Singapore banks face 90% onboarding bottleneck despite AI push

Banks invest in skills, not hiring.

Singapore’s corporate and investment banks are investing more heavily in internal artificial intelligence capability-building, but 90% still cite client onboarding as inefficient, according to Capgemini.

The firm said Singapore banks are shifting from hiring to building, with 40% investing in hands-on AI upskilling and 30% offering incentives to drive adoption, compared with 23% and 14% globally. Only 20% of companies are recruiting external AI talent, compared to a 40% global average.

Operational bottlenecks remain more severe than global norms in several key workflows. The firm said 80% of Singapore respondents flagged KYC and due diligence as inefficient, compared with 75% globally, whilst another 80% pointed to transaction reconciliation, compared with 63% worldwide.

Compliance was a relatively smaller concern in Singapore. Half of respondents cited regulatory and compliance monitoring as inefficient, close to the 48% global level and below Hong Kong’s 60% and Japan’s 80%.

The Singapore findings come as Capgemini’s global corporate and investment banking report showed rising competitive pressure across the sector.

It said 85% of banks’ corporate clients plan to engage a non-bank financial institution within the next 12 months, whilst only 23% said banks currently meet expectations for faster, more transparent, and responsive service.

Globally, Capgemini said banks are still struggling to convert innovation spending into results, with 82% of executives saying innovation programmes are not generating improved revenue from new products and 51% saying they have not delivered expected cost savings.

It added that only 29% of IT budgets are directed to transformative technologies, whilst 43% is still spent maintaining legacy systems.

A NOTE FROM SINGAPORE BUSINESS REVIEW

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia