Since its inception in December 2021, followed by a full public rollout in September the following year, Trust Bank (or Trust) has emerged as one of the fastest growing digital banks in the world. Licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Trust Bank captured 16% market share in Singapore within two years of launch in a highly competitive market.
Backed by a unique partnership between Standard Chartered Bank Singapore and NTUC Enterprise, Trust is leveraging their combined expertise of over 200 years to serve customers with a wide range of innovative and easy to use financial products – including a numberless two-in-one credit and debit card, Singapore’s first fully digital supplementary credit card, savings account, personal loan products, general insurance and an extensive rewards platform.
Recognising the accomplishments of Singapore’s first digitally native bank, The Digital Banker presented Trust Bank with the award for the Best Mobile Banking App at the Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards 2024, while also giving it high acclaim under the category of Best Digital Bank in Singapore.
A unique approach to banking
It is no secret that Singapore’s retail banking landscape is highly competitive and well-developed, with existing players investing heavily in their digital transformations to upgrade their offerings. Despite the refreshed digital services introduced by incumbents, Trust’s extensive customer research and insights indicated that the basic customer banking experience remained underwhelming. Additionally, there was also a lack of real-time transparency around customer rewards.
Trust recognised the opportunity to build a modern, seamless, efficient, transparent and easy-to-use app from scratch for everyone in Singapore to easily adopt digital banking services, by leveraging its latest, cutting-edge tech stack. Additionally, it helped to fill the gap in providing real-time transparency for consumers.
As the first bank in Singapore to use a modern, cloud-native platform, Trust raised the bar for customer experience and innovation through the use of real-time, digital services. From the initial three core products at launch, Trust has released several innovative and market-first solutions based on customer feedback to create a banking experience that they have come to love. This includes a personal loan application journey that takes less than 60 seconds and a three-click travel insurance application.
More than 90% of Trust’s customers are onboarded with straight-through processing without the need for any physical intervention thanks to an onboarding experience that is one of the fastest in the world – it takes most customers around 3 minutes to open an account and be able to use their digital card immediately.
The foundations underpinning this are a modern cloud-native technology, an agile culture and a focus on customer experience, translating into unrivalled speed in the market, with Trust releasing app updates in around half the time it takes for competitors.
Additionally, for delivering an easy-to-use experience, Trust has helped a wide range of customers enjoy its services. In fact, more than 30% of its customer base are people over 55 years of age and 10% are over 65 – something very unusual for a digital bank and reflecting the intuitive and customer-centric design of its mobile app.
Anchored by its vision to help people maximise their lives simply and delightfully, Trust plans to continue utilising the latest technology to bring a new standard of customer experience to Singapore and help people make significant savings on their everyday spending.
