The Helios platform will move the due diligence process before the relationship manager meets a prospective customer
[SINGAPORE] OCBC is looking to cut onboarding time for its wealth clients to 15 business days using agentic artificial intelligence.
Called Helios, the platform will comprise five separate agents that will cut time for the bank down from the current industry median of around six weeks, the lender said on Wednesday (Jul 29).
This follows announcements by the Monetary Authority of Singapore to reduce account opening timelines in the private banking industry to within one month, by the end of 2026.
Loretta Yuen, OCBC’s head of group legal and compliance, said: “This is a paradigm shift for compliance where we are not just enabling business, but originating opportunities.”
OCBC noted that the bank has been working to cut onboarding time, with its current average more than 30 days.
“The beauty of the system was it was built by compliance,” said Bank of Singapore (BOS) CEO Jason Moo. “It wasn’t built by the tech person or from the business side, (the compliance team) can build their standards already into the system.”
The Helios platform will move the due diligence process before the relationship manager meets a prospective customer.
It will provide relationship managers with individuals’ key data, information and credit risk profiles upfront while highlighting information gaps.
This enables relationship managers to quickly obtain the missing data from customers and reduces the back-and-forth between the customer, relationship manager and the bank’s compliant unit.
The time freed up for the compliance unit will also allow it to pivot to advisory research or perform more AI-related analyses.
The current industry practice is for know-your-customer screenings and risk assessments to be conducted only after the relationship manager submits source of wealth information.
OCBC’s private banking unit BOS has tested the platform on 25 per cent of its relationship managers over the past five months.
The platform is set to be rolled out across BOS by the third quarter of 2026. OCBC also plans to extend Helios to its premier private clients by the end of 2026.
Four of the five agents are already in play.
The first agent conducts prospect research, which supports pre-onboarding due diligence. The second is in charge of onboarding recommendation, which highlights remaining profile gaps.
The next one is a leads generator, which identifies associates of current prospects and helps relationship managers identify higher-quality leads.
The fourth is an independent agent that checks the other agents for accuracy.
OCBC noted that most information will be verified and checked by this agent, and whatever remains will be checked by a human.
The fifth agent that looks at ongoing monitoring of existing clients is set to be ready by the first half of 2027.
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