DBS ramps up digital investments to outbid China's non-bank fintech giants

The Singapore lender has invested about $3.5b to upgrade its technological infrastructure.

Bloomberg reports that Singapore’s DBS has been steadily ramping up the bank’s digital investments which stand at $3.5b from 2012 to 2016 as it tries to keep up with China’s fintech giants.

“Our role model is a tech company," DBS CEO Piyush Gupta said in an interview with Bloomberg. “Because they are not burdened with a legacy. They basically came and re-imagined how banking could be done." 

Also read: Singapore banks net profit surge 27% in Q4 as they embrace fintech

The lender is targeting a 10% reduction in its physical bank branches over the next five years as it moves its services online and mobile with the development of mobile payments app DBS PayLah! which currently has 800,000 local users.

Also read: Singapore amongst the most open to digital banking

“The future model of banking is going to be different,” said Gupta. “You need to focus right now on transforming the company to cater to this future model. If you wind up spending a lot of capital and management bandwidth on what I think are things of the past, I am not sure that’s a smart thing to do.”

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