OCBC to raise annual technology and AI spending to 771 million dollars

OCBC (Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp.), one of Singapore's three largest banks, plans to raise its annual technology spending, including artificial intelligence, to more than 1 billion Singapore dollars (771 million US dollars), a senior bank executive said in an interview with Bloomberg.

How much will the bank spend on technology?

The exact timeline for the budget increase has not yet been disclosed. The target, however, is more than 1 billion Singapore dollars a year, which makes OCBC one of the largest corporate technology buyers in Southeast Asia.

• Target annual budget: more than 1 billion Singapore dollars (771 million US dollars)
• The spending includes artificial intelligence alongside other technologies
• The statement came from a senior OCBC executive
• OCBC is part of Singapore's «big three» banks, along with DBS and UOB

What banks spend their AI budgets on

In banking, AI is most often deployed in a few predictable areas. These include transaction monitoring to fight fraud and money laundering, automated customer checks when opening accounts (KYC/AML), credit scoring and borrower risk assessment, and robo-advisers that build an investment portfolio for a client without human involvement. Over the past two to three years, generative AI has joined the list: customer-support chatbots that take pressure off call centers, and internal assistants that help employees speed up request processing, legal review of contracts and report preparation.

Why Singapore is pushing banks toward AI

OCBC operates in more than ten countries and serves both retail and corporate clients, so the scale of its technology infrastructure is comparable to that of international financial groups. Competition for the status of Asia's fintech hub is also driving up IT budgets at banks in the region. For years, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has encouraged banks to experiment with generative AI through the industry initiative Project MindForge, launched in 2023 to work out the risks and best practices for using such models in the financial sector, and through regulatory sandboxes for riskier pilots.

What we know about the bank itself

OCBC is Singapore's second-largest bank by assets and operates under OCBC Group. The group also includes Bank of Singapore, a private bank that specializes in wealth management for affluent clients, and Great Eastern, one of the region's largest insurers. With this mix of businesses, the bank needs new AI tools in several areas at once, from retail banking and private banking to insurance, where AI is increasingly used for risk assessment and claims automation.

What this means

OCBC's decision is another sign that artificial intelligence in banking has stopped being an experiment and has become a permanent capital expenditure line, comparable in scale to traditional IT infrastructure.