DBS Bank

DBS Bank faced a structural gap between retail customers' awareness of financial planning and their willingness to act on it. Despite serving millions of customers across Singapore and Asia, traditional advisory channels could not cost-effectively reach the mass retail segment at scale. Customers acknowledged the importance of retirement preparedness and investment goals but rarely translated that awareness into concrete steps. Without a scalable intervention, the bank risked leaving a large proportion of its retail base financially underserved — with downstream consequences for both customer outcomes and digitally managed assets under management.

DBS developed the NAV Planner, a digital financial planning tool that combines fintech infrastructure with machine learning and predictive analytics to generate personalised financial road maps for retail customers. The platform aggregates each customer's financial position and uses AI-driven models to identify gaps in retirement readiness, investment coverage, and insurance adequacy. Critically, it can stress-test individual portfolios and cash flows against inflation scenarios, then surface targeted nudges recommending specific investment or insurance products to close identified gaps. Deployed at scale through DBS's existing digital banking channels, the tool bridges the gap between fully self-directed customers and those requiring human advisory — extending personalised guidance to segments where dedicated relationship managers are not economically viable.

The NAV Planner reached 2.8 million customers, with approximately 35% (~1 million) classified as active users — a scale that would be unreachable through traditional advisory alone. The headline outcome was a 4x increase in customers completing full investment journeys, demonstrating that AI-driven nudging materially converts passive awareness into committed action. Within one year of focused deployment, AUM of digitally managed investments grew 52% year-on-year. Key outcomes:

• 4x investment journey completion rate
• 52% YoY growth in digitally managed AUM
• 2.8 million total users onboarded to the platform
• ~1 million active users regularly engaging with financial planning features

• Nudging architecture matters as much as the model: surfacing the right recommendation at the right moment in the customer journey drove completion rates more than product quality alone.
• Stress-testing builds trust: giving customers a concrete view of how their portfolio holds up against inflation scenarios created engagement that generic advice could not.
• Scale requires digital-first delivery: reaching mass retail segments with personalised guidance is only viable when AI removes the dependency on human advisors.
• Active users are the real KPI: total signups are a vanity metric — the 35% active user rate reflects genuine behavioural change, not just registration.
• AUM growth is a lagging but durable signal: a 52% YoY increase in digitally managed assets validates that engagement translated into real financial decisions, not just tool usage.