One thing DBS Bank did to outperform other banks was to spot trends before their competitors.

By dedicating teams to assessing trends and observing the market, DBS Bank made earlier investments and had the first-mover advantage in transformation work.

DBS Bank’s former Chief Data and Transformation Officer, Paul Cobban, offers three principles for competitive advantage:

  1. Spend quality time with subject matter experts and predict trends
  2. Determine which trends will be most relevant to your customers and business
  3. Use data to support your experimentation and continually align with it

You can watch Paul Cobban’s full presentation on What DBS Did Better than Most Banks on ADAPT’s Research and Advisory platform.

Contributors
Paul Cobban Chief Data & Transformation Officer at DBS Bank
Paul Cobban, Chief Data and Transformation Officer at DBS, has helmed the cultural, digital, and data transformation that secured for DBS the... More

Paul Cobban, Chief Data and Transformation Officer at DBS, has helmed the cultural, digital, and data transformation that secured for DBS the distinction of being the only bank in history to be recognised as the World’s Best Bank three years in a row – “Best Bank in the World” by Global Finance (2018, 2020), “Global Bank of the Year” by The Banker (2018) and “World’s Best Digital Bank” by Euromoney (2019).
Based in Singapore, Paul and his team are responsible for enabling the bank’s strategic agenda to build a strong digital foundation by driving ambitious innovation, data-driven decision making and an Agile start-up culture, anchored in excellence in customer and employee experiences.

Since 2009, Paul has led multiple bank-wide transformation programmes at DBS to drive continuous improvement through process re-engineering, Human Centered Design, Journey thinking and data analytics. With data and design thinking at the forefront, Paul set out to transform DBS to a digital platform company around a culture-based vision of becoming a 29,000-person start-up, an achievement recognised by Harvard Business Review in 2019 (Top 10 Business Transformations of the decade).

Considered one of the leading cultural transformation practitioners in the world, Paul is regularly sought after for global speaking engagements to share his experiences. He has co-authored a book on the culture of innovation (“Eat, Sleep, Innovate”) and was a finalist for the inaugural Clayton M. Christensen award for the best article in innovation published in Harvard Business Review. Paul currently chairs the Institute of Banking and Finance (IBF) Future-Enabled Skills Work Group, is on the board of EFMA, and is an IBF Fellow. He also sits on the FinTech Advisory council for the Institute of International Finance (IIF). For the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), Paul is also Co-Chair of the TechSkills Accelerator (TeSA), IMDA’s SkillsFuture initiative.

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Modernisation Transformation