Singapore’s Trust Bank (also known simply as Trust) is a new financial institution that’s enjoyed a strong first year of operations, capturing 12% market share in Singapore since launch and setting new benchmarks in customer experience and innovation.
How this digital-first bank developed a differentiated user experience for its customers provides insight into what it takes to succeed in such a highly competitive and rapidly evolving industry.
“The whole experience must be built around a set of real customer needs,’’ says CIO Rajay Rai. “Customers told us they wanted their banking to be easy and transparent, and we understood that real-time capability is a key enabler in this regard. That’s why all our updates to customers happen in real time. This may sound small, but it’s a step change for consumers who expect instant gratification with all their digital interactions.”
Before Rai moved to Singapore to take up the CIO role at Trust, he amassed decades of experience in manufacturing in Australia’s vibrant financial sector. His responsibilities now range from encompassing technology architecture and operational stability, to security, cost management, partnership oversight, and domain-specific deliveries, among others.
In a recent keynote address at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas titled Building for Scale while Enhancing the Customer Experience, Rai laid out the set of foundations used to create Trust, which includes real-time execution, scalable architecture, and speed of execution. “There’s a famous saying that says, ‘Vision without execution is hallucination,’” he says. “You need the ability to execute at speed and scale, and as you execute fast, you start building an experimental capital for the bank. For us, we move fast and you don’t fail. As a bank, you cannot fail.”
At the heart of Trust
Trust has made excellent use of software known as Thought Machine, which is a cloud-native core banking platform. “It’s our beating heart,” says Rai. “Thought Machine generates all these events. The arteries of the entire bank are pumping data and events all the time, and you have services that are listening to all these events. They can act and react to them, as well as adapt and respond in real time.”
