The Singapore-headquartered bank is pushing its employees to embrace digital, it says, and is adopting a cloud-based productivity tool.

Singapore-headquartered DBS Group says it is the first bank in the Asian city-state to adopt cloud-based productivity technology called Office 365, a move it says cements its status as a technology groundbreaker.

The bank is piloting Microsoft Office 365 across about 1,000 staff and aims for its entire 22,000-strong workforce to make a shift to the cloud over the course of the year. In all, the employees work across 18 markets.

The bank, along with other lenders, seeks to cope with the threats to conventional banking from the rise of fintech organisations. The industry is being shaken up by developments as diverse as mobile tablets, artificial intelligence and machine learning, distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain, biometric verification and robo advisors. In recent months, firms such as Standard Chartered and Deutsche Bank, among others, have launched "innovation labs" to keep ahead of fintech.

“Asia-Pacific super-regional institutions, like DBS, will set the pace. At least 80 per cent of these FSIs [financial service institutions] will run on a hybrid cloud architecture by 2018. These large players will clear the way for their peers and will set best practices in the location, control, ownership, and management of data in the cloud,” said Michael Araneta, associate vice president for IDC Financial Insights Asia/Pacific.

The bank said its staff can work collaboratively from anywhere, across PCs, tablets and smartphones. Across the organisation, meetings can now be conducted through Skype for Business, cutting down on travelling time. Enterprise social network Yammer provides a platform for employees to form closer communities and to collaborate across departments and locations. In addition, to encourage knowledge sharing across DBS’s network of employees, every individual will receive an increment of file storage capacity to one terabyte per user on OneDrive.

The bank is urging employees to embrace digital technologies by learning and experiments, it said. It has held “hackathons” in which staff work with start-ups to create prototypes that address business challenges.