Culture change is a common obstacle to digital transformation success, especially for decades-old companies with siloed business functions and entrenched legacy processes..
DBS Bank, a 51-year-old banking and financial services giant based in Singapore, met that challenge head-on. As the first step of its digitalization journey, DBS launched a sweeping cultural reinvention. Its objective: become “digital to the core.”
DBS leaders strove to make the company feel and function like a 22,000-person startup. They created an innovation department whose sole focus was fostering culture change, rather than designing digital products. They analyzed other large companies that had achieved success in their digital transformation efforts for inspiration. And they forged partnerships with forward-leaning fintech startups.
To become digital to the core, DBS made reskilling mandatory for every employee. It adopted agile DevOps methodology companywide. And it encouraged creativity among its workers with monthly hackathons for mobile app development and other digital banking innovations.
The startup mindset has paid dividends in improved time to market, product innovation, and waste reduction through automation, according to Chief Operating Officer Paul Cobban. “We took out 250 million customer hours of waste,” he explains. In one year, the company’s customer satisfaction score climbed from lowest to highest for any bank in Singapore.
DBS recently launched Digibank, a mobile-only banking service, in India, serving millions of customers without a single brick-and-mortar branch. That’s nimble for a half-century-old banking institution.