SINGAPORE (THE BUSINESS TIMES) - DBS Bank has rolled out the banking industry's first digital audit confirmation solution, DBS Audit Confirmation, on its online corporate banking platform DBS Ideal.

The solution allows DBS' corporate and small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers to verify their financial positions and balances digitally, with confirmations sent to their auditors as part of statutory corporate reporting requirements.

Singapore's largest bank said on Monday (Jan 25) that this digital process will cut processing time for audit confirmation requests to under 24 hours, as compared with the industry's norm of at least seven days.

The digital solution is expected to save some 30,000 of the bank's corporate and SME clients the "onerous" task of manual submissions and expedite the closure of their annual financial statements, added DBS.

With DBS Audit Confirmation, customers will also be able to track the status of their requests in real time via DBS Ideal instead of inquiring over the phone. The lender said this resolves the industry pain point of banks having to cope with high call volumes, especially between January and March when more companies close their books.

Audit confirmation is applied by auditors to ascertain the existence and/or completeness of a company's assets and liabilities. It is required as part of the audit process for financial statements.

DBS said it receives more than 30,000 of such audit confirmation requests per year.

Ms Tan Su Shan, DBS' group head of institutional banking, said: "With the annual financial book closure peak season starting, we are bringing to bear our innovation and digital capabilities to offer our customers a service that will drastically reduce the time and effort needed to process their requests.

"This will free our customers from administrative tedium, which we hope will allow them to focus their energies on tasks that are more important to them as they prepare their businesses for the new year."