United Overseas Bank Limited - Digital transformation strategies

United Overseas Bank Limited - Digital transformation strategies

Summary

This report provides insight into United Overseas Bank's fintech activities, including its digital transformation strategies, its innovation programs, its technology initiatives, its estimated ICT budget, and its major ICT contracts.

United Overseas Bank Ltd (UOB) provides a range of financial solutions that includes deposit accounts, loans, payment and travel cards, and insurance. The group offers trade finance, corporate finance, financial supply chain management, savings bonds, cash management, treasury management, and debt and equity capital market solutions. UOB provides various other services such as asset management, wealth management, venture management, advisory, private banking, transaction banking, mobile banking, online banking, and internet banking services.

In October 2018, UOB launched its in-house eLab in Singapore to design targeted financial management solutions that drive better engagement for its digital banking customers in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand. eLab employs proprietary AI algorithms to draw behavioral insights from customers’ transaction data and aims to assist UOB in designing a more personalized and data-centric model for its customers.

In October 2018, UOB launched the Innovation and Internationalisation Programme to help SMEs build technological solutions and expand their business. The program is run in collaboration with Enterprise Singapore, the government’s digital transformation initiative for the overall banking industry. UOB (along with its partner network) follows a four-stage process to support businesses in Singapore, covering diagnosis, solutions, implementation, and internationalization.

Scope

UOB has built an enterprise-wide big data platform to support its business units. The platform enables UOB to capture critical data insights that can help it drive business improvement through artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and analytics. Under its data analytics transformation strategy, UOB employed Cloudera Data Science Workbench and applied analytics and AI technologies to customer and transaction data, thus helping improve business processes and the detection of financial crimes.

UOB has created a fintech and innovation team responsible for maintaining relations with customers across digital channels. The team is responsible for accelerating disruptive financial ideas, exploring implementation feasibility, building use cases, running pilot tests, and commercialization. UOB trains its employees through innovative programs to acquire digital skills and knowledge on emerging technologies, helping them keep up with evolving customer needs.

The bank’s hybrid cloud infrastructure has been supporting its digital innovation journey and fast-tracking its innovation and application developments while ensuring a simple, fast and cost-effective way for migrating mission-critical applications to the cloud. Adoption of this cloud platform also provided UOB with a strong disaster protection and access to AWS’s suite of services and robust disaster protection.

In 2021, UOB continued to step up efforts in helping its clients adopt digital banking by adding: a digital point-of-sale collection feature to UOB mCollect, a mobile QR-based solution in Singapore; PayNow for real-time collections and reconciliation; and an online FX function to UOB Infinity for corporate clients.

Reasons to Buy

• Gain insights into United Overseas Bank's tech operations.
• Gain insights into its tech strategies and innovation initiatives.
• Gain insights into its technology themes under focus.
• Gain insights into various product launches, partnerships, and investment strategies.