Trust Bank’s commitment to CX as a digital disruptor

Singapore’s Trust Bank (also known simply as Trust) is a new financial institution that’s enjoyed a strong first year of operations, capturing 12% market share in Singapore since launch and setting new benchmarks in customer experience and innovation.

How this digital-first bank developed a differentiated user experience for its customers provides insight into what it takes to succeed in such a highly competitive and rapidly evolving industry.

“The whole experience must be built around a set of real customer needs,’’ says CIO Rajay Rai. “Customers told us they wanted their banking to be easy and transparent, and we understood that real-time capability is a key enabler in this regard. That’s why all our updates to customers happen in real time. This may sound small, but it’s a step change for consumers who expect instant gratification with all their digital interactions.” 

Before Rai moved to Singapore to take up the CIO role at Trust, he amassed decades of experience in manufacturing in Australia’s vibrant financial sector. His responsibilities now range from encompassing technology architecture and operational stability, to security, cost management, partnership oversight, and domain-specific deliveries, among others.

In a recent keynote address at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas titled Building for Scale while Enhancing the Customer Experience, Rai laid out the set of foundations used to create Trust, which includes real-time execution, scalable architecture, and speed of execution. “There’s a famous saying that says, ‘Vision without execution is hallucination,’” he says. “You need the ability to execute at speed and scale, and as you execute fast, you start building an experimental capital for the bank. For us, we move fast and you don’t fail. As a bank, you cannot fail.”

At the heart of Trust

Trust has made excellent use of software known as Thought Machine, which is a cloud-native core banking platform. “It’s our beating heart,” says Rai. “Thought Machine generates all these events. The arteries of the entire bank are pumping data and events all the time, and you have services that are listening to all these events. They can act and react to them, as well as adapt and respond in real time.”

The strengths of this architecture, he adds, enable them to go fast and evolve, like with transactions that constantly come through. “You have the ability to build services on the side without disrupting any other microservices in the system,” he says. “It’s 100% containerized and we insist that all our partners must have container-first principles. That enables us to bring the cost of operations way down.”

Putting users at the center

Customer experience is the key ingredient to drive engagement, but it doesn’t start after onboarding. “It starts when customers begin their onboarding journey,” says Rai. “On average it takes approximately three minutes for customers to go from the start of their application to being able to use the digital card.”

Customers at Trust are also encouraged to be active participants in the growth of the bank and win rewards along the way. Month-long birthday specials for consumers, attractive referral rewards, and even the chance to win a Tesla, for instance, all drive engagement. And 70% of customer acquisition comes from referral programs. Even analytics have been reimagined to provide a better user experience. While everyday banking produces a lot of data, consumers often ignore all the insights provided. Trust took a different approach and developed its own feature to deliver insights that customers would find most useful, which they called “funalytics.” Some inspiration to create animated characters that grow as you spend even came from the Tamagotchi digital pets of the 1990s.

Having an agile, open mind

Rai explains that he and his team are fortunate to have a modern, cloud-native platform that’s allowed them to scale capacity to match strong customer growth. “I’ve never seen this sort of scaling before and it’s a great example of the strengths of being cloud-native,” he says. “As a start-up, having the flexibility to add capacity to match your business growth is a huge advantage, and means you don’t have to build expensive infrastructure before you know you need it — or even worse, not being able to support the level of customer demand.”

Rai understands that the financial landscape is undergoing constant change, so teams have to adapt quickly. “As a CIO, you need to work closely with teams to feel a pulse on the ground, have insights into what’s coming around the corner, and have the ability to shift gears along the way.”