OCBC Bank has launched a mobile app that uses AI avatars to deliver 24/7 wealth management services, committing over S$1 billion annually to digital infrastructure and AI as part of a strategy to double its wealth income by 2029. The app, OCBC WoW, marks the first such deployment in Southeast Asia and places AI at the centre of the bank's customer engagement for its affluent clients.
The app features two digital avatars-Wendy and Wayne-that interact through voice or text, track investment portfolios in real time, deliver personalised market news, and offer investment ideas drawn exclusively from OCBC's proprietary research. Group CEO Tan Teck Long described the move as a fundamental shift. "We are changing the face of banking," Tan said. "Starting with wealth management, we are transforming how we engage customers with the use of avatars and hyper-personalisation in real-time."
This push into AI for Finance reflects a deliberate focus on revenue growth rather than cost reduction. Tan noted that the avatar banking channel was built in-house at a "fraction of the cost" of traditional technology, and he prefers not to obsess over isolating AI's specific financial returns from broader digitisation efforts. "The energy we spend on trying to quantify the benefits of AI is probably equal to what we can do here (in executing projects)," he said.
Augmenting the human workforce
Tan emphasised that the avatars will complement, not shrink, the bank's human team. OCBC plans to hire 600 additional relationship managers over the next three years to support its whole-of-wealth strategy. The digital assistants handle baseline education and real-time queries-explaining a market move at 3 a.m., for instance-so human RMs can concentrate on complex advisory work and relationship building.
"Instead of AI reducing the workforce, AI like [avatar banking], which grows the business, will allow us to increase the workforce to support a much bigger business," Tan said. Sunny Quek, head of consumer banking, underscored the practical limits of human-only service. "Today, you can talk to the RM, you can come to the branch, but the RM may not be there for you all the time," Quek said. "What we truly want to transform is that your RM is with you 24/7." Quek expects the avatars to boost engagement and market share, accelerating the division's wealth-income doubling target to 2029-a full year ahead of the original 2030 goal.
Guardrails and expansion plans
OCBC WoW is model-agnostic and uses a mix of large language models under deterministic guardrails. The avatars only draw recommendations from OCBC's own research, never pulling unverified information from the internet. While they can execute simple transactions like equity purchases, more complex products still require suitability checks with a human RM to meet regulatory standards.
The app is in beta, tested by an invited group of 50 Premier Private Client customers-individuals with at least S$1.5 million in assets under management. Over the next 12 months, the bank will progressively extend access to more customers in Singapore and later to overseas markets. English is the current language; Mandarin, Bahasa Melayu, and Bahasa Indonesia will follow. OCBC plans to expand the app's scope beyond wealth management to include tailored insurance and everyday banking services.
Why this matters for management
OCBC's approach offers a clear strategic counterpoint to the default narrative that AI replaces workers. By tying avatar deployment directly to business growth and simultaneously hiring hundreds of relationship managers, the bank models a scaling play-not a downsizing one. The refusal to fixate on AI-only ROI metrics, captured in Tan's remark about execution energy, echoes a principle often discussed in AI for Management: when returns are diffuse and tightly interwoven with broader digitisation, it is more productive to invest in doing than in measuring what's already done.
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