UOB Launches Southeast Asia eLab

UOB launches its pan-regional Engagement Lab (eLab) on Thursday, making it the first dedicated unit set up by a Southeast Asian bank that focuses on using the latest technology and behavioural insights to deepen customer engagement.

«We believe that designing a simple and easy-to-navigate app interface to create an intuitive user experience is just the beginning. We want to build on this and to ensure that every touchpoint – from the on-boarding process to day-to-day banking – at the Digital Bank is relevant to our customers and resonates deeply with their lifestyle needs and priorities,» said Dennis Khoo, head of digital bank at UOB in a press statement.

eLabs Serves Southeast Asian clients 

The Bank will set up eLabs across its network of ASEAN countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. UOB’s Digital Bank, set to launch in the next few months, has been modelled such that digital interactions with the customers are designed to deepen client relationships.

Through the eLab, the Bank will use the insights drawn to design, to test and to trial ways to encourage customers to save and spend more wisely. Given ASEAN’s cultural and linguistic diversity, these conversations will be in the customers’ own mother tongue.

Digital Capabilities

In August, the bank had announced plans to introduce a Digital Bank for Asean customers that will use a data-centric business model to understand individual customer banking needs and habits through their digital interactions with the bank.

«We will use next-generation digital capabilities to anticipate our customers’ needs and to prompt them to make better financial decisions to achieve their goals. This will be done through meaningful real-time digital conversations that guide customers to better financial choices,» Khoo said.

UOB Accelerates Hiring For Digital Bank

The Bank aims to increase its Digital Bank team by 50 per cent in the next 12 months. Of these new hires, a quarter will join the eLab. Other roles include those in areas such as user experience and user interface design, behavioural science and research, data analytics and design thinking.

This helps to accelerate the Digital Bank’s initiatives in the region, it said. The new hires will join the 120-people strong team already working on the roll-out of UOB’s digital bank across ASEAN.

In addition, it is looking to hire software engineers and architects to develop solutions such as in-house application programming interfaces (APIs) which tap UOB’s secure IT architecture to drive real-time data analytics.