In History: Tales of DBS’ analogue ambitions

Join us as we journey through time with former DBS employees who were at the forefront of embracing technology five decades ago. From flimsy punch cards to cutting-edge innovations, their stories give us a fascinating peek into DBS' pioneering spirit. 

Whether you're a tech geek, a history lover, or just intrigued by how banking tech has evolved, this episode guarantees a delightful mix of nostalgia, wisdom, and inspiration. Don't miss out – hit that play button now and dive into the incredible journey of DBS' early tech trailblazers!

 

Article: https://www.dbs.com/dbs-heritage/stories/the-early-tech-adopter-tales-of-dbs-analogue-ambitions.html

Interviewees:

• Mr Nawaz Vilcassim, former Managing Director (Securities and Fiduciary Services)
• Mrs Elsie Foh, former Managing Director (Consumer Banking Group)
• Mrs Teng-Han Soon Lang, former Vice President (Data Resources)
• Ms Cheong Yin Ping, former Advisory Systems Analyst

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to an episode of DBS archives, where we delve
into the memories and stories shared by former employees, offering
a glimpse into the intertwined history of DBS and Singapore
during their formative years. In this episode, we journey through
time with former employees who are at the forefront of
embracing technology five decades ago.

(00:21):
From flimsy punch cards to cutting edge innovations, their stories
give us a fascinating peek into the bank's pioneering spirit.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
At first glance, they looked absolutely unremarkable, if not for
the litany of numbers dotted across them. The flimsy looking
punch cards could have been easily mistaken for scrap paper.
But what these boarding pass-sized cards lacked in aesthetics, they
made up for an application being the core of a
cutting-edge technology powering the game-changing automated teller machines, also known

(00:52):
as ATMs, that DBS rolled out in 1981.
Before the existence of sophisticated coding languages like Python and JavaScript,
these cards were the Excel sheets of that time. Vintage
programming technology saw machines literally punching codes typed manually on
clunky keyboards into them before a punch card reader converted

(01:14):
these physical codes into a virtual format they would then
be uploaded onto a computer as specific instructions for the
ATM system.
And with an ATM only able to function with precise codes,
these cards had to be painstakingly perfect.
If you find that the logic is wrong, we have
to make the change. You find which card is wrong,

(01:35):
pull it out, retype and get another card to replace it,
said Miss Cheong Yin Ping, one of the system officers
at DBS's Computer Services Department then. Can you imagine how
manual the process was?
The worst case scenario?
"You can't mix them up or you die," she added.

(01:56):
"The programme is gone and you have to retype it."
These were the teething tech pains experienced by DBS in
its early years as the bank looked to develop cutting-edge
innovations to get ahead of the game. It was then
the golden age of the analogue, a technology that typically
relied on physical elements to transmit and process signals.

(02:18):
Made antiquated today by the digital revolution, it was groundbreaking
back in the seventies and eighties, and the fledging bank
was quick to embrace it to better serve customers and
be at the pinnacle of Singapore's flourishing financial sector. "During
the early years, there were plenty of opportunities to experiment,
to try new things," said former senior managing director Tan Soo Nan,

(02:41):
who was at the bank for 29 years.
"The introduction of new ideas, the catalytic work that we did,
strengthened many parts of Singapore," he added.
With an array of gadgets like smartphones and laptops supporting
DBS employees today, it seems utterly inconceivable there was once
a time when the bank did not own any computers

(03:03):
or even have an information technology team.
But that was a sobering reality in its early years,
when DBS was a tech greenhorn, it had to rent
computer time from the Port of Singapore Authority, which also
helped build, deploy and manage the system for the bank
Savings Account. But to become Singapore's pre-eminent bank, that dependence

(03:24):
had to end.
This meant building its own technology capabilities, which the bank
did in the 1970s by creating its first ever IT team.
When we first started, it was only a few of us -
a handful. "It was a very flat structure," recalled Mrs
Teng-Han Soon Lang, who was part of the inaugural team

(03:46):
that was a complementary mix of experienced heads and novices.
No expenses were spared in teaching them the likes of
system analysis and system design.
"The bank didn't stint on training. It was very comprehensive,"
said Mrs Teng-Han.
So comprehensive, in fact, that no computing background was required
to join the team. "We hired new employees not because

(04:09):
they had relevant degrees, but because they came from good
universities with good degrees and we were prepared to train them,"
said Mrs Teng-Han.
With self reliance as the ultimate aim, the team soon
became competent enough to handle the savings account system previously
managed by PSA deploy a Current Account system and achieve
notable milestones.

(04:31):
"We did new things," said Mrs Teng-Han. We co-built the
Current Account system and ran it on DBS machines, and
we built other things on our own.
"The bank wanted to be innovative, so we looked at
new types of technology and the way forward," she added.
Looking forward also meant charting new frontiers. In 1980, the

(04:53):
IT team helped DBS deliver a show-stopping innovation - Autosave.
The bank's market programme saw customers enjoying the best of
both worlds. They could earn interest with the money in
their savings accounts, yet also get these funds automatically transferred
to their Current Accounts whenever they had to draw cheques.
At a time when banks paid interest only for savings accounts,

(05:16):
this 2-in-one initiative was unprecedented, one that all banks in
Singapore would eventually adopt to the benefit of all Singaporeans.
Making Autosave more remarkable was the fact that the young
IT team had received little guidance when building the revolutionary programme.
According to Miss Cheong, the instructions from the top were

(05:36):
summed up in a single straightforward phrase
of course, we had to do it," she said.
Simple details usually taken for granted now, such as bank
account balances following withdrawals, were built through tedious, meticulous processes.
"We worked hard to make sure that the balances from the current account were correctly reflected in the savings account, and that they tallied,” added Ms Cheong. Autosave’s stupendous success would be the catalyst for more innovations to come.

(05:57):
Just a year later, in 1981 DBS launched its very
own ATMs. After Autosave, the bank promptly named these machines Autobanks.
This was DBS's reply to the Chartered Bank's setting up
of Singapore's first ATM in 1979. Once again, the technology
team played a vital role in rolling out this advanced

(06:18):
technology of that era.
They liaised with the current and savings accounts teams to
interface the data and worked with technology company IBM, DBS's main
technology vendor to understand how the machines worked.
At a time when customers typically queued at a bank
just to withdraw money, the idea of a machine automatically

(06:39):
churning out cold, hard cash was simply jaw-dropping.
Like Autosave, the versatile Autobank was revolutionary. A single machine
could now allow customers to make cash withdrawals, cash deposits,
inquire on account balances and transfer funds, among others. "It
heralded the era of self-service banking," said Miss Cheong.

(07:02):
The Business Times in 1983 lauded its prowess, calling it
the tip of the electronic banking iceberg. In less than
five years, the bank had gone from tech novice to tech-savvy. "During that time, there was a push for innovations after our experience with ATMs," said former veteran DBS employee Mrs Elsie Foh, who was with the bank for 36 years.
As the ATM got the technology ball rolling, another opportunity
that DBS seized was to forever change the way people
paid for things. In 1985, a consortium of five local

(07:24):
banks - including DBS - set up the network for electronic transfers,
an electronic payment service provider also known as NETS.
NETS saw cards overtaking cash as the main mode of payment.
Putting Singapore on the path to cashless transactions, a journey
it is still on today.
By 1993, spending through NETS surpassed the 1 billion Singapore

(07:47):
dollar mark.
"That was also a great innovation," said Mrs Foh. We
harnessed the capability of technology in a big way, and
DBS has always been successful in this area.
In 1993, DBS even became the first bank in the
world that allowed investors to subscribe for shares using ATMs.

(08:10):
Beyond playing a pivotal role in innovation, technology could even
help mitigate potentially hazardous situations even in the least expected areas.
For instance, before the Stock Exchange of Singapore converted to
scriptless trading of securities in 1990, DBS had to store
physical share certificates in a massive vault.

(08:32):
"It was like a hive, in a sense, a maze,"
recalled former managing director of Securities and Fiduciary Services Nawaz Vilcassim. "
Shelves here shelves there, shelves everywhere."
This posed a significant challenge.
"When we closed the vault at the end of Friday,
we were not allowed to open it till Monday morning,"

(08:54):
said Mr Vilcassim.
"My biggest concern was if a staff was inside, I
did not want to take any chances. So I arranged
bedding inside the vault with food, water and a telephone.
In case they got stuck, they could survive for 48 hours."
Thankfully, the situation never occurred. When physical certificates were no

(09:15):
longer needed, DBS had to quickly adapt. The solution was to
tap on technology.
"We had to improve the technology and quality of the
product that we gave," said Mr Vilcassim.
This led to the launch of IDEAL in 1991 - a
technology system that allowed its investor clients access to their

(09:35):
portfolio information any time. "It was a big move for us,"
said Mr Vilcassim. It was developed all in-house together with
our IT people. When we told the clients they felt
that we were on the ball in terms of developing
new technology.
While it got DBS ahead of the game, technology sometimes
required a little troubleshooting, especially in the early days when

(09:57):
the ATMs made their debut.
To reduce downtime, DBS deployed the most advanced setups, such
as a fault tolerant computer system for its ATMs called
the Tandem BASE-24 ATM. Even if one or more of
its components became faulty, tandem still allowed ATMs to operate normally.

(10:17):
This reliability meant that the machines could function 24/7, allowing
the bank to serve its customers any time, a considerable
feat in those days. "For DBS, it was considered groundbreaking
technology at that time. We were very, very proud," said
Mrs Teng-Han.
The early days of tandem, however, saw some technical difficulties.

(10:41):
Although the system ensured that the ATMs would not break
down completely, the mainframe would inexplicably go offline daily at
around 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. as if it was
taking a post-lunch siesta.
It was an unexplained hiccup that left the technology team
utterly perplexed. "Every day we had to restart the system
to bring the mainframe back online," said Miss Cheong. We

(11:02):
had our own systems programmers, the IBM engineers, and the
tandem engineers agonising over this. Eventually, they discovered that the
amount of time taken for an online system to process
programming instructions had been set to 240 minutes, with the
system shutting down after that, time had lapsed.To

(11:23):
To think that the team had once attributed the issue
to the supernatural. We thought it was a ghost, quipped
Mrs Teng-Han.
But when technical issues arose, there was no finger pointing.
The soft power of camaraderie complemented the prowess of hard
hitting technology.
"People were not blamed," said Mrs Teng-Han. “We just understand why the problem occurred and put in measures to prevent it from recurring.”This cohesiveness was fostered across the whole of DBS, within teams and between departments. Indeed, the strong ties between DBS’ retail banking team and their IT counterparts was crucial in helping the bank develop more innovative products for customers.
The two departments may have been markedly different, but they

(11:44):
were unified by a common goal to service the customers better,"
said Mrs Foh, who was executive vice president of retail
banking in the mid-90s. And although her job was a
customer-facing role, she was also fascinated with the technical back-end
aspect of these products and would even read up on
the technology.

(12:05):
"It also resulted in the retail team becoming technically competent.
Because we could understand the needs of our customers, we
could translate them and write out the user specifications in
the way that the IT team could translate into IT specifications,"
said Mrs Foh. "To quote one of my colleagues in IT,
we were the darlings of the IT department."

(12:28):
This unexpected technical ability even led to the creation of
a team within the retail department that specifically focused on
IT innovations - the e-banking team, which acted as a bridge
between IT and retail.
As the gap between the two departments closed, the doors
for more innovations opened. Launching the likes of phone and

(12:50):
Internet banking services and electronic banking kiosks, firmly cemented DBS's
status as one of Singapore's leading banks.
"It always stayed ahead of the curve. This was the
work culture we had at the time, which is why
to this day, we still have very fond memories about
our work and our colleagues," said Mrs Teng-Han.

(13:10):
Indeed, even the tediously manual punch cards are part of
the cherished memories. After serving their sophisticated programming purpose, they
would be then sold to the 'Karang Guni' to fund
the technology team's office pantry.
"We'd collect the money and buy biscuits to eat for
tea time. At that time, one carton of biscuits didn't

(13:31):
cost a lot. Sometimes you could buy two cartons," recalled
Miss Cheong.
DBS was named the world's best bank for five consecutive years.
One notable characteristic where the bank stood out was its
ability to leverage digital capabilities. This has earned the bank
several 'Best Digital Bank of the Year' awards over the years.

(13:52):
Our digital transformation journey continues to be studied as a
model for digital transformation, with Harvard Business School being the
latest academic institution to capture it in a case study.
Thank you for joining us on this episode of DBS archives.
Don't forget to subscribe to our channel and stay tuned
for our next episode, where we'll uncover more captivating stories

(14:14):
behind the long-intertwined history of DBS and Singapore.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
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