The time saved by technology can be reused to expand the business, says director Tan Hsu Xiang.
(Singapore) Years of investment in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have driven record deposit inflows, asset growth and fee income for DBS in 2025, CEO Tan Hsu Shang said.
He said the bank’s use of AI-powered tools such as contextual nudges and automated customer engagement played a key role in attracting new customers and driving transaction volume growth for the bank.
“This is because of our efforts over the years to use AI, to use machine learning and contextual nudges to attract new customers for the bank, to be customer-centric, to automate nudges, and to use AI wisely,” she said during an earnings call on Monday, February 9.
He added that as AI becomes more deeply integrated into daily workflows, it becomes difficult to isolate the exact economic value it creates, but what is “exciting” to DBS is its potential to free up employees for growth-oriented work.
“We may try to capture the economic value[of AI]based on what we’ve done so far, which is A/B testing, but I think there’s going to be a lot more going on in terms of capacity building.”
A/B testing is the comparison of results between two groups, one that uses an AI-driven solution and one that does not, to measure the incremental impact of technology.
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During DBS’s fourth-quarter results conference, Tan answered media questions about the economic value AI tools have brought to Southeast Asia’s largest bank. He pointed out that AI has compressed work that previously took months or even years into weeks, citing the area of technical debt (a term used to describe the maintenance and fixing of outdated systems and code) as an example.
She said the time saved can be reused to grow the business. “What excites us is that we can take what we can leverage from our capabilities (build) and redeploy them for growth.”
More than 60 per cent of the financier’s staff are now “very actively” using DBS GPT, an in-house generative AI tool, Mr Tan added.
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When the tool was launched last July, she admitted, it “wasn’t very good.” But since then, it has “just gotten better and better” and is now used in “countless” applications.
These include translation tasks, internal questions about the bank’s policies and procedures, and guidance on how employees should deal with questions from internal and external parties.
DBS told the Business Times in January that the economic value of its AI initiatives increased by one-third from S$750 million in 2024 to S$1 billion in 2025.
The S$1 billion figure was arrived at by comparing outcomes between customers provided with AI-driven solutions and those in a control group.
Impact on staff
Regarding the impact on employees, DBS announced in early 2025 that it will reduce approximately 4,000 contract and temporary staff over the next few years through natural attrition.
For financial institutions, human-machine interaction is focused on training staff to safely use tools such as agent AI, while leveraging technology to expand capabilities and shift employees into higher-level roles, Tan said.
“We want people to feel at ease and learn and utilize this new ability, this new superpower, that they have to fulfill their higher-order roles,” she added.
Staff costs for the fourth quarter ended Dec 31 were S$1.38 billion, down from S$1.54 billion in the previous quarter.
Chief Financial Officer Chng Sok Hui said on the same earnings call that part of the decline reflected lower bonuses accrued in the fourth quarter compared to the strong performance in the third quarter.
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