Asia Awards 2025: Best analytics initiative—DBS Bank (Manager Analytics Assistant)

Initiative overview

With the objective of transforming staff productivity data―known internally at DBS Bank as the Management Tool Kit―into impactful insights for prompt and efficient action, Manager Analytics Assistant (MAA) provides operations managers (OMs) with transparency including weekly personalized reports of their teams’ overall status, recommended actions, and callouts to address issues. Leveraging multiple sources of internal and external data, MAA allows OMs to manage team performance more effectively.

The problem it solves  

It is increasingly challenging for OMs to prioritize issues that require their attention. OMs with access to Unified Ops Control Tower (UCT) must navigate large volumes of data across dashboards, which may be subject to self-interpretation before making an informed decision. In recognition of these challenges, all DBS Bank OMs with or without UCT access receive customized MAA reports with data analysis and actionable insights, providing early warning indicators so that they don’t miss the “golden hour” to escalate and respond to potentially critical issues.

Results  

MAA is designed to allow OMs to respond quickly to operational issues and improve action planning. Examples of efficiencies created include:

• The Singapore collateral safekeeping team’s operational backlog improved (reduced) from 800 to 230 hours.
• In Q4 2024, 77 OMs in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan received access to MAA, positively impacting approximately 1,100 staff.
• Significant employee satisfaction (out of 5 points) from 100% of respondents: 4.5 (Singapore), 4.63 (Hong Kong) and 4.9 (Taiwan)
• In March 2025, 28 OMs managing approximately 1,500 staff in China, Indonesia, India and Thailand will receive access to the firm’s MAA.

Future plans

• Appreciating the benefits MAA provides for consumer banking operations, MAA will be further extended to OMs in DBS Bank’s institutional/corporate banking operations (1,390 headcount) and global financial market operations (199 headcount).
• Subsequent enhancements to MAA will incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to help OMs with capacity planning via predicting demand and supply requirements in resource planning reviews.
• DBS Bank’s Customer Contact Centre will also leverage an MAA approach as early warning indicators toward product calls, etc.

Why they won

DBS Bank wins its first of two individual categories in this year’s WatersTechnology Asia Awards by emerging top in the best analytics initiative category, thanks to its Manager Analytics Assistant initiative. The MAA is about one thing more so than any other―increasing operational efficiency across the business, which might not be as celebrated as revenue-generating projects but are nonetheless critical to the efficient running of the business, reducing operational overheads and cutting unnecessary costs. 

To that end, the MAA provides operations managers with regular updates and clarity around their teams’ overall status, the results of which have been impressive to date. For example, the firm’s Singapore collateral safekeeping team’s operational backlog was reduced from 800 to 230 hours, while during 2024, the program was extended to include Hong Kong and Taiwan.