Singapore-based OCBC bank to pilot new fintech solutions developed by start-ups

Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), a publicly listed financial services organization, has announced that its fintech accelerator program ‘The Open Vault at OCBC FinTech Accelerator’ has come to a successful closure with its upcoming pilot tests with three start-ups - Fincast, BondIT and CogniCor.

The official release stated that three of the eight start-ups completed successful proof-of-concepts for new solutions in two key pillars of innovation – wealth management and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. The pilot test will last for three months starting from the fourth quarter of this year. The other five startups include ChromaWay, Coins.ph, Onelyst, Quantifeed and WealthObjects and the bank plans to collaborate with them as well and explore opportunities.

“I am very pleased that the OCBC accelerator programme has proven itself. Having invested time and resources over six months, we now look forward to piloting three FinTech solutions that will begin 2 benefiting our customers as early as the end of the year,” Samuel Tsien, CEO of OCBC Bank’s Group said. “Our three solutions, impacting wealth management and customer service, will make banking easier and simpler in ways we have never offered before – either in improving customers’ experience or providing much enhanced inputs to guide our customers’ investment decisions. Deploying these solutions will involve changing the way we do things.”

The bank will pilot two new wealth management platforms in order to enhance the way financial advisors manage their customers’ investment portfolios. The first platform is a portfolio management tool – Fincast. The bank will pilot this platform at its Premier Banking branches for up to selected 100 customers based on varied customer profiles. With this tool, Premier Banking relationship managers will be able to have face-to-face conversations with customers about their financial goals.

The second being wealth management tool – BondIT that will enable Bank of Singapore relationship managers to provide superior service to customers with investment portfolios focused on bonds.

In terms of virtual customer assistance (AI), the bank will pilot CogniCor in a move to address initial queries from customers interested in OCBC’s home loans. This will enhance the operational efficiency since customers will be able to obtain information about the bank’s home loans more quickly, with real-time responses delivered through an instant messaging chat box directly on the OCBC Bank website.

OCBC Bank launched The Open Vault at OCBC in February 2016, to strategically collaborate with FinTechs to develop meaningful financial solutions through open innovation. FinTech start-ups work with in-house OCBC Bank experts like programmers, application developers, credit risk management specialists, legal advisors among others in a move to employ the bank’s data sandbox and application programme interfaces (APIs) to bring innovative solutions quickly to the market.