Trust Bank: Driving phenomenal growth with exceptional customer experience Qorus-Infosys Finacle Banking Innovation Awards 2025

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 early 2025 reached 1 million customers, capturing 20% of the adult population, making it the fourth largest retail bank in Singapore by customer numbers. That’s 1 in 5 adults in Singapore who bank with Trust.

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 award-winning 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.

Coming to market with three main products and a well-developed loyalty rewards programme is rare for a digital bank, where the standard approach is to launch with one product - typically a deposit-based product – and then expand at a later point. Delivering this was complex but extensive user research indicated this would create a far more compelling proposition, particularly given the strong levels of competition in the market.

Since then, Trust has rapidly expanded its customer proposition, launching several innovative products including split purchase and balance transfer loans, a cashback credit card and a proposition for mass affluent customers called Trust+. In addition, Trust launched the bank’s first wealth management product called TrustInvest in February 2025.

Trust now offers a wide range of products covering savings, spending, budgeting, borrowing, insuring and investing. Very few digital banks globally have built such a wide range of products and services in such a short period of time.

These innovative features, especially security features, were developed in response to extensive user feedback given during the roll-out phase, to address and safeguard customers’ specific needs. Trust continues to act on customer feedback to prioritise planned features or launch new products. Trust’s unique approach garnered strong support from partners and resonated with consumers, leading to widespread adoption of its pioneering digital banking services.