimes can be found.
“As a bank, we will always be very vigilant, and technology allows us to use digital solutions to carry out surveillance,” she said.
Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), for example, can be brought to bear in analysing mountains of banking data for both the detection and prevention of nefarious activities.
“We are working with the Government to look at how all this data can be put together and help the country in its fight against cyber crimes or to prevent scams,” she said.
Conversely, the broad applications if AI can be applied positively as well.
Ms Wong said using data analytics allows the bank to “look at our customer base and pre-emptively meet” the customers’ needs.
In understanding the ebb and flow of the client’s business transactions, “we’ll be able to pre-approve their loans”, she added.
This same analysis can also benefit clients: “For our SME customers who may not be able to afford to carry out the data analytics themselves, we offer this as a service that they can sign up for, to manage their businesses better.”
Meanwhile, AI can also be used across broad swathes of the bank’s key operations, such as customising and personalising the user’s experience, automating a host of mundane processes and managing risk.
OCBC said AI is already helping it to make around four million decisions daily, a number that is expected to hit 10 million in the next two years.
At the same time, the bank is raising the staff’s know-how, with in-house programmes to raise the awareness of data-literacy skills.
Since its launch in 2022, about 10,000 OCBC staff have undergone the course and this number is set to rise to 24,000, or 80 per cent of all employees, by the end of this year.
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