 Robin is a recognized pioneer and expert in strategy and digital implementation. He is driven to transform strategy implementation globally by inspiring leaders to adopt a different mindset and approach. He's the founder of three companies and three businesses association. Robin is the CEO of a business consulting and co-founder of a strategy implementation institute and the ticking clock guide. As a TEDxpeak presenter and facilitator for IMD and an adjunct faculty member for Duke CE and Singapore Management University and an international best-selling author, he actually recently launched his new book, World's Best Bank, A Strategy Guide to Digital Transformation. And you'll see, we'll talk about the fact that he's been recently co-nominated with Piyush Gupta, CEO of DBS Bank, over Fingers 50 ideas into practice award. We were privileged to have him with us just over a week ago as a strategy at work. It was simply spectacular. So the topic today really is about the story of DBS Bank, lessons from a world-class digital transformation. As we know, leaders need to learn new strategies and continually and create actually new approaches to transform their organizations. What should they focus on? That's the question that we're asking ourselves. Being strategic, planning digitally and implementing in times of change require fundamental shift in culture and ways of working. Rubin will share with us how leaders can accelerate the pace of transformation while at the same time placing a deep focus on implementation. In the talk that we'll have with Rubin taking us through, he will also share how DBS Bank transformed from a traditional bank to the world's best by leveraging digitalization. DBS has been awarded the world's best bank for the past three years, so not one, not two, but three, and ranked among the top 10 digital transformations of the past decade by Harvard Business Review. Through the presentation, Rubin will help us uncover the intriguing lessons, best practices, and strokes stemming from the three years of research that he's done for his new book. So without further view, let me welcome Rubin here so that he can take us through the great story of DBS Bank. Rubin? Terry, thank you for the intro. Let me kick off with a question. We all know that digital is critical for most business models, but what percentage of digital transformations are succeeding in today's world? 10, 20, 50, 80, what percentage succeed? Well the research from not only myself but people like McKinsey, IBM, Boston Consulting Group, all is consistent that only one in three digital transformations are succeeding. I'm living in Singapore, which has been home for almost 30 years, and I sat down with my ex-colleague from Citigroup, a gentleman called Piyush Gupta, a couple of years ago. And we were chatting and decided to tell the story of how a very small bank in a very small island went to become the world's best bank. And Terry, thank you for the introduction. It's not, they just won it not for the third year, but now for the fourth year. So they've now been recognized for four years in a row. And Piyush and I were together last week and I said to him, thank you for winning it again. And he looked at me and he realized, of course, it means your book is good for another year, the world's best bank. So I have 20 minutes to share with you the two years of access I was given to the C-suite, to the bank in our collaboration to write the world's best bank. And my focus, as Terry was kindly introduced, is not a banking story. It's how a legacy company became one of the top 10 digital transformations, as according to Harvard. And as Terry kindly mentioned, Piyush and I have been co-nominated and are presenting next week at the Thinkers 50 conference. So I'll go back a step. So for myself, just to add onto Terry's kind introduction, it's a pleasure to be presenting with Brightline again. We had a lot of fun at the conference a few weeks ago, a lot of interaction and discussion. And my passion is implementation. I was previously a city banker and I love banking, but my passion is helping leaders implement that strategy. And it's something that I've done for 21 years. So here we go. Let me go straight into the presentation. Because as I said, I got 20 minutes to share with you two years of research, writing and development. So why does digital transformation fail so often? And for today, we'll do this as a rhetorical question. I was very fortunate that not only was I working with the world's best bank, but I was also working with the world's largest luxury company back in 2014. And I pivoted my business seven years ago, recognizing that digital transformation is even tougher than strategy implementation as we previously knew it. In 2018, we interviewed over 1,800 leaders across North America, Europe and Asia looking at the state of digital. And the top three reasons in 2019 that we discovered why it fails are, first, the lack of senior leaders to change their mindset. This is something I've now coined that we shift from vertical leadership to horizontal leadership, where they have to humble themselves and recognize they can't run the business the way they always have done. The second reason is the culture. As soon as you walk in and you see people working in cubicles, not connecting with each other, you know they're going to struggle. We've got to change the culture, the way we run meetings, the way we connect, how we get together, how we communicate. So much needs to change. And the third top reason in no order is that recognizing it's not about applying automation to your back-end processes, but a whole business model transformation. So with that, I was curious to understand why DBS was so successful. And I sat down with Piers and he and I have been colleagues and friends now for 25 years. And I've been consulting to the bank for a decade now to capture the story. And this was a fun picture that someone put together of Piers, you know, back to the future style. So in my short presentation, I'm going to highlight three key areas of any digital transformation, not just a bank. How do you transform your technology architecture to support the transformation? How do you become customer obsessed? And how do you create that startup culture where people respond fast, quickly and move? So the first question that any organization moving into digital transformation should have asked is what does digitalization, sorry, where does digitalization add value to your business? Because digital has become an enormous word. Are we talking about AI, machine learning, customer journey, DevOps, agile, hackathons, customer journey mapping, design thinking? There's so much under this umbrella. You have to articulate with the focus of where the value is for your customers and your business. In DBS, the leaders were sitting in 2014 discussing the opportunity. And at the time, it was just at the back of the global financial crisis. Many people found banking painful and they recognized nobody wakes up in the morning saying, let's do our banking. So they saw an opportunity and out of that, a strategy was born to make banking joyful. Now, banking is not joy. Disneyland is joyful, not banking. So this was the digital purpose. They focus on how to really make banking joyful. And you can see here the strategy. I'll just go back to the question. Here's the first challenge. Once you identify how to digitalization will impact your business, you have to make it come alive for your employees. In our 20 years of continuous research, only 5% of employees understand their own organization strategy. So first challenge was how did DBS share making banking joyful with the whole organization? And I call this a strategy on a page. And this image was like tattooed on everyone's forehead. Everyone knows it. And when I interviewed the leaders for the book, nobody mentioned making banking joyful because it was already after four years embedded into the way they worked. So this picture summarized their strategy around focusing on the Asian markets, embedding into digital, and then behind is the skyline of Singapore. So what was the understanding? Technology allows you to make processes invisible to your customers. So by adopting the new technologies of today, the bank became less visible in the processes. Simple example, previously to do a transaction, you had to visit the branch. Get in your car, go all the way down, find a parking space, fill in the forms when you got to the branch, join the back of the line, wait to be served. Of course, now we all use mobile apps. So that's taking the pain. Now that's a very, of course, simple example, and you'll see how the bank used technology to make it invisible. So the next question is, well, you've got a purpose, but how do we implement the transformation? And as I shared as the agenda, the bank came up with three strategic principles. To transform your, to become digital to the core, this is transforming your technology, and this is where your initial capital expenditure goes. Embed yourself in customer journeys. For years, I've worked with banks across the world who said, we are going to be number one in customer service, and not just banks, but any company. Today, we truly can become the best in customer service, as DBS did. They actually went from last in Singapore to best. And how do you create that startup culture that encourages agile communication, learning, experimentation? So I'll spend about five minutes on each. So here we go with the technology component. For DBS, the challenges were redesigning their architecture, becoming nimbler so they could work and respond faster, and enable scalability through all their ecosystem partners and improve business and technology while co-working with maximizing the use of data. And part of the bank's success was how they responded to these challenges. So now you've got your purpose. You've shared it with everyone, but how do you change the mindset? Now pause for a moment. How do we get people to think and act differently? Far too often leaders charge into a transformation without recognizing that they've been studying the transformation and planning it maybe for six months, a year or two years. And they give their employees a town hall meeting and expect them to change their thinking. It doesn't happen. So this is another example of how DBS were very smart. They used an expression that said, what would Jeff do? Now you'll recognize the picture, of course, it's Jeff Bezos from Amazon, who's known for being customer obsessed. And this was very clever, because in meetings, instead of saying, how do we solve this as bankers, they said, how do we solve this as a techie if we're working in Amazon? So they thought, what would Jeff do? But a slogan on its own is not enough. So they also visited the top tech companies. And again, they were very clever. They took the acronyms and made a new, they took the letters and made a mnemonic that represent the lessons from people like Google Netflix, LinkedIn, et cetera. And it spelt out Gandalf. And Gandalf, many of you will recognize, is the wizard in Lord of the Rings. So it gave a magic touch to transforming our technology. And it explained it by saying, from Google, for example, we'll learn about open source, from Netflix about data, from LinkedIn about the importance of community. And the D in the middle is DBS becoming the digital and data bank of Singapore. But even this is not enough. You need to support with a roadmap for technology. And you need to benchmark not against your competitors, but the best in the processes. So benchmark against the world's best, not your competitors. So the leaders then said, well, we need the architecture roadmap. And from day one, the first year of the transformation, they displayed the five key elements for the change. So today it's all about moving from products to platforms. Four out of the top five companies in the world today are platform-based. It's about developing a platform-based platform It's about developing high-performing agile teams. Automate everything. Now for any bankers on the call, they'll be familiar with the term STP, straight through processing. This has been the bane of banking for many years. Now we can finally really achieve straight through processing. Design for modern systems and organized for success building in scalability. So the roadmap achieved the transformation over about three years. And the bank moved from designing for ops to no ops to now, like many in organizations, it's about having AI not people at the center of your ops. So I've put together after each one, best practices that I picked up from the research and published in the world's best bank, the book. Number one was so critical for their success. In the past, the business set the goals, turned to technology and said, what can you do to assist us? Today in DBS, the tech and the business as they plan for 2022 sit at the table as equal partners. It's called tech is biz and biz is tech. What would Jeff do? Very effective in changing the mindset. Benchmarking against the world's best, not your competition. Becoming cloud native, finding that right balance between private and public cloud. What's removed toil? Toil is a term from Google, which is the pain in processes, the non-value act. Automate everything and reinforcing how important that is. And finally, digital is not the tech's responsibility, it's everyone's. Sorry, one more, and develop your roadmap. So what were the challenges for them becoming truly customer obsessed that made them the world's best bank? Well, remember when they started their digital transformation in 2014, banking was seen very negatively. In fact, Time Magazine showed that 71% of people prefer to go to a dentist than their local branch, what? That's how painful banking was. So they wanted to make the change, hassle free, great customer satisfaction and build ecosystems. So a question you need to ask is what does digitalization mean to our customers? And for DBS, they started with what I call an outside in approach. So they didn't say what's best for us, which banks are very guilty of, and we build the process and then we like force the customer to do it our way. The bank looked at the touchpoints with the customer and reversed engineer so that they could make it easy to do, easy to do business with from the customer's point of view. So they moved from being product focused to customer centric. But how did you get your employees to practice being truly customer obsessed? It's fine to talk about it, but you have to embed it into the everyday business. In DBS, they use customer journey mapping, which many of you will be familiar with. This is not just mapping out the touchpoints of the customer, but physically going to meet them or virtually, finding out where the pain points are, how the customer feels, what are their expressions and looking at ways to improve. It's about identifying the job to be done. Now, what do I mean? For example, in the bank, people don't want a car loan. What they want is a new car. The job to be done is not provide a loan, but to provide the car. So on DBS website today, you can actually buy and sell cars. Now, what? Why would a bank buy and sell cars? Because they built the ecosystem with the partnerships through open APIs and the loan process is almost invisible because it's embedded as you enter your information, which the bank already has. It's also about eliminating those pain points when customers get so frustrated. So just a couple of examples, one example, how often have you gone to an ATM and it says, sorry, no cash? In banking, we call that cashouts. An early success was using predictive technology to remove cashouts from three months. So every 90 days to now, only happens every 55 years. Couple of other key things to share. You have to provide the tools in any technology transformation. You can't expect people to change the way they act and behave without giving them the supporting understanding, lessons and tools. DBS adopted design thinking. Now, whether you use the Stanford or the British approach doesn't matter, they're all the same principle. You discover what needs to be done. You define the problem and opportunity. You develop a minimum viable product and then you embed it, you deliver it into the operations. And this changed the thinking of the employees. So this built on what they were doing. So they no longer ask, how many mortgages do we sell every week or month? They focus on the customer. And the job to be done is to help the customer realize their dream. Customers don't want a mortgage, they want the new home. And that changes the way you think and solve problems. And customer journey mapping and design thinking are two very prominent tools that help the bank redesign its customer experience. And just closing out on customer for those in banking financial, the bank move from cross-sell to cross-buy. Now, what's cross-buy? The bank now uses contextual marketing to provide the right recommendation at the right time because it tracks every single step in the customer journey. And instead of just pushing products onto customers, it makes recommendations based on the use of data. And the bank is also very prominent in enhancing the customer experience and has the largest live open APIs of any bank in the world. So let me summarize. This is a picture of the car loan. So best practices under customer. Don't ask what is best for us but what is best from the customer. Design outward in. Start with the customer and work inward. Know the job to be done, not a mortgage or a loan, but a new home or a new car. Continuously identify, improve, and remove pain points. This is not a one-time action. You continuously track and improve customer journeys. At the bank in DBS, they used hackathons early on and they were very successful in showing what digital could do. Build open APIs to create better customer experience. Okay. So I got about five minutes left and we'll run through the culture components, which has two key messages in it because I appreciate there's a lot of information here. For DBS, it continued to evolve its culture. It wanted to move to experimentation. Now, huh? In banking, we're taught to mitigate risk. Now we were encouraging people to experiment. So that was a major change in thinking and culture. And they also wanted the happiest workforce. So the first thing the team did and a question you should ask is what is the biggest barrier to changing your culture? In DBS in 2015, there was no doubt. It was meetings. They had too many meetings that didn't start on time, took too long and weren't productive. So they created a governance. But they, again, they made it fun and enjoyable. They called it Mojo. Now, huh? What's Mojo? Mo is meeting organizer. Joe is joyful observer. So they created a Mojo for meetings. The governance was that the meeting organizer had to follow dates, be data-driven, fixed agenda, start and end on time, encourage everyone to speak up and then summarize. And at the end, the joyful observer would give feedback on the Mo's performance. And if a Mo receives too much negative feedback, they can be stopped to organize meetings. What was the impact? Today, the bank saved half a million wasted customer... Sorry, employee hours that freed up the time to take value-adding actions. So how often, before the pandemic, were you sitting in a meeting room waiting for colleagues to start a meeting or your meeting overran and you were rushing to the next meeting with no time to do anything? That was eliminated. And they also moved the needle that they went from 40 to 90% engagement with everyone speaking up in the meeting. And the last thing I'm going to share with you, and I've just got two more slides and then we'll open up for some questions. How do you create that startup culture? Every legacy company is looking at the startup culture because it eliminates the bureaucracy. We blow up bureaucracy. We work faster. We can adopt agile. Again, you won't be surprised the bank was very smart about how they did it. They had an ABCDE approach. Not just agile for A in the tech, but the whole bank worked in an agile. So one of the first departments to adopt agile was audit because they had to work faster. They became a learning organization recognising in digital transformation we need to learn new skills. Now, why customer obsessed again? Because they wanted to reinforce how important it was and the approach from Piyush is not what many other organisations do, which is employee customer stakeholder. For Piyush, he's very clear, and we were just talking about this last week, he said, Robin, customer employee stakeholder. If you create the understanding and the focus on the customer and give people a purpose, then the employees are more engaged and they deliver the results. So when customer was reinforced, being data driven, I don't have the time with you today, but this is the biggest challenge for almost any organisation who's coming from legacy. By cleaning up your data and getting rid of mistakes so that you're putting in the right data and then putting in the governance of how data is used throughout your organisation. And finally, E is experimentation to build a culture that is psychologically safe for people to experiment. So let me close out. You have to, in digital transformation, encourage experimentation. Why? Because to innovate, you need to experiment and when you experiment, you fail. So you need to encourage people to experiment and simultaneously create a culture of psychological safety where people can put up their hand and say, I tried, it didn't work, but I learned. So the motto becomes learn fast, learn forward. Learn about your mistake and apply it to your next experiments. Create a working environment that supports agile. Break down the silos, break down the barriers. For years, we've talked about silos as an issue in companies. It's about truly achieving open relationships. Go back to school. For those of you who are here today, thank you. It's about learning new skills. I had the best teacher. I learned from the leaders. I walked in and said, so how do you build the world's best bank? Look at where your gaps are, how you can fill them. Number five is so critical. You have to be a data first culture. You can only talk about AI and data separately today. But in time, we'll only talk about AI because data is part of your AI. So it's evolving and you need to have that data in the organization and remove time wasting meetings. Free up employees time. And then something the bank did was they hired non-bankers to think different and blow up the bureaucracy. If somebody goes into a design thinking and then has to go around the organization asking for approval, you're already dead in the water. So before I hand back to Teru, just to give you a highlight, the bank recognized that digital customers provide double the amount of income to traditional customers. They do more business. They perform more. So I'm just going to share this for those. Sorry, there's a problem with the system. So let me go to the next slide. There we go. So today the bank continues to invest about a billion or three quarters of a billion US dollars a year in its technology. It's focusing on blockchain using 5G and now it has achieved its goal of becoming the best bank in the world. It wants to be the best bank for a better world. And people around the world are asking no longer what would Jeff do but what would Pius do. So thank you for joining us today. I'm going to hand back to Teru. I know as soon as we walk away you forgot in half of what I said. So, you know, please welcome to stay in touch. Implementation Institute, our online course or want to connect or interested in buying the book. Please do let us know and thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to share what's been a wonderful learning for me as well as experience in publishing the book. This is wonderful. I encourage participants here to type in the questions in the Q&A. If they have any questions there but really I was saying it's an inspiration and the energy with which you're sharing these and then the learning that are coming out of it simply spectacular. By the time we see some questions I'll throw in one and that is when you see basically the better the technology the less visible the bank becomes. It kind of made me think because of course you want the customer to remember the bank for the next transaction. So if the bank is less visible how do they differentiate? Because if I don't see with different banks Your question was actually asked by the employees they said the same thing as you. Hang on if they can't see us they forget. So this is a very big mindset shift that when the bank becomes invisible it means invisible on the platforms. So going through you don't have to physically go to your branch or go through a long process what that translates to is not that people forget about you that they feel more comfortable using the platform. So to give you an example many people obviously use Amazon around the world or Alibaba here in Asia once you're on the Amazon once you buy that book buying your toothbrush your groceries because you're comfortable on the platform and it becomes easier so what's happened is the banks found that digital customers do 16 times more self driven activity on their own because they're simply comfortable using the app and using the platform and because it's painless it's seamless faster and easier. So yes it seems counter intuitive but it actually results in greater business because customers find it easier. Wonderful, wonderful still waiting for questions from attendees if they have any. I'll just for one more. Of course you were saying to build the startup culture and I personally like it I mean you get the Silicon Valley thinking and so on but what would you tell to people that says our company is too big how can we let's say adopt the startup mindset it is too risky for us. Sorry in terms of data in terms of the startup mindset which are you referring to? The startup mindset so the agility, the learning the experimentation that you were mentioning. So it's not an option for many industries not all but for many we have to respond faster in the past it was all about size and ironically just as we're talking you might have heard in the news that GE is breaking up it was just announced on the news today it's no longer about size it's about speed and if you don't move fast enough then either somebody sitting in a garage will find a solution for your customers or your competition will be doing it. So it's no longer an option for most now I say most industries because some industries are still got the luxury of time but for many of us especially in technology banking and telecoms it's how fast you're moving to sustain and maintain your market share because if you don't offer the customers what they want today they'll go. So the critical thing is creating the right culture to hide the company. Now you and I both noted from the work we do in implementation culture is the hardest thing to change in any implementation of all the different components why? Because changing culture means changing everything and everything means everything so very difficult to make a culture change happen which is why it contributes to transformation in digital struggling. Amazing, amazing and when you were saying to be fast I recall a strategy at work we also welcome Mike King who was saying really that one need to be fast speed wins perfect doesn't so meaning that the ability to go fast. Let me take the last question and that question is coming over with two but we'll take one it's coming from Glenn Turgman and he's saying again thank you for this excellent presentation and he would appreciate understanding more about the impact of the transformation on senior leadership so let's say 100 top leader in 2016 how many are still in the organization so basically what is happening to that senior leadership during transformation and investing. Great question Glenn I was personally amazed because when Peuge took over the bank in 2009 he took the leadership on a journey and today most of the team are still with him so he didn't replace he didn't have to replace you know one or two changed as always happens but on whole the leadership team learned with and followed along on this journey he was able to bring them up from working you know and this was the same team who were working in a traditional bank who he brought along on his passion and his vision and his purpose to make banking joyful so his CFO, his CTO his CIO all the same people maintained yes did he bring in some bench strength in a couple of areas absolutely and further down you saw that they hired non-bankers who were for example in data translators, data analysts, data engineers so but it was tremendously successful in evolving and bringing along so I've actually written two case studies on the book that are on Harvard and you know when I've gone back and forth sorry on the bank not the book when I've researched the leaders they come I go back in the room you're back again Robin what for this time meaning it's the same leaders over the 10 year journey so most of the great question the leadership team he brought along with them on this purpose wonderful thank you so much this will take us to the end of this formal part of the presentation and Robin really really appreciated and of course beyond this I'm saying there are always I mean many people involved we have our own you have Nika who is playing the role of the curator for this to make sure that we again are able to bring the best and the greatest insight to the forefront here so really really appreciated I just want to mention also that coming up next on November 24th we will also welcoming Raul Avasti and to discuss again digital transformation for teams that are not digital first that would have been one question that I would have asked you actually that being said Robin I know it is early morning for you so have a great one and then for everyone let's say east coast west coast have a good evening and good night thank you goodbye from Singapore there we go beautiful beautiful thank you everyone Terry thank you for the invite