Singapore's OCBC Bank is to move into customer testing of new applications developed by three startups graduating from its inaugural fintech accelerator programme.
The bank launched a fintech co-working space and innovation unit in February and announced its first accelerator programme to identify and collaborate with innovative startups.
Eight companies graduated from the twelve-week bootcamp late last month, with the bank singling out three promising applications in the robo-advisory and virtual agent space for further exploration and customer testing.
The bank says pilot testing of the technology - developed by Fincast, BondIT and CogniCor - will begin in the fourth quarter of this year, and will last for three months.
Robo-advisory tool Fincast will undergone tests with 100 customers selected from the bank's Premier Banking branches, while BondIT will be used by Bank of Singapore relationship managers to provide customers with snap recommendations for investment portfolios focused on bonds. CogniCor's virtual assistant will be installed on the bank's home loans webpage to address initial queries from customers interested in home loans.
OCBC chief executive Samuel Tsien, says: “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. They may even require us to adjust our business model, and we are entirely happy to embrace “disruption” of this kind too, if it means delivering greater value and ultimately further securing the trust from our customers."