Trust Bank

At a glance

Project year 

2022

Bank type 

Greenfield

Cloud partner 

Amazon Web Services

Geography 

Singapore

Trustbank card and mobile app visualisation

Challenges

Launching in Singapore presented a set of distinctive challenges.
The market is highly competitive, the incumbents have invested heavily to digitise, and nearly everyone has a bank account.

To stand out from the competition, Trust needed to create an unparalleled real-time customer experience.

Achieving this goal necessitated the implementation of a modern, highly configurable core banking platform, enabling agility and swift adaptability to support Trust’s ambitious objectives.

The solution

Following the successful launch and outstanding results of Standard Chartered Bank-backed Mox Bank in Hong Kong – running on Vault Core – Trust aimed to bring the same positive change to the banking market in Singapore. In addition to supporting large-scale banks undertaking core transformation, Vault Core is positioned to support new digital banks and fintechs, bringing new propositions to market.

Trust designed a world-class solution with an intuitive customer experience, integrating one of the market’s leading consumer ecosystems into its banking proposition. Most digital banks typically launch with a single core product and expand their offerings over time. Trust’s ability to move at speed meant it launched with a credit card, savings account, and family personal accident insurance. The lineup was complemented by Link Rewards, Fair Group's industry-leading loyalty program. A year after its launch, Trust had expanded its range of products to an unprecedented level.

Freed from legacy technology, Trust has set new global industry benchmarks with an event-driven architecture. This enabled real-time customer experiences, including a member-get-member referral programme that powered its rapid growth. Trust aims to continue providing an easy-to-use, transparent, and rewarding banking experience through its cloud-native technology.

Our story

Launched in 2022, Trust Bank is Singapore’s first digitally native bank. This pioneering financial institution results from a unique collaboration between Standard Chartered Bank and FairPrice Group, uniting two organisations with rich market heritage on a cutting-edge, cloud-native platform.

The world’s fastest-growing digital bank

Trust’s compelling customer proposition stood out even in a market as competitive as Singapore. Trust has become one of the world’s fastest-growing digital banks and has amassed over 700,000 customers, equivalent to 14% of the Singapore market, by end-2023. The rapid scaling was facilitated by the flexibility and architectural design of Vault Core, enabling Trust to swiftly introduce new products to meet evolving customer needs.

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Leading the industry in onboarding

Vault Core’s architecture gave Trust the foundation to rapidly design and build innovative products and processes that set new industry benchmarks. One example of this is Trust’s streamlined onboarding process that lets most customers sign up within three minutes for a savings account and four minutes for a credit card – far surpassing industry standards.

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Iterating products rapidly in response to customer feedback

A key driver of Trust’s growth was its user-centricity, evident in its swift responsiveness to customer feedback and subsequent enhancements to its mobile app. Trust consistently achieves an impressive app release cycle of nine days on average, significantly outpacing the Singapore industry average.

Responding to customer feedback at lightning speed, Trust harnesses Vault Core’s smart contracts to develop and launch in-app features to improve the user experience. An example of this was developing and launching a feature that allowed customers to self-adjust credit limits within a ten-day day period.

Vault Core’s product-building framework supports Trust’s holistic and rapid approach to product management, leaving behind siloed systems.

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Creating a rewarding banking experience to engage customers

Given the rewards-centric nature of the Singapore market, Trust prioritised seamless access to rewards in its design. To create a rewarding banking experience, the bank required foundational technology capable of interacting with and supporting an ecosystem of other services. The API-enabled architecture of Vault Core empowers Trust to seamlessly integrate into one of Singapore’s prominent consumer ecosystems, along with a wide range of other merchants. This integration provides Trust’s customers with real-time access to coupons and rewards from their preferred brands across Singapore.

Trust has demonstrated the significant impact of customer engagement within an ecosystem. Customers of coupons and rewards in the Trust App have engaged in over twice as many transactions than those who do not participate, highlighting the tangible commercial benefits of leveraging an API-first core to partner with external vendors.