Singapore banks using AI to vet private banking clients, speed up onboarding

SINGAPORE – Prospective private banking customers can now expect their account applications to be processed faster, as Singapore banks put agentic artificial intelligence to work behind the scenes.

Beyond customer-facing chatbots, banks are now deploying the technology for back-office tasks such as compliance and know-your-customer due diligence – automating and speeding up customer onboarding without compromising on regulatory requirements.

OCBC announced on July 29 that with its new HELIOS agentic AI platform, private banking accounts can be opened in 15 business days, compared with more than 30 previously, while maintaining stringent risk management and compliance standards.

The 15-day figure is a median across all clients – half of OCBC’s new private banking accounts are opened within that time or less, while the remaining, more complex applications take longer.

Loretta Yuen, head of group legal and compliance at OCBC, said that depending on the client’s risk profile, straightforward cases can even potentially be onboarded within a day.

This time reduction aligns with industry efforts to speed up customer acquisition.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore is working with the Private Banking Industry Group to reduce private banking account opening times to within one month by the end of 2026, down from the current industry median of around six weeks or longer for complex cases. 

HELIOS, or Holistic wEalth Lifecycle Insights & Ongoing Surveillance, is a digital co-worker for OCBC’s relationship managers (RMs).

The multilingual “assistant” uses advanced data-gathering to research and run background checks on prospective customers in multiple languages, including Chinese. 

It highlights potential information gaps so RMs can obtain the missing data when they meet the customer.

As a result, the back-and-forth between the customer, RM and compliance unit is significantly reduced.

Yuen said banks need to identify potential concerns early on and assess financial crime risks more holistically. 

“By combining agentic AI with the expertise of our compliance professionals, HELIOS enables us to screen prospective customers more thoroughly and earlier in the customer journey,” she said.

Koh Sinyee, director of compliance consultancy firm Integrity Consulting, described HELIOS as an “inventive step” in using AI to scour the internet for information to pre-qualify prospective clients. 

By doing so, OCBC narrows its focus to prospects the bank is confident it wants to do business with and can successfully onboard.

Over the past five months, more than 100 relationship managers (RMs) at Bank of Singapore (BOS), OCBC’s private banking arm – representing 25 per cent of its RMs – have begun using the platform across Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai.

BOS chief executive Jason Moo said around 50 clients have since been onboarded via the platform.

All of BOS’ RMs will have access to HELIOS by the end of the third quarter of 2026. 

Following the private banking roll-out, OCBC plans to extend the agentic AI platform to its Premier Private Client segment by year end. This tier serves affluent clients whose net worth sits between the mass-affluent Premier Banking tier and the high-net-worth tier served by Bank of Singapore.

Jan Ondrus, professor of information systems at ESSEC Business School, said private banks globally are competing for the same wealthy clients in Asia. 

He added that other financial institutions are exploring the use of agentic AI for onboarding as well, so the technology might not be a point of market differentiation for long.

Echoing this trend, a DBS spokesperson said the bank has also turned to AI, cutting overall onboarding time by half in the first five months of 2026. 

The shortened timeline means DBS has been able to onboard 20 per cent more new high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth customers over the same period.

The spokesperson added that the bank can complete the onboarding process and open accounts within a week for some new client profiles. 

Similarly, Alex Sim, chief operating officer at UOB Private Bank, said UOB can open accounts within seven calendar days for clients with straightforward profiles.

He noted that as at end-June, UOB’s “median turnaround time was well within industry guidelines” of around six weeks. 

Amid the optimism over AI, Ondrus cautioned that the technology can confuse individuals with similar names or draw incorrect conclusions from fragmented data. He added that while agentic AI is excellent at finding what is in the public domain, the wealthiest clients are often the least visible online. 

The real test, therefore, is whether the system treats an absence of information as a red flag that demands greater human scrutiny, or gives a false sense of security that all is well, said Ondrus.

Indeed, the human-in-the-loop is a vital piece of the puzzle. UOB’s Sim noted that “human accountability remains central to the bank’s approach”.

OCBC’s Yuen said there is always a human involved throughout the bank’s due diligence process, with ultimate accountability for all reviews, judgments and decisions resting firmly on the RMs and internal review teams.

What Ondrus found “genuinely novel” is that OCBC has turned compliance into a source of business leads.

He said: “The due diligence work becomes a source of new clients, so compliance shifts from being a (traditional) cost centre to a (direct) value generator.”  

HELIOS is able to do that because it has relationship-mapping capabilities that can lay out a potential client’s relationships and connections. This enables the compliance team to identify high-quality leads and surface them to RMs.

Yuen said: “This is a paradigm shift for compliance, where we are not just enabling business, but also originating opportunities.”

BOS’ Moo said: “It is very rare for compliance partners to provide good-quality leads that bankers can prospect with confidence.”

HELIOS, thus, becomes a “compelling differentiator” in growing the business, he added.

OCBC also plans to extend HELIOS to support the ongoing monitoring of customer activity by the first half of 2027.