DBS enhances GenAI chatbot for business clients

Singapore’s DBS Bank has launched an enhanced virtual assistant powered by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) for its corporate clients in a bid to provide round-the-clock, personalised customer service, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Dubbed DBS Joy, the chatbot was first launched in 2018, and described by the bank as Asia’s first corporate banking virtual assistant. It is accessible via DBS Ideal, the bank’s digital platform for businesses.

Unlike older chatbots that rely on pre-programmed answers, DBS Joy uses GenAI to understand and provide detailed, conversational responses to a range of corporate banking queries.

For more complex issues, the chatbot will transfer the user to human customer service specialists who are also armed with a GenAI tool to help them retrieve information, provide concise recommendations and improve customer response times.

“This reduces employees’ effort and allows them to focus on work that involves human judgement to address client needs,” said Welson Jamin, group head of operations at DBS.

In early trials of the technology, which began in February 2025, DBS joy has handled over 120,000 unique chats from about 4,000 corporate clients each month, the majority of whom work for SMEs. The bank also reported over 23% improvement in customer satisfaction scores for users of the virtual assistant.

Chen Ze Ling, group head of corporate and SME banking at DBS, said the latest iteration of DBS Joy “represents a major leap forward as it offers instant and intelligent support to customers, while enabling our SME relationship managers to deliver more focused and value-added engagements to clients”.

Developed in-house by DBS, the chatbot is powered by large language models and the bank’s own proprietary knowledge base.

To ensure accuracy and mitigate risks, responses generated by the chatbot are filtered through multiple layers of internal checks and safeguards. A team of human evaluators also reviews chat logs to assess the quality of responses and suggest improvements.

Kelvin Ong, who worked as a customer service specialist for over two years before being upskilled for his role as an evaluator, plays a critical quality assurance role to ensure the chatbot delivers accurate and reliable responses. “My work empowers customers with instant, correct answers about bank products and services 24/7, boosting satisfaction and their ability to manage their financial needs confidently,” he said.

DBS plans to add more functions to the chatbot and progressively roll it out to other core markets, including Hong Kong and India.

The latest enhancement to DBS Joy is part of wider efforts by the bank to drive the use of AI across its business. These include DBS-GPT, an employee-facing version of ChatGPT, to help employees with content generation and writing tasks in a secure environment. It is currently available to more than 25,000 DBS employees.

Other AI initiatives include an enterprise knowledge base that will give employees the ability to search and synthesise unstructured information for various tasks, and the use of GenAI for code and test generation, which is expected to speed up software development.

In October 2025, Global Finance named DBS the world’s best AI bank on the back of its early and extensive deployment of AI models, strong experimentation culture, data-driven workforce, and execution capabilities. In 2024, Harvard Business School chronicled the bank’s AI strategy in a case study, the first of its kind undertaken on an Asian bank.