Agentic AI for banking compliance & onboarding

SINGAPORE – Prospective private banking customers can now expect their account applications to be processed faster, as Singapore banks put agentic artificial intelligence to work behind the scenes.

Beyond customer-facing chatbots, banks are now deploying the technology for back-office tasks such as compliance and know-your-customer due diligence – automating and speeding up customer onboarding without compromising on regulatory requirements.

OCBC announced on July 29 that with its new HELIOS agentic AI platform, private banking accounts can be opened in 15 business days, compared with more than 30 previously, while maintaining stringent risk management and compliance standards.

The 15-day figure is a median across all clients, meaning half of OCBC’s new private banking accounts are opened within that time or less. The remaining, more complex applications take longer.

Loretta Yuen, head of group legal and compliance at OCBC, said that depending on the client’s risk profile, straightforward cases can even potentially be onboarded within a day.

This timeline reduction aligns with industry efforts to speed up customer acquisition.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore is working with the Private Banking Industry Group to reduce private banking account opening times to within one month by the end of 2026, down from the current industry median of around six weeks or even longer for complex cases. 

HELIOS, or Holistic wEalth Lifecycle Insights & Ongoing Surveillances, is a digital co-worker for OCBC’s relationship managers (RMs).

The multilingual “assistant” uses advanced data-gathering to research and run background checks on prospective customers in multiple languages, including Chinese. 

It highlights potential information gaps so RMs can obtain the missing data when they meet the customer.

As a result, the back-and-forth between the customer, RM and compliance unit is significantly reduced.

Yuen said banks need to identify potential concerns early on and assess financial crime risks more holistically. 

“By combining agentic AI with the expertise of our compliance professionals, HELIOS enables us to screen prospective customers more thoroughly and earlier in the customer journey,” she said.

Koh Sinyee, director of compliance consultancy firm Integrity Consulting, described HELIOS as an “inventive step” of using AI to scour the internet for information to pre-qualify prospective clients. 

By doing so, OCBC narrows its focus to prospects the bank is confident it wants to do business with and can successfully onboard.

Over the past five months, more than 100 relationship managers (RMs) at Bank of Singapore (BOS), OCBC’s private banking arm – representing 25 per cent of its RMs – have begun using the platform across Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai.

BOS chief executive Jason Moo said around 50 clients have since been onboarded via the platform.

All of BOS’ RMs will have access to HELIOS by the end of the third quarter of 2026.