Before Chief Data and Transformation Officer Paul Cobban had arrived, DBS Bank was previously known to stand for ‘Damn Bloody Slow.’

Paul described their previous employee engagement rate as low and their financial performance as mediocre.

Based in Singapore for the last decade, 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 agile start-up culture anchored in excellence in customer and employee experiences.

DBS Bank is an example often cited by MIT as having created the best-in-class frameworks for transformation. At CIO Edge, Peter Weill, Chairman of MIT CISR, interviewed Paul Cobban on how to foster an innovative culture.

Contributors
Peter Weill Senior Advisor at ADAPT
Peter Weill’s work centers on the role, value, and governance of digitisation in enterprises and their ecosystems. His research focuses on digital... More

Peter Weill’s work centers on the role, value, and governance of digitisation in enterprises and their ecosystems. His research focuses on digital business models and transformation, digital savvy and partnering, replatforming, and modern business.​

Based in Australia, Peter consults ADAPT and attendees of EDGE events on how to be future ready in the digital age.​

Peter has written award-winning books, articles, and case studies published by Harvard Business School Press, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and more. ​

In 2008, Ziff Davis ranked Peter as #24 in its list of the Top 100 Most Influential People in IT, the highest-ranked academic. ​

Peter has worked on digitisation issues with executive committees and boards at more than 50 companies globally.​

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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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