dbs bank business plan

Becoming more than a bank: Digital transformation at DBS

January 9, 2020 Singapore-based DBS bank has earned multiple “best bank” titles, from publications including Euromoney, The Banker, and Global Finance. The bank is widely cited as being in the vanguard in terms of embedding digitization across the full range of banking processes and services. McKinsey senior partner Joydeep Sengupta, leader of McKinsey’s Strategy, Organization, and Corporate Finance Practice, sat down with Chng Sok Hui, DBS’ Chief Financial Officer, to discuss the bank’s approach to digital transformation.

I. Communicating the value of digital

Joydeep Sengupta: One of the things that people like most about DBS’s digital transformation journey has been the fact that it is able to communicate the value that you’ve captured through this process. So, tell us a little bit about how it all started.            

Chng Sok Hui: The way it started is the realization that we were not just a bank, we were becoming a technology company. And the markets were not giving us a valuation that was reflective of the work that we were doing. We believe we were the first bank to make this effort to link the methodology of how we demonstrate digitalization efforts and link them directly to the P&L. So, we were able to demonstrate that the most digitizable part of our business, which is the retail and SME business in Singapore and Hong Kong, we were able to bifurcate that between a digital segment and a traditional segment, and to accelerate the adoption of digital behavior. We were able to show that digital customers had two times higher income per customer compared to a traditional customer.

We were able to demonstrate that the digital segment had cost-to-income ratio that was about 34 percent—20 percentage points lower compared to the traditional segment of 54 percent.

2. Setting ourselves apart from the crowd

Sengupta: There are many banks who say they are all going through digital transformation. So what’s the difference in your approach versus what the other banks are doing?

Chng Sok Hui: The key is to be able to translate operational metrics. Because a lot of these metrics that fintechs and competitors put out is the rate of growth of the digital customers, it is the metrics around conversion, it is the metrics around income per customer, and how it was building up . . .  all these are good metrics. But for the analyst to translate that more concretely into a valuation model—because these are not technology analysts, these are banking analysts—the way that we have communicated is: how these operational metrics translate into a lower cost-to-income ratio.

3. Creating change from the inside out

Sengupta: How convinced are you now of its robustness?

Chng Sok Hui: We have been running this digital value creation metric coming to five years now, and I think the value that I can see out of this is that the businesses themselves are very passionate about it.

I just had a review meeting with one of the business units today and they were talking about the way they go about trying to accelerate digital adoption; so, for a traditional customer, how do you introduce incentives, products to attract them to buy a digital product?

The other thing that I think we are beginning to do very well is to understand which processes are truly digital. And therefore there is huge operating leverage. For example, our DBS remittance product: it’s fully digital, and therefore whatever additional customers you acquire, additional number of transactions, actually the benefits flow through to the bottom line.

So it’s not just the outcome that is great, I actually think that the internal mechanism by which we drive the business, to actually think through because our metrics are very granular, that is the part that I think is beginning to actually contribute much more than external communication, but really driving our business as a technology business.

4. Cultivating a digital culture

Sengupta: Do you see any impact on the culture of the organization?

Chng Sok Hui: I think we needed to learn how it is that we can become digital to the core, but I think that we also need to learn how to change in terms of our own mindsets and in terms of the organization culture.

And we remind ourselves that it’s not only the executives at the top, that it’s not just the IT folks, that it’s not just the business folks, it’s everyone. So, we started with a lot of change agenda items. I remember we had human-centered design thinking. In fact, almost everyone had to go through a process of coming up with an app.

The other thing we did very well I thought was customer-journey thinking, and thinking about the customer. So not so much an inward process, but how the customer would actually experience the app that we wanted to put out. So today when I look back I actually see an awesome culture change that has actually happened.

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Singapore bank dbs: a blueprint for digital transformation in finance.

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DBS Bank is the largest bank in Southeast Asia, with operations in 19 markets around the world. DBS is widely known in the banking industry for value creation through digital transformation and has been named World’s Best Digital Bank and World’s Best Bank multiple times .

For a bank, digital transformation means an operational and cultural shift towards integrating digital technology into all bank functions, fundamentally enhancing bank operations and value delivery to customers. Not all banks can claim successful transformation outcomes, even though digital transformation is necessary for long-term survival in the face of the disruption brought by FinTechs and evolving customer expectations.

Digital transformation in the financial sector are the most challenging because of strict regulations. End customers are demanding 21 st century experiences and the enterprise has to balance out the risk of making one wrong move until the regulators start swarming.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Nimish Panchmatia, Chief Data & Transformation Officer at DBS Bank, to find out why the Singapore bank has become a “poster child” for digital transformation in the banking industry.

Nimish Panchmatia, Chief Data & Transformation Officer

A strong leader tasked with digital transformation

In talking to many companies across multiple industries, I have found that leadership from the top of the organization is a vital success factor for successful digital transformation. Executive management must consistently communicate the transformation vision and inspire the organization to participate. The title may not always be chief transformation and data officer, but a strong leader should fill the role of overseeing the execution of the strategy. The position is vital for banks, which are typically organizations that have several lines of business, each with its own priorities.

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In his role, Panchmatia looks three to five years into the future. For example, looking back five years, Blockchain, 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) were focus areas. Today, his team’s focus has expanded to include generative AI and digital twins — while still waiting for 5G to flourish.

As Panchmatia noted, "We must decipher what the technology means for the organization. Where does the organization need to be so that there are no surprises? Are we prepared with our people, processes, and technology to address what's coming?” Once impacts are understood, the work focuses on creating change programs across the board that encompass people, culture and technology.

Panchmatia has a team tasked with teaching new skill sets and assembling learning programs to prepare for change. Panchmatia noted, "To be prepared spans how we organize and work, the new skills people need, what environments people need and what does it all mean from a customer journey and experience point of view?”

Data drives everything. DBS has a central team called DataFirst that is tasked to pull together all the necessary data, tools and skills to serve the organization. This team is innovating to the next level, using analytics, AI and machine learning (ML) and working on use cases that make a difference for customers, the business and employees.

The transformation process never ends

The real key to success is realizing that the transformation process never ends. Individual initiatives may have defined timelines, but all of them should contribute to an ongoing organizational discipline.

In 2021, DBS refreshed its vision from being “the best bank in the world” to being "the best bank for a better world" and has brought a singular focus to that journey. It’s a journey that does not have a stop sign anywhere, but one that executives and rank-and-file employees alike understand is continuously evolving.

Panchmatia noted that talking about becoming “best bank for a better world” isn’t just for the people at the top of the company; it means something important to the person processing a credit card or interacting with a customer in the branch or the call center. All employees must understand the program and its messages. Otherwise, it is just lofty words .

DBS and Infosys Finacle — unplugging the mainframe

It’s instructive to dig deeper into an example of a digital transformation project that has paid off for the bank. A decade ago, DBS was on a mainframe in a completely outsourced arrangement; the technology was operated by that vendor’s employees. Everything was proprietary, with millions of dollars each year being paid for database and mainframe licenses.

DBS saw that the world was changing, and its CEO, Piyush Gupta, challenged the organization to devise a plan to get off the mainframe. One of the first tasks was to list all the related applications and other technologies and classify them into three categories: decommission, invest or retain. The second major decision was transitioning from a fully outsourced employee model to one where DBS was in control of its technology agenda. The rationale being that technology is the biggest driver of a digital company, so the expertise better be in-house. The third thing the bank did was talk with other companies that were already on the transformation journey to learn what was possible.

At this point, DBS engaged Infosys for several application solutions that could be viable alternatives to mainframe core banking. These included solutions to support bank operations, wealth management and liquidity management, to name a few.

DBS also collaborated with Infosys on many significant transformations. One of them was DBS choosing Infosys Finacle, a cloud-ready API solution, as the open and flexible core platform for their operations across 13 markets. Another was launching a mobile-only bank, digibank, in markets like India and Indonesia to provide customers with a simple, convenient and secure way to bank on-the-go.

Three critical success factors for digital transformation

When DBS launched its digital transformation, three key elements were vitally important. One was being digital to the core. To DBS, “digital to the core” means having a rock-solid foundation of core systems and common platforms across all locations. In practical terms, that meant investing in cloud infrastructure and rearchitecting applications to be cloud-ready, becoming more data-driven and integrating AI/ML capabilities.

The second element was to push customer-journey thinking throughout the organization. This meant putting the firm at the forefront of digital banking by offering customers cutting-edge digital financial services.

The third element was changing the company's culture to operate with the energy and agility of a startup. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it to create a culture that embraces experimentation and innovation while ensuring that all employees have the necessary skill sets so no one is left behind.

Wrapping up

The transformation process never ends, and we will continue to see DBS placing bets on emerging technologies. As digitalization has become table stakes at many banks, DBS continues to invest in at least three areas that create more differentiation.

The first is the integration of AI/ML and data analytics. These include use cases that span customer-facing businesses such as consumer and SME banking as well as support functions including legal, compliance and human resources.

The second is an ecosystem strategy enabled by an API suite; this results in new business won without customer acquisition costs through partnerships with companies such as ByteDance, Ctrip, Home Credit and Kredivo.

The third is the ongoing efforts at DBS to develop an agile workforce to support its startup-style culture.

The DBS story illustrates what a genuinely future-ready business looks like. By this point, DBS isn’t merely a technology-friendly bank; it would be more apt to identify it as a technology company with a banking license.

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Performance Management Case Study

In collaboration with mckinsey & company.

Redefining Performance Management at DBS Bank

How lofty ambitions and innovative metrics sharpened customer focus, march 26, 2019, by: david kiron and barbara spindel, introduction.

In 2008, the year David Gledhill went to work for DBS Bank, few would have predicted that within a decade the Singapore-based bank would be racking up an impressive slate of honors. Nonetheless, DBS was the first recipient of Euromoney ’s Best Digital Bank Award in 2016; it received that distinction again in 2018 and, that same year, was also named Global Finance ’s Best Bank in the World.

Just a decade ago, however, DBS, beset by long lines at branches and ATMs, high turnover among relationship managers, and a plodding credit card application process, had the worst customer satisfaction scores of all the banks in Singapore. Chief data and transformation officer Paul Cobban, who came aboard in 2009, recalls that “it was almost embarrassing to tell people at dinner parties” that he worked for the bank “because DBS had such a bad reputation.”

Executives did not simply change their performance management systems to achieve these goals. They redefined the meaning and measurement of performance.

Soon after Cobban joined, a newly arranged management team, with the support of tech-savvy CEO Piyush Gupta, turned things around by thinking of DBS as more of a tech startup than a bank. Gledhill, DBS’s CIO, says, “Our future competition wasn’t going to come from just banks, but from a lot of cool technology companies that were going into finance.” DBS, in Gledhill’s words, committed to becoming “digital to the core,” and he and his team initiated a thoroughgoing culture change to support digital innovation.

Company Background

DBS Bank was established by Singapore’s government in 1968 as the Development Bank of Singapore Limited. (It became known as DBS in 2003.) Still headquartered in the island nation, the multinational financial services group, with a workforce of over 26,000, has expanded throughout China, Southeast Asia, and South Asia, and currently has 280 branches in 18 markets. With its focus in recent years on reimagining banking as a seamless and streamlined digital experience (it has made banking mobile-only, paperless, and branchless in some of its markets), DBS’s mission is embodied in the slogan “Live more, bank less.”

Gledhill finds that operating in Singapore has distinct advantages. He cites the country’s “advanced IT infrastructure and strong intellectual property regulatory frameworks,” which encourage and protect technological innovation, and he points out that 80 of the world’s top 100 tech companies have a presence on the island. He also mentions Singapore’s highly skilled and highly educated pool of talent. “Together with supportive government initiatives to further Singapore’s digital agenda,” Gledhill says, “we believe we are definitely in the right place to fulfill our digital ambitions.”

The Foundational Years: 2009 to 2014

When Gledhill, Cobban, and the rest of their team joined DBS, they immediately set about changing the culture of the company. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, DBS was determined to differentiate itself from Western banks by emphasizing that it provided, in Cobban’s words, “a special brand of Asian service.” The qualities of this service were embodied in the acronym RED: respectful, easy to deal with, and dependable. The hope was that living up to these qualities would improve the company’s customer satisfaction scores, which Cobban recalls were “rock-bottom.”

Under the umbrella of RED, they created cross-functional teams called PIEs (process improvement events). The goal was to come up with processes that could be implemented within one week and that would address the bank’s biggest service problems — say, the time it took to replace a lost credit card — often by improving speed and eliminating waste. Cobban recalls, “I said, ‘What can you actually change within a short time frame?’ And that was it from an incentive point of view. It made people realize if they put some effort in now, they can see major results. Even to this day, I’m not quite sure how this happened, but we unlocked the enthusiasm, the energy, of the bottom of the company.”

Removing operational barriers lifted the ambition of employees across the organization without the use of incentives.

Notably, the PIEs helped effect a culture shift in the organization by enabling rapid, visible improvements to a wide range of operational processes. Removing operational barriers lifted the ambition of employees across the organization without the use of incentives. “We create a mechanism that anybody can participate in,” Cobban says. “We make it a very low bar to participate, and we did not expect everyone to be successful.”

In addition to improving organizational processes, the new team ensured that the company’s focus was squarely on the customer. In 2009, in what Cobban calls “in hindsight a moment of genius,” the management team invented the measure of the customer hour, a unit of wait time for a customer (a customer waiting for a credit card for an hour equals one customer hour), and used the PIE concept to eliminate as many customer hours as possible. Cobban hoped to be able to take 10 million customer hours out of the bank and ended up taking out 250 million. The process, Cobban says, “was really focused on making the customer’s life better,” a goal that unlike, say, increasing the bank’s profits, gave DBS employees a shared sense of purpose. (Google, Cobban notes, has since adapted DBS’s customer hours concept.) The shift in focus entailed an accompanying shift in the meaning of performance, as the previous measures of success were no longer relevant.

The final innovation was to upgrade DBS’s technological capabilities. “We had to build resilience into our platforms and data centers,” Gledhill says. “Our securities and monitoring operations needed revamping. But more important was the need around insourcing. We built our own technology DNA around the company so that we could really start to look and act more like a technology company. We fixed our application stack and got rid of our legacy systems to build an environment on which we would really start to scale.” The company, which was 85% outsourced in 2009, was 90% self-managed by 2018.

Looking back on the new management team’s early successes, Cobban jokes that “we were so bad, it was easy to improve within that first year.” The team wasn’t yet aspiring to compete with tech companies, but it was laying the groundwork for doing so. Gledhill was still, at that point, “thinking about ‘world class’ as being world-class among banks.” He sees the team’s initial actions, which included experimenting with agile practices, as integral to DBS’s later successes, noting that “our foundational years from 2009 to 2014 were critical building blocks where we fixed the basics to be able to move fast.” The changes to DBS’s approach to performance during this period both responded to and helped drive the company’s digital transformation. Soon, however, the company articulated a new and ambitious goal that led to a major shift in its performance management.

Project GANDALF: 2014 to the Present

Around 2014, Gupta and Gledhill began to see DBS’s competition as tech companies — like Google, Amazon, Netflix, Alibaba, LinkedIn, and Facebook — rather than other banks. They set their sights on joining that pantheon as a world-class tech company. The initials of the tech giants together spell GANALF. The company goal was to add a D to the acronym, for DBS, to spell GANDALF, the wizard of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings novels. “That aspiration, more than any single piece of technology or anything else,” Gledhill declares, “really galvanized people to a completely new level of performance and thinking.” The CIO adds that the company “made it fun as well.”

5 Focus Areas for DBS Bank’s Digital Transformation

The GANDALF goal led to a shift in the company’s approach to performance management, which DBS explicitly used to drive its transformation toward becoming a digital leader. The company quantified what it wanted to achieve and measured itself continually against its goals through its management scorecard and key performance indicators. The effort was enterprise-wide and aligned the business and technology sides. “It’s a partnership with HR in terms of reimagining the training and tools and the programs that we want to run,” Gledhill says. “It’s working with our marketing folks to figure out how we shape and sell our message. It’s working with the other business leaders to get them on board. So, it becomes a culture shift more than anything else, which has to affect all parts of the organization. Everybody has to shift the way they operate.”

To disrupt itself and join the digital elite, DBS took the following steps:

1. Gave new meaning to “performance.” Once the PIEs had resolved the customer satisfaction problems related to basic issues like length of wait time for customer center calls, they evolved into a set of programs focused more holistically on the customer. Cobban recalls, “We realized we now need to take friction out of the customer journey — it’s a lot faster than it used to be, but still there’s quite a lot of friction. This deep understanding of what customers really need is pivotal to what we built in.” DBS turned to human-centered design thinking to solve customer problems, running more than 500 “customer journey projects.” Employees are invited to create solutions and pitch them to senior staff. That might mean designing apps that don’t consume too much battery power because in a digital age, being “respectful,” part of the RED mandate, means being conscious of the importance of a customer’s battery life.

In 2017, in another move that greatly altered the company’s conception of performance, DBS developed a method for measuring the financial impact of digitization. Called the digital value capture (DVC), the data quickly and quantitatively demonstrated the importance of migrating customers to digital banking. “Through DVC, we noted that, compared to a traditional customer, a digital customer brings in twice the income, with 1.5, 2, and 3.6 times higher deposit, loan, and investment balances, respectively. A digital customer, on average, also costs 57% less to acquire and is more engaged, with 16 times more self-initiated transactions,” Gledhill notes. DVC data served multiple purposes: It created a new mandate for DBS employees, it was shared with investors, and it helped develop the enterprise’s business plan.

2. Used performance management to drive digital transformation. The company uses a balanced scorecard approach to measure performance, and digital transformation now comprises a significant part of the scorecard. As Gledhill explains, “Because we are really pushing this digital agenda, our scorecard has changed. We want to drive people to push digital adoption of the customers. And so 20% of our scorecard — so 20% of the bank’s performance, which ultimately defines how much we get paid — is focused on digital transformation.” The scorecard’s metrics are very precise. Gledhill continues, “We have very specific measures in there about the percent of customers we acquired digitally, about the shift from manual channel to electronic channel, execution for transactions, and how much we engage. So, acquire, transact, engage. Every business and every product within every business has targets about how it has to shift its customer base to those electronic channels. So, the scorecard is very tightly aligned to digital.”

“With most people, it was very liberating because it set an aspiration of something they’d completely, to that point, failed to imagine, and it was fun.” — David Gledhill

3. Changed the culture that supports performance management. In addition to providing a unifying sense of purpose to the organization, the GANDALF goal has focused DBS on its company culture. Through a process called Culture by Design, DBS has been extremely precise about codifying the culture it wants to establish: one that gives its 26,000-person workforce the feel of a startup. The acronym ABCDE details the characteristics of the culture: Agile (adapting more quickly), Be a learning organization (adopt new ways of approaching the business), Customer-obsessed (understanding customers’ pain points), Data-driven (using data holistically to transform internal processes), and Experiment and take risks (encouraging the 4D process: discover, define, develop, and deliver).

“Once we defined these key characteristics, we started reinforcing them by making aspects of these traits and behaviors a requirement for everyone,” Cobban explains. “We continue to reinforce these characteristics throughout the bank through multiple learning and collaboration programs. We focus on identifying ‘blockers’ to our cultural innovation and set about targeted countermeasures to address them.”

For instance, the company’s meetings, according to Cobban, were frequently ineffective. Problems included “people being late, unprepared, poor agenda, too many people in the meeting, too many meetings generally.” A program called Meeting MOJO was conceived to overcome this particular blocker. Under MOJO, every meeting now has a meeting owner (MO) who in turn appoints a joyful observer (JO). The MO, according to Cobban, ensures that the meeting has a clear agenda, that it starts and ends on time, and that there is “equal share of voice” throughout the discussion. At the end of the meeting, the JO provides feedback to the MO about whether the meeting was a success according to those criteria. “The results have been dramatic,” Cobban says. “More of our meetings start and finish on time, and they now have more structure and engage more attendees.”

“If you give people a sense of purpose and get out of the way, it’s far more powerful than trying to incentivize somebody with money.” — Paul Cobban

In addition, in 2017, DBS launched DigiFY, a mobile learning platform and online course intended to transform the company’s bankers into digital bankers. The program imparts skills in seven categories: agile; data-driven; digital business models; digital communications; digital technologies; journey thinking; and risk and controls. By the time employees achieve mastery in the three-part course, they are qualified to teach its precepts to their coworkers. Once the company decided it required digital bankers, it methodically set about defining, creating, supporting, measuring, and developing them.

As Cobban explains, all these changes took place within a traditional performance management system; what’s more, they were divorced from financial incentives. “We have not set out to change the culture of performance management directly through compensation. My experience is that it’s not effective in shaping a company,” he says. “Our performance approach is very conventional. We have an annual appraisal process. We have KPIs that we need to meet. If you give people a sense of purpose and get out of the way, it’s far more powerful than trying to incentivize somebody with money.”

Creating Buy-In at the Customer Center

Improvements to the customer center at DBS exemplify the shifts taking place within the organization at large. Beginning in 2014-2015, at the customer center as well as throughout the enterprise as a whole, performance management was used to drive the digital agenda. DBS’s head of customer center Geeta Sreeraman states that while the center, like most contact centers is “a highly KPI-driven environment;” the KPIs were very aligned to the bank strategy. “And our focus was, and continues to be,” she adds, “how do we participate in this whole digital transformation?” The answer was to use technology to engage the staff, improve efficiency, and enhance the customer experience.

A top priority was changing the mindset of the 500-plus customer care representatives. This was accomplished in part by enlisting the employees to collaborate in the creation of the unit’s KPIs. “We don’t want a top-down KPI that doesn’t account for their challenges,” Sreeraman says. The “culture of cocreation,” she observes, resulted in “a lot more buy-in.” Moreover, management regularly reviews and refines the unit’s metrics as the nature of engaging with customers changes. For instance, DBS customers increasingly use chat to handle simple banking issues. As customers turn to phone calls as a last resort to address more complex technical problems, KPIs related to the average time of a phone call are of lesser relevance. Metrics relating to first-contact resolution and customer satisfaction become more critical.

By the time customers do make phone calls, then, there is a strong possibility that they’re experiencing a problem that they were unable to solve using self-service online tools. DBS began using speech analytics not to punish poor performance but to understand both the challenges faced by call center staff and customer pain points. “A lot of our high-emotion calls were because of confusion,” Sreeraman says. If, for instance, the analytic tools revealed that callers were frustrated because they couldn’t access their bank statements, the company specifically trained employees to assist customers in accessing their statements online. (This solution had the added benefit of supporting DBS’s agenda to get its customers to go digital.) Similarly, if an urgent problem arises, the company can figure it out more quickly by registering an increase in negative emotions associated with calls.

Access to data enabled innovations at the customer care center. “We enhanced our internal data capabilities to make sure that we capture real-time data through dashboards,” Sreeraman says, adding that the data also facilitates any “real-time management that we need to do.” As part of having a transparent and open culture, an in-house mobile engagement app called Alive makes performance data available 24 hours a day. Managers can see which employees need additional support and which are in a position to stretch themselves. The app is also used to encourage employees to manage their own performance. They can “benchmark their performance with the rest of the cohort to assess if they are on track to meet their objectives,” Sreeraman says. Employees are encouraged to take responsibility: to self-assess, seek feedback from managers, and set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) goals. This “self-driven” performance management, she says, is “where we are headed right now.”

As DBS’s recent accolades suggest, the bank has been successful in aligning its performance management system, its KPIs, and its culture with an ambitious digital transformation agenda. Of course, work remains to be done. Gledhill is interested in applying principles of performance management to the company’s teams; he also wants to deploy machine learning and advanced analytics tools to further optimize customer interactions. But as he measures DBS against the tech giants, reflecting on the audacious goal of putting the D in GANDALF, he is confident that the company will continue to make progress. “I would say we’re a long way away from some of the advanced tools and techniques these guys use, but here’s the point,” he reasons. “If this is always your North Star, you will always progressively move closer and closer to it. That’s how we look at it.”

David Gledhill

group chief information officer and head of group technology and operations

David Gledhill is group chief information officer as well as head of group technology and operations at DBS Bank. In 2017, he was the recipient of the MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award, becoming the first CIO from an Asian company to have won. Prior to joining DBS in 2008, he worked for 20 years at JP Morgan.

Paul Cobban

chief data and transformation officer, technology and operations group

Paul Cobban is chief data and transformation officer, technology and operations, at DBS. He joined DBS in 2009 as managing director for business transformation, and was chief operating officer of technology and operations from 2013 to 2017.

Prior to joining DBS, Cobban held a variety of roles at Standard Chartered Bank, and he also worked at JP Morgan UK as an IT project manager and at IBM as a programmer and project manager.

Geeta Sreeraman

head of customer center, Singapore, technology and operations

Geeta Sreeraman is head of the customer center at DBS Bank, where she leads a team of 600 employees. Since joining DBS in 2011, she has held various senior positions, from managing relations with regulatory bodies to leading the development of the department. Under her leadership, her group has won many accolades, include Best Contact Centre at the Annual Contact Centre Association of Singapore Awards. She started her career as a relationship manager for Citibank India.

Banking On Technology-Enabled Performance Management

By Peter Cappelli

The DBS Bank example is a good illustration of how to pull off organizational change, especially a big one. The key is to use many different levers to get employees to behave differently. In this case, performance management is one of those.

It is useful to think of organizational change as similar to trying to get an individual employee to behave differently, but you have to do it at scale. There are all kinds of reasons we keep doing things the same way, but the most important is arguably that change is both unsettling and, in many cases, risky, especially if what we have been doing has been working pretty well for us.

It helps to have a powerful need for change. Some people refer to this as a burning platform — a pressure that is big enough that we cannot simply ignore it. DBS wasn’t failing; it just wasn’t very good. The pressure had to come from someplace else.

The success of DBS seems to have come from two initiatives. The first was empowerment. We’ve long known that employees can be engaged to work hard and creatively on projects for which they are responsible and that they own. The Singapore work culture is generally quite top-down, so the decision to empower teams to take on projects is more radical than it sounds. I suspect the employees responded to it with even more energy than they might elsewhere.

The second initiative relates to performance management, specifically the creation of measures of success. It is hard to engage people in anything if they do not know how they are doing, and it is especially difficult to improve if you cannot measure whether you are doing better: Imagine trying to improve your golf game if you went to the driving range and could never see where the ball went. The truly innovative initiative at DBS was to create a measure of performance — hours of customer time — that had face validity (we can see why it is good for business and for customers to bank faster), will stay in place over time, and is comparable across parts of the bank.

Paul Cobban says that the bank’s performance appraisal system is very conventional, but the management team did make changes in it that drove behavior in a different direction. That began with new organizational measures, a balanced scorecard, and new measures of individual behaviors that the team wanted employees to execute. We should not underestimate the importance of training on those behaviors because a big cause of resistance to change is employees who aren’t sure whether they will be able to hit the new goals, so they often do not try. Good training goes a long way toward taking that fear away.

Even with all these efforts, organizational changes typically fail. They are working at DBS in part because the leaders smartly let the new practices drive culture changes and aligned efforts to move employees in a new direction. DBS leaders provided a compelling vision of becoming a digital company, empowered employees to act on that vision, measured how they are doing, and gave them the skills to succeed. As with any successful change, it is a lot more work to make it happen than it sounds from a story. The key element here is leadership commitment: Put time and sustained resources into the effort and see it through to a conclusion.

Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School and director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, served as senior advisor to the Kingdom of Bahrain for employment policy from 2003-2005, and since 2007 is a distinguished scholar of the Ministry of Manpower for Singapore.

About the Authors

David Kiron is the executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review ’s Big Ideas Initiative, which brings ideas from the world of thinkers to the executives and managers who use them.

Barbara Spindel is a writer and editor specializing in culture, history, and politics. She holds a Ph.D. in American studies.

Contributors

Michael Fitzgerald, Carolyn Ann Geason, Allison Ryder, and Karina van Berkum

Acknowledgments

David Gledhill, CIO, DBS Bank

Paul Cobban, chief data and transformation officer, DBS Bank

Geeta Sreeraman, head of customer center, DBS Bank

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• Disclosure & Barring Service

DBS business plan: 2022-23

Updated 13 July 2022

Applies to England, Northern Ireland and Wales

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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dbs-business-plan-2022-23/dbs-business-plan-2022-23

1. Chairman and Chief Executive’s foreword

In 2019, the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) board launched a new five-year strategy for the period 2020-25. We are now entering the third year of our journey to deliver the outcomes set out in the strategy, which we developed with our employees and partners. The last two years have been challenging due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but despite this, we have maintained our operational performance. We have made good progress with the activities in our strategy to strengthen the quality of our services, enhance our technology, raise our profile, and build a diverse workforce supported by a contemporary workplace.

In 2021-22, we introduced a revised quality assurance framework to further raise standards to support safeguarding, and launched our Safeguarding and Quality charter, which is at the heart of everything we do. The way we work has evolved with the introduction of secure remote access to our IT systems, which, for the first time, means all of our employees can work more flexibly while delivering our services in a timely manner to customers.

We have improved our support to organisations that use our services through expansion of our regional services, which offer advice, guidance, and training to support our quality objectives, reaching hundreds of organisations annually. We have worked closely with the Home Office to identify opportunities to improve safeguarding and operationalise changes to legislation.

We have enhanced the capabilities within DBS to support our objectives, including the recruitment of an increasingly diverse senior management group. We have modernised our office environment at Darlington to encourage collaboration.

2022-23 will be another challenging and exciting year for DBS. We have set out an ambitious but realistic workplan in what will be a challenging year as the UK starts to recover from COVID-19 and the pressures on government finances that this brings. We continue to strive for performance improvements and are moving towards an ‘outcomes’ focus in our performance management processes, supporting Home Office priority outcomes to reduce crime.

We will continue to modernise our services, including the launch of a new portal for barring referrals and continue our work on digital identity verification. We will complete analysis to understand what the optimal service take-up should be for all our products and services to support safeguarding, and this will inform a refresh of our strategy for 2023-26. We will be actively contributing to the independent review of the disclosure and barring regime, supporting the Home Office’s commitments in the Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls strategy (July 2021).

Finally, we will continue to progress our People objectives, with a particular focus on the introduction of the DBS Academy, the aspirations in our Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion charter, and the development of our future workplace.

We look forward to working with our employees, stakeholders, partners, and customers to support our important work to make recruitment safer this year.

2. Introduction

The DBS 2022-23 business plan focuses on the actions we need to take over the next 12 months to deliver the ambitions set out in our five-year strategy.

Quality is at the heart of our work and everything we will do is designed to improve the quality of our services and the decisions we make. Our intention is to continue to modernise the services we provide, the way we work, and the way we interact with our stakeholders.

The actions we will deliver this year form part of the objectives identified in our co-produced strategy and will make significant contributions to improving the quality of service, the technology we use, our profile, and our work with, and for, our partners, customers, and staff. Some of these deliverables form part of ‘business as usual’ while others are transformational changes.

Delivery of the business plan is supported by the Change and Transformation plan, the technology roadmap, and eight strategic plans for wellbeing, partnerships, green, marketing and business development, police, Registered Bodies, equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), and organisational development.

The Change and Transformation plan outlines all current and planned change activity for 2022-23, and also captures exploratory work we are doing to understand what changes might be needed in future years.

The technology roadmap provides a pathway to the improvement of digital services through modernisation, technology transformation, managing supplier services, and maintaining the IT estate.

The DBS Organisational Development (OD) strategic plan is a dynamic and purposeful document that aims to ‘bring to life’ the DBS organisation of 2025 and articulate how we will deliver our vision of Making Recruitment Safer. The role of OD is to facilitate organisational success by providing a plan and way of working which help align the structural, cultural, and strategic realities of DBS and the environment we operate in.

3. Who we are and what we do

DBS provides disclosure and barring functions on behalf of government. This includes DBS checks for England, Wales, Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man, and barring functions for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. We carry out this work from bases in Darlington and Liverpool, with employees both in these areas, and across the UK.

DBS was created under the provisions of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. We are a non-departmental public body (NDPB) accountable to Parliament through the Secretary of State for the Home Office. We provide an important service, helping to safeguard and protect people in our society while ensuring proportionality and protecting the rights of individuals. We do this by providing relevant information and, where necessary, making barring decisions to help employers make safer recruitment decisions.

DBS issues four levels of certificates of criminal records, known as DBS certificates, and we operate a system of updating certificates through our Update Service. We also bar individuals from working or volunteering in certain circumstances. Our work is funded by the fees from our disclosure (DBS check) customers.

Basic DBS check

A Basic DBS check is available for any position or purpose. A Basic certificate will contain details of convictions and conditional cautions that are considered to be unspent.

Standard DBS check

Standard DBS certificates show relevant convictions and cautions held on the Police National Computer (PNC), subject to filtering rules.

Enhanced DBS check

An Enhanced DBS check is available to anyone involved in work with vulnerable groups, and other positions involving a high degree of trust. Enhanced certificates contain the same information as a Standard certificate, with the addition of relevant local police force information.

Enhanced with Barred List(s) DBS check

An Enhanced with Barred List(s) DBS certificate contain the same information as an Enhanced DBS certificate but includes details of whether the individual is included on one or both of the Barred Lists. These lists include individuals barred from working with children and vulnerable groups where the role is in regulated activity.

We make considered decisions about whether an individual should be barred from engaging in regulated activity with children and/or adults and maintain the Children’s and Adults’ Barred Lists. We also make decisions as to whether it is appropriate to remove a person from a Barred List.

Enhanced DBS checks for healthcare professionals (fast-track)

In support of the government’s COVID-19 response, we are currently providing a temporary service for certain roles, such as nurses, midwives, and social workers. When an application for an Enhanced with Barred List(s) DBS check comes in, and has been identified as an application for particular roles relating to COVID-19, we will do a check of both Barred Lists within 24 hours. A full Enhanced DBS check is then progressed.

4. DBS priorities and strategic objectives

Our purpose.

Protecting the public by helping employers make safer recruitment decisions and by barring individuals who pose a risk to vulnerable groups from working and volunteering in certain roles.

Making Recruitment Safer: By being a visible, trusted, and influential organisation, providing an outstanding quality of service to all our customers and partners, where our people understand the important safeguarding contributions they make and feel proud to work here.

Our strategic objectives

We have identified three strategic priorities that really matter to everyone - Quality, Profile and People. We have developed six objectives within these priorities to help us deliver our vision of Making Recruitment Safer.

Quality - Objective 1

We will provide high quality, reliable, consistent, timely and accessible services for our customers.

Quality - Objective 2

We will embrace technology to drive improvements to the quality of our work.

Profile - Objective 3

We will raise awareness of DBS and the services we offer, keeping people informed through our communications, to increase public understanding and confidence in our organisation.

Profile - Objective 4

We will be a respected and trusted organisation, working with our partners to play an influential role in the environment in which we operate.

People - Objective 5

We will develop a talented and diverse workforce that understands how their contributions help to achieve our objectives.

People - Objective 6

We will build a flexible, vibrant, and contemporary workplace where our staff will be able to do their jobs using modern ways of working that promote OneDBS.

5. Delivering our strategic objectives

To achieve our vision and deliver year three of our strategy, we have identified the following deliverables to be completed this year, in each quarter. We have strong governance in place through our board, committees, and Strategic Leadership Team (SLT) to ensure we focus attention on delivering the priorities in the plan.

All deliverables will be tracked quarterly by SLT, and assurance will be completed by our Quality, Finance and Performance Committee and People Committee. Those included within the Change and Transformation plan will also be tracked through our Transformation Steering Group and assured by our Change Management Committee.

As our delivery progresses, we will use our governance processes to make decisions to ensure our strategic approaches and milestones continue to be appropriate and valid for this plan.

6. Strategic Objective One: We will provide high quality, reliable, consistent, timely and accessible services for our customers

In year two of our strategy, we maintained a strong focus on quality in our operational service delivery, identifying opportunities to improve services for customers and continue to raise standards, introducing our Safeguarding and Quality charter, and implementing a revised quality assurance framework and a new excellence model in our Barring and Safeguarding directorate. We developed new capability to support insight and intelligence to inform our decision making, and continued work to ensure ongoing compliance with legislative changes.

In year three of our strategy, we will progress changes needed to be compliant with future safeguarding legislation, improve the quality and inclusivity of our existing products and services, and consider future service improvements. We will embed our Safeguarding and Quality charter, and our Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion charter in everything we do, by improving our approach to quality and the accessibility of our services. A cross-cutting theme will be ensuring value for money and efficiency in everything we do.

7. Strategic Objective Two: We will embrace technology to drive improvements to the quality of our work

In year two of our strategy, we prioritised delivery of the technology roadmap. We improved our capacity and capability to provide digital services, striking a balance between building our own and buying services from third parties. We introduced remote access to our systems so all of our staff can work remotely if needed and progressed digital certificates to prototype stage. Implementing year two of this strategic objective was not without challenge. It was a good learning opportunity regarding optimal distribution of resources and level of ambition. We have, as part of our learning and due to limited capital funding availability in government, repurposed some commitments into years three to five of our strategy.

In year three, we will focus on maintaining and enhancing existing technology, which is critical for a legacy estate, continuing to progress modernisation of our digital services (with a focus on paperless applications), and ensuring we have the technology tools we need to be an efficient organisation.

8. Strategic Objective Three: We will raise awareness of DBS and the services we offer, keeping people informed through our communications, to increase public understanding and confidence in our organisation

In year two of our strategy, we focused on growing the profile of DBS as a professional and trusted organisation. We launched our Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) charter containing our aspirations for inclusive service delivery. We strengthened our capability for marketing and business development activity, and we widened our social media communication channels by introducing Facebook alongside existing channels.

Internally, we introduced the DBS Employee Engagement Forum, completed our new Employee Engagement Survey and embedded the ‘Engage for Success’ internal engagement model within DBS.

In year three, we will concentrate on developing an enhanced understanding of where take-up of all our services should be encouraged to support safeguarding, informing marketing activity and events to support the 10-year anniversary of DBS. We will align our communications planning to the government functional standard for communication and review our online content to ensure it is streamlined and accessible for all customer groups.

9. Strategic Objective Four: We will be a respected and trusted organisation, working with our partners to play an influential role in the environment in which we operate

In year two of our strategy, we continued to build our regional delivery model within Barring and Safeguarding and Regional Outreach, improving the support and guidance available to the organisations that make use of our services. We built a successful strategic partnership with the Government Digital Service and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, focused on digital identity verification to modernise our approach for the future. We continued with the rightsizing of the Registered Body network and improved our processes for working with the police to make DBS checks more efficient, and to support swift safeguarding decisions.

In year three, we will embed a more effective model for supplier management and compliance to support our activities and ensure they are effective and efficient. We will continue to shape our place as an influencer in the safeguarding landscape, including through a refresh of our strategy and further partnership-building activity. We will also move to an increasingly outcomes-focused planning model, to better show how we contribute to safeguarding objectives.

10. Strategic Objective Five: We will develop a talented and diverse workforce that understands how their contributions help to achieve our objectives

In year two of our strategy, we concentrated on enhancing our internal capability through organisational restructuring to support effective and efficient service delivery. We had a strong focus on introducing more diversity within our workforce to support our strategic objectives. We continued to embed the use of the Metis HR and finance system and introduced a new reward and recognition policy to ensure staff are fairly recognised for going above and beyond.

In year three of our strategy, we will focus on the development of the DBS Academy as we move towards becoming an exemplar organisation, produce an action plan to act on the findings of our Employee Engagement Survey 2021-22, and continue to deliver the commitments in our Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) strategic plan.

11. Strategic Objective Six: We will build a flexible, vibrant, and contemporary workplace where our staff will be able to do their jobs using modern ways of working that are smart and which promote OneDBS.

In year two of our strategy, we focused on transitioning to a new more flexible working model following COVID-19 and invested in improvements to our Darlington offices. We developed a new wellbeing offer for staff and embedded OneDBS ways of working into our culture. We also introduced better knowledge management through investment in capability and the introduction of SharePoint to modernise our file management.

In year three, as part of refreshing our strategy, we will co-create a vision for the future of working for DBS and deliver year two of the Wellbeing strategic plan.

12. Measuring success against the plan - key performance indicators

Performance management is one of the controls we use to ensure we are delivering against the strategic objectives in the DBS 2020-25 strategy, and contributing to the outcomes desired by the Home Office (HO) and government for citizens and society. The Home Office has four priority outcomes in its Outcome Delivery Plan. DBS contributes to HO Priority Outcome 1: Reduce Crime. DBS also contributes to other government priority outcomes, including those for health and social care, employment, education, protecting the public, and economic growth.

We measure our progress using a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) and targets agreed by our board. Our KPIs are grouped into four themes: quality, timeliness, finance/Value for Money, and people. We have a strong focus on the quality and timeliness of our products and services. These are the issues that customers tell us are important to them and it is these that ensure we are supporting the safeguarding of vulnerable groups including children, as effectively as possible.

As part of our performance management framework (PMF), progress towards targets is reviewed monthly by our Strategic Leadership Team and board, with the Quality, Finance and Performance Committee and People Committee providing assurance that performance is being managed appropriately. KPIs are supplemented by other measures which operate at a corporate, directorate, service, and team level.

In 2021-22, our ability to achieve all our performance targets was affected by COVID-19, although we continued to provide a high quality of service and were praised for our overall operational response. We will continue to strive to achieve all our performance targets in 2022-23 as we transition to a post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, and in some cases we have stretched our targets where we feel we are able to do better. We have improved transparency for the public by providing labels that describe in plain English what our KPIs mean to our customers and employees, and linked these to our strategy commitments.

Our quality KPIs support our commitment to providing high quality, reliable, consistent, and accessible service for our customers. Quality is at the heart of everything we do, as outlined in our Safeguarding and Quality charter.

Our timeliness KPIs support our commitment to providing service for our customers. These KPIs help us to demonstrate our speed of service to the public, ensuring safeguarding decisions can be taken by employers and that those individuals who should not be allowed to work with children and/or vulnerable adults are identified and barred as quickly as possible.

Finance/value for money

We are committed to developing a talented, diverse, and inclusive workforce that is engaged in delivering the best possible services to the public. Our people KPIs demonstrate progress against the People commitments in our strategy. We have a range of more detailed people measures, and breakthrough diversity measures, that we use internally.

13. Strategic risks to delivery of the plan

We identify, monitor, and mitigate risk through the DBS risk management process. Risks are reviewed on a monthly basis by our Strategic Leadership Team and board, with the Audit and Risk Committee providing assurance that risk is being managed appropriately. Risks are held at strategic, corporate, and directorate level. The table shows risks that, if they materialised, would impact on delivery of business plan strategic objectives.

14. Budget - delivery of the plan

The budget sets our estimated costs to deliver our services and business priorities this financial year, reflecting financial estimates of service demand, efficiency, and risk. The budget reflects the business plan milestones that support the delivery of our strategic objectives.

Key financial highlights include changes to our product fees from April 2022, which demonstrate our commitment to delivering value for money to our customers. The product fees have been set to align with full product cost recovery. We will be reducing our fees for Basic DBS checks (from £23 to £18), Standard DBS checks (from £23 to £18), and Enhanced and Enhanced with Barred List(s) DBS checks (from £40 to £38) on 6 April 2022. The efficiencies driven through our finance/value for money KPI will allow us to continue to deliver products and services that represent value for money to our customers and the Home Office in future years.

The budget overall is in line with our financial goal of a balanced budget with a fair view of risk and opportunity. As we enter year three of our strategy, our activities to build capacity and capability are starting to deliver benefit and support the ongoing desire for transformational change and efficiency set out in our strategy. Our modernisation plans remain dependent on capital funding availability within government and the pace of change is constrained by this, but we are on track to deliver our capital-dependent commitments within the life of the DBS 2020-25 strategy.

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