OCBC Bank wins big at Asian Experience Awards 2022

The company has brought home three awards for its utilisation of the latest technologies in its banking services.

Financial services company OCBC Bank took home three major awards at the recently held Asian Experience Awards 2022 for its suite of solutions that aim to streamline banking and address pain points customers are facing.

Amongst its award-winning solutions is the MyWorld & HR-in-your-Pocket (HIP) super-app, which was created to harmonise all employee and work-related matters into a unified platform. This aims to address manual and paper-based processes across the organisation. It is part of the company’s Digital Office multi-year strategy and focus, which sets the ambition to empower the workforce with digitalised and highly streamlined employee-related service requests and processes. 

To date, over 200 service requests and processes across the OCBC Group have been digitalised, automated, and streamlined through the platform, eliminating more than 95% of the organisation’s reliance on paper. MyWorld & HIP also exceeded its targets, having more than 13,000 employees actively using the platform monthly and consistently achieving good employee satisfaction ratings.  

The Digital Office aims at not just the digitalisation of processes but also propel many innovative features that are often bespoke to employee needs and support the group's sustainability efforts.

At the same time, leveraging agile delivery and building on a highly modernised technology stack, the platform allows the company to add new features and quickly respond to employee needs. Its highly automated DevOps framework also allows the company to easily extend and scale new features to any entity and division across the OCBC Group entities.

The super-app has been recognised as the winner of the Singapore Employee Experience of the Year - Banking award.

Meanwhile, regulatory authorities across the globe have announced the transition from Interbank Offer Rates to Benchmark Rates, which are derived from rates paid on overnight unsecured wholesale funds. This is meant to improve the robustness and integrity of financial benchmarks.

In Singapore, the Singapore Overnight Rate Average (SORA) was identified as the benchmark rate. OCBC Bank aimed to be the first in the market to offer a loan product referencing SORA to customers, and establish market leadership in its adoption.

To accomplish this, the project team aimed to build a new centralised library of Overnight Risk Free (ORF) Rates to allow OCBC to be the first in the market in availing new consumer and corporate products pegged to SORA and other ORF benchmark interest rates.

It also set a goal to build new mechanisms allowing various permutations and potentially a wide range of products which can be availed by loan product users across all business segments and to build the company’s consumer and corporate loan portfolio through acquisition and retention.

This rate library for ORF rates was initially meant to be built within OCBC’s core banking system, from where the information will be fed to multiple downstream systems. However, the project team adopted a different design and architecture, with the rate library done in the bank’s digital core based on a cloud-native and open architecture framework, using microservices and micro-frontends as key building blocks.

Utilising this system allows for faster time to market with focused applications done in-house without any dependency on the bank’s existing core banking system or any external vendors. The centralised system with an open architecture also allows for ease of integration of the rates into the various systems by the use of APIs and asynchronous messaging. Such a system enables reusability across multiple systems and business segments.

This innovative solution has received the Singapore Product Experience of the Year - Banking win from the awards programme.

OCBC Bank, together with the Central Provident Fund Board (CPFB) and the Government Technology Agency of Singapore, has also introduced GovCash. It is a first-to-market solution that uses OCBC’s facial recognition-enabled ATMs for government payouts. The withdrawal can be made at over 500 OCBC ATMs located conveniently across Singapore.

With the increase in the frequency of payouts by government agencies, particularly during the pandemic, a solution was needed to reduce the number of cheques being disbursed and to improve the experience for the agencies and the citizens by eliminating the need to issue cheques to those unable to receive payouts via direct bank crediting.

The use of facial recognition via ATMs directly eliminated the need for citizens to visit any bank branch to cash out their government payout. This means reducing wait time for other customers of the banks and future-proofing against unexpected pandemic outbreaks with lockdowns. 

GovCash brings convenience to citizens as they can receive their payments at the ATM instantly without being restricted by bank operating hours. ATM disbursement also means that citizens who are less tech-savvy and do not have smartphones have a way to receive the payouts.

This solution bagged the Singapore User Experience of the Year - Banking award during the awards programme. The Asian Experience Awards aims to highlight the ingenious initiatives of creative companies delivering meaningful brand experiences to their stakeholders.

The Asian Experience Awards is presented by Asian Business Review Magazine. To view the full list of winners, click here. If you want to join the 2023 awards programme and be acclaimed for providing meaningful brand experiences to stakeholders, please contact Jane Patiag at [email protected].