Awards for Excellence 2017
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There are two priorities at OCBC: wealth management, through the Bank of Singapore subsidiary; and small and medium-sized enterprises. All banks in Asia like to say they prioritize SME banking, but at OCBC it is clearly instrumental to everything the bank does – and that makes it our best bank for SMEs in Asia. Since last year, OCBC has allied its early-stage persistence – everyone who registers a new business in Singapore is contacted almost immediately by the bank with an offer of assistance – with the use of big-data analytics. This can be as simple as analyzing trends among people who register new businesses, or refining an online campaign through the customized use of search engine keywords. For its flagship small business accounts, OCBC believes it has increased its number of leads by 180% and its conversion from 40% to over 50% through these techniques.
In Malaysia, it has achieved almost 50% year-on-year growth in average account balances; the Indonesia accounts, launched in February 2016, are in their infancy but have still seen 30% year-on-year growth in average account balances.
All banks in Asia like to say they prioritize SME banking, but at OCBC it is clearly instrumental to everything the bank does – and that makes it our best bank for SMEs in Asia |
Another point of differentiation at OCBC is the way its offering varies not just by country but by city. The bank has 340 branches in Indonesia and more than 40 in Malaysia, so it knows that the dynamics of small business vary considerably and that what works in Surabaya may not work in Medan. By understanding the types of businesses that tend to thrive in individual countries, it is succeeding in offering a better service. Revenue in Surabaya grew 30% year-on-year in 2016.
At home in Singapore, business has been tough, and so OCBC launched a collateral-free working capital loan of up to S$300,000 ($216,700) for businesses that are at least two years old. Within four months of launch, it has disbursed over S$150 million. There is a risk to that, of course, but the group continues to report very low impairment numbers. It supports numerous award programmes for entrepreneurs around the region and is making more frontier-spirited progress in Myanmar.
