Operations and Technology

2025 was a productive and purposeful year for us. We not only strengthened our foundations but also broke new ground in innovation. Our focus centred on three priorities: boosting IT resiliency, accelerating AI, Digital and Data capabilities, and investing in people and culture.

Uplifting IT Resiliency

We made significant progress in improving the resilience of our IT systems through a multi-year programme to modernise our core systems and infrastructure and enhance recovery capabilities.

Resiliency remains the foundation to ensure successful delivery on our technology agenda, and has become even more critical amid heightened cyber threats, rapid digital adoption, and an evolving regulatory landscape.

We took a deliberate, forward-looking approach to refresh and upgrade our technology stack while ensuring our core systems continued to perform steadily. This balanced strategy enables us to stay ahead of emerging risks and sustain long-term operational excellence.

We also strengthened operational resilience by enhancing controls, governance and oversight across the technology landscape. Recognising the importance of external dependencies, we enhanced third-party and supply-chain risk management through tighter governance, more rigorous resilience assessments and stronger contractual safeguards to mitigate concentration risks.

At the same time, we continued to elevate our cybersecurity posture.

Enhanced controls and automation improved threat detection, containment and recovery speeds, helping to safeguard customer data and ensure uninterrupted services amid increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.

Our efforts to modernise and strengthen our technology capabilities have delivered close to S$80 million in cost avoidance, improved system stability and reinforced the reliability of our platforms. These advancements enable our customers to transact, interact and bank with us confidently and securely.

Accelerating AI, Digital, and Data Capabilities

2025 was also the year we scaled AI adoption meaningfully.

We have further integrated AI into daily operations, delivering strong productivity gains across teams and enabling our people to focus on higher-value activities that require judgement, problem-solving and critical thinking.

AI was deployed to automate document processing and optimise workflows, significantly reducing manual effort while improving accuracy and turnaround times. Within engineering, AI is now embedded across the end-to-end development lifecycle, from refactoring legacy codes and conducting automated reviews, to AI-driven testing and quality checks.

Collectively, these capabilities have reduced coding and testing effort of engineers by 20-30%, enabling faster time-to-market, greater fault tolerance and higher overall reliability in the delivery of new features and products.

On the business front, AI-powered solutions are transforming customer engagement. Voice AI now automates courtesy reminder calls, while hyper-personalisation capabilities allow us to deliver more relevant insights, recommendations and products tailored to customers' needs across the region.

At our private banking subsidiary, Bank of Singapore, we deployed an agentic AI tool – Source of Wealth Assistant – to automate the drafting of source-of-wealth reports for relationship managers. Preparation time was reduced significantly from up to 10 days to just one hour, freeing our bankers to focus on higher-value customer engagement.

Together, these initiatives represent more than incremental technological upgrades. They reflect a shift towards smarter, faster, and more personalised technologies, enabling us to deliver a seamless and differentiated customer experience.

Investing in People and Culture

As we deepen the use of technology, investing in our people remains fundamental to our strategy. Upskilling and reskilling are essential to sustain performance and long-term growth.

Technology fluency is no longer the domain of IT specialists alone. It is a core capability for every role across the organisation. We continue to invest in building a workforce that can confidently harness emerging tools and translate innovation into tangible outcomes. Over the past three years, about 3 in 5 of our employees have participated in an AI, Digital or Data training as part of their continuous development.

In emerging fields such as quantum computing, more than 600 colleagues across the Bank were upskilled in 2025, accumulating over 2,800 hours of specialised training for the year.

While quantum technologies remain nascent globally, we are equipping our people to anticipate future risks, unlock new capabilities and contribute meaningfully to Singapore's ambition to build a secure, resilient and future-ready financial services ecosystem.

Our research collaborations with the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University and Singapore Management University further strengthen this effort. Through these partnerships, we are exploring practical applications ranging from derivative pricing to portfolio optimisation, while strengthening our defences against quantum-powered cyber threats.

At the core of our resilience is a strong engineering-led build culture. This culture gives us deeper ownership, transparency, and control over mission-critical systems, and shapes how we invest in talent. It demands strong technical depth, continuous learning and a mindset of accountability; qualities that underpin our ability to innovate safely and at scale.

The Next Phase

Looking ahead, we are preparing for technologies with the potential to redefine our industry.

We are stepping up preparations for a quantum-enabled future. As AI continues to evolve, we are actively evaluating next-generation AI models and platforms to further enhance internal productivity and customer experiences. These technologies will shape the next decade of banking, and we are taking active steps to stay ahead of the curve.

In 2026, we will double down on embedding AI, Digital and Data deeply across customer journeys to build scale, personalise our service and achieve cost efficiencies. This will improve quality, consistency, and time-to-market across the Group, and unlock new growth opportunities.