Digibank by DBS

• 8 August 2017 | 2315 Views | By Mint2Save

Applications for banking are increasing and the penetration of virtual credit cards, virtual debit cards are increasing. With the penetration of the same in India, Digibank which is a multinational banking and financial service providing bank also thought to launch its services in India.

“People don’t need banks, people need banking”- Bill Gates

They didn’t launch the services in India as a full fleshed bank, but in the form of an application only which provides virtual credit cards and other banking options.

DBS Bank is a bank having its headquarters in Singapore. The bank was earlier known as The Development Bank of Singapore limited before 2003, later it changed its name to DBS Bank. Bank was set up by the government of Singapore back in 1965, today there are hundreds of branches all across the world, and now the bank is making its way in India.

Launching Digibank

DBS Bank launched its services back in April 2016 in India as Digibank. The Digibank is a mobile banking application, and DBS Bank targets to make this application a full paperless work, and hence for that, they will be using Aadhar card, wherein you just have to verify via your biometrics and artificial intelligence.

DBS Bank will be offering a 7% interest rate for the savings bank account, and the bank account which they will be offering will be a Zero-Balance account, so herein you will not have any problem of having a fixed amount engaged in order to keep the account active.

Digi bank’s 7% interest rate is not behind the highest rate of interest in India currently of 7.5%, which is being offered by Airtel’s payments bank account. Piyush Gupta, Chief Executive Officer of DBS Bank said, “We want to build a liability book of Rs 50,000 crore and an asset book of Rs 10,000 crore in the next two to three years on this platform. We are also aiming to have about five million savings accounts in the next five years.”

This is a high aim for the banks new offering. At the time of launching the application of Digibank, they got applications for about 30,000 – 40,000 bank account which is quite good numbers for a new bank setup in India.

About Operations

DBS Bank in India collaborated with Coffee day, which is the franchisee who runs the Café Coffee Day, now in order to actually open an account, you just have to visit Café Coffee day, and using a biometric system, you will be able to open a bank account in the Digibank application of DBS Bank. With this simple procedure, you can simply open the bank account that will result into a green India, because it is not requiring any type of Paperwork.

This will be for their customers who just need to bank for their savings account or personal uses, for corporate clients and even small to medium enterprise clients, DBS Bank will be working to expand its branch networks. Currently, in total DBS Bank have 12 branches all over India, which is quite a low number for bank standards.  

DBS Bank has applied to RBI to move to a fully-owned subsidiary structure, for which the application is currently in the pending state. As per RBI’s statement, it will take around 12 – 18 months to process fully which is quite a long time. Till now Digibank by DBS hasn’t got any negative feedback, which is quite a good thing.

More about Digibank Application

Currently Digibank application is launched with just more on the liabilities side. This means they will enable you to currently just operate on saving bank accounts which will enable you to store the amount in account of the bank, and then when and as you need, you can use the money, either via net banking or UPI or any other format. They will soon be introducing investments, loans and other things soon via the app, which is quite a good thing and it will be interesting to see if they can scare the well-settled bank with the rate of interests they will be offering.

There are no loan products offered by the bank as of now.

Every bank needs a backend to provide support to the people who are not able to do some certain task. But as Digibank is still a mobile-only banking station, and the limited 12 branches won’t be able to cover whole India, as a result DBS Bank got up with a great solution of using an AI powered virtual assistant. The Virtual Assistant is known as KAI and is developed by Kasisto. This is simply a banking application take on Apple’s Siri. This will also offer the same kind of functionality to the bank.

Although this is not going to be as smart as Siri, but after repeated usage. i.e., when people will start using this regularly, KAI itself will be learning how to answer and more from the users, hence the more we use the smarter it will become. Although we do recommend that you must not ask questions related to investments to Kai.

There are different charges for different plans for Digibanking applications and DBS Bank applications. DBS Bank has two types of different plans for customers one will be digit savings and another will be digibank e-wallet, with digibank e-wallet you will not be getting any interest over any amount.

With Digibank’s digisavings account, you will get interest rates of 7% till 1 lakh amount. If you are having enough money and you decide to put above 1 lakh and between 10 lakhs then you will have a 6% rate for the incremental amount that you will deposit, i.e. if you have 3 lakhs in the account then for the first 1 lakh you are getting 7% rate of interest while for the next 2 lakhs you will have 6 % of rate of interest.

It would be great if you visit digibank by DBS’s website for a rate of interest information and information about different types of fixed deposit rates, and other rates. Because all these tend to be getting ups and down. Do let us know in the comment section on what you think about digibank by DBS.

The rise of digital banks might just be a beginning of a revolution. As explained by DBS’s Group CEO, Piyush Gupta, these four factors are going to push up fintech to a totally new level: Smartphone, Rise of social economy, explosion of big data and AI along with cognitive learning. In his post on LinkedIn, Mr. Gupta also ponders upon the future existence of banks and that people would need them or not.

For now, rise of digibank and its increasing popularity has created a new map of banking for us.