On August 22, Trust Bank – the digital bank backed by Standard Chartered and Singapore’s FairPrice Group – sent out invitations for its launch event on September 1, held in a pop-up tent outside the Vivo shopping centre.
Two days later, GSX – the new digital bank backed by Grab and SingTel – sent out its own invitation, for the day before Trust Bank’s, at the Grab headquarters in Singapore’s hi-tech One-North business park.
The timing appeared to grate slightly with the Trust Bank team, who were quick to allude to the fact that GSX’s launch event came several days before the actual launch of its app, which would come five days later.
Judy Hsu, Standard Chartered’s chief executive of consumer, private and business banking, announced from the stage what customers of Trust could look forward to “starting today, September 1, not September 5,” to rapturous whoops from the assembled crowd.
Big guns
The two are slightly different operations – GXS is a newly licensed digital entity, while Trust is under a full banking licence – but there was clearly a sense of competition between them, the more so since there is no sign of the other digital retail bank licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore last year, from Tencent-backed Sea Group, getting anywhere near a launch of its own.
Not to be outdone, Trust unleashed the big guns, getting Lawrence Wong – Singapore’s deputy prime minister and finance minister (and apparent successor to Lee Hsien Loong as prime minister) – to speak at its event, amid the crowd-rousing of an exuberant MC and some sort of confetti bazooka.
With about 200 people, newly maskless after the lifting of one of the world’s stricter mask mandates three days earlier, wedged into a blue tent, it was a gathering quite unlike any other in the city state over the last two and a half years.
Wong, a rather more candid politician than is the norm in Singapore, spoke of an interesting barometer for the successful adoption of digital banking: his mum.
“My yardstick for attitudes among seniors is my mother,” he said.
Like many older people in Singapore, he said, she still won’t use a smartphone for banking and insists upon going to a branch with her bank book. The arrival of Trust Bank, he said, made him hope he might get her to turn digital.
We will have a greater chance to assess movements in the Lawrence Wong’s Mum Indicator if Sea ever gets around to launching. Wong briefly addressed its tardiness.
“There are new digital banks coming,” he said, and left a meaningful pause. “Soon.”
