Trust Bank: Customer experience driving the world’s fastest growing digital bank Qorus-Infosys Finacle Banking Innovation Awards 2024 - Winner

The retail banking landscape in Singapore is highly competitive and well-developed. In supporting Singapore’s Smart Nation goals, existing players are already investing heavily to build and digitise their existing extensive product offerings and traditional services for the local market. However, despite the refreshed digital services that were introduced and offered by incumbents, Trust’s extensive customer research and insights indicated that the basic customer banking experience was underwhelming, with legacy technology platforms and complex architecture making it difficult to effectively digitise. Additionally, there was also a lack of real-time transparency around customers’ rewards, where it may not necessarily meet their banking needs. For example, in the traditional banking model, customers would have to wait till their end-of-month account statement to get more detailed info on the month’s banking activities - this would mean that it would have been too late by then for them to leverage it for useful decision-making. 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, through leveraging the latest, cutting-edge tech stack. Additionally, it helped to fill the gap in providing real-time transparency for consumers.

In a highly developed market where around 98% of adults have a bank account, Trust identified a gap to provide digital banking services for the mass market that are easy, transparent and rewarding.

Trust is the first cloud-native bank to be launched in Singapore and much of the tech build and infrastructure behind the bank is first-in-market. This means that new features and technology were being built consistently, which was not easy to implement given it was the first time it was used in-market with partners.

Entering a well-banked and highly competitive market, Trust Bank launched in September 2022 and took Singapore by storm. Within a year of launch, Trust became one of the world’s fastest growing digital banks and by the end of 2023, had captured 14% market share.

Trust is backed by a unique partnership between Standard Chartered Bank, and FairPrice Group - Singapore’s leading “Everything Food” retailer. This brings together trusted and reliable banking foundations with an extensive consumer ecosystem that delivers more than 1 million customer experiences nationwide each day.

Trust’s modern, cloud-native technology and truly customer-centric culture allows it to compete with long established players in the market, building rapidly around customer needs. Feedback has been very strong with an App rating of 4.8 and - perhaps the strongest form of endorsement - around 70% of Trust’s customers joining through existing customer referrals.

Trust supports Singapore’s ambitions to further strengthen its financial sector for the digital economy of the future. Singapore’s world-class digital foundations are combined with Trust’s modern technology to create an exceptional customer experience. This includes an onboarding experience that is one of the fastest in the world – it takes most of our customers around 3 minutes to open an account and be able to use their digital card.

Trust is backed by a unique partnership between Standard Chartered Bank, and FairPrice Group - Singapore’s leading “Everything Food” retailer. This brings together trusted and reliable banking foundations with an extensive consumer ecosystem that delivers more than 1 million customer experiences nationwide each day.

To further enhance customer experience, Trust is seamlessly integrated with the FairPrice Group ecosystem, offering Link Rewards, a market-leading rewards and loyalty programme.

From its inception, Trust has created several innovative and market-first solutions based on customer feedback to create a banking experience that they will love. This includes a numberless 2-in-1 debit/credit card, Singapore’s first fully-digital supplementary credit card, a personal loan application journey that takes less than 60 seconds and a 3-click travel insurance.

These innovations have been delivered at incredible speed underpinned by Trust Bank’s modern and cloud-native technology and by its agile culture. This has resulted in a range of products and services that are almost unparalled for a one-year-old bank.

In February 2024, Trust launched Singapore’s first fully elevated banking experience called Trust+ with an automatic qualification which is transparent on criteria and brings extra privileges to customers, including an extra tier of interest on deposit balances.

Trust’s strategic priority is to target continued strong growth and establish itself as the fourth largest retail bank by customer numbers in Singapore by the end of 2024.

Anchored by its vision to help people maximise their lives simply and delightfully, Trust will continue to utilise the latest technology to bring a new standard of customer experience to Singapore and help people make significant savings on their everyday spending.

Trust’s strategic priority is to target continued strong growth and establish itself as the fourth largest retail bank by customer numbers in Singapore by the end of 2024.