Driving Digital Transformation: Lessons from Building the First ASEAN Digital Bank

Filled with visionary analysis and on-the-ground guidance, Driving Digital Transformation demonstrates how successful digital transformations can be replicated across all industries. For any leader or organisation starting on a major digital initiative, this book is a must-read. Traditional banks, like many other industries, are facing unprecedented disruption from challenger banks today. So why aren't more of them launching challenger banks of their own? Well, two high-profile examples - JP Morgan's Finn and RBS's Bo - were launched with much fanfare, but both shuttered after less than a year. In light of this, the success of TMRW digital bank by UOB, launched in Thailand in 2019 and Indonesia in 2020, is astonishing. Dr Dennis Khoo, who created TMRW, shares with us the thinking behind the design of this revolutionary undertaking. At every step of the way, he and his team went against established paradigms and bucked conventional wisdom to build ASEAN's first digital bank.

"What makes this playbook particularly valuable is that it is written by Dennis Khoo, one of the sharpest minds in the industry." - Mary Huen, CEO, Standard Chartered Hong Kong

Dennis wrote Driving Digital Transformation based on his experience building a digital bank from scratch. It has been the most complex initiative in his more than 30-year career. He wrote it to address a very severe issue facing companies undergoing digital transformation today – a dismal 5 to 30% of transformations achieve their stated objectives.

A 2019 survey of 1,000 C-level executives by Celonis supports the call for a more holistic approach, as it was found that almost one in two don't know where to start, with 4 out of 10 confirming that their transformation has been a waste of time. "It's a matter of leaping before they look", with "70% intending to invest in AI, machine learning and automation and yet only 32% intend to invest more in getting better visibility of their processes".

When he set out to design and build TMRW in 2017, there wasn't any structured and holistic approach to follow. While there are many toolkits available in the market (e.g., business model canvas, customer value proposition canvas, customer empathy maps, a myriad of traditional strategy tools, etc.), they are disparate and, without an overall holistic and structured approach, often appear haphazard and reactive. Even if you hire management consultants to help you, they don't utilise any specific structured approach. The available methods tend to be overly simplistic, anecdotal and unable to handle the complexity you will likely encounter in anything apart from the most trivial digital transformations.

In 2017, Dennis could have used a holistic approach. A playbook from which to take reference, see the path ahead and adapt to their specific situation would have made the journey clearer and easier. In writing Driving Digital Transformation therefore, Dennis created a playbook to help other companies as they embark on their digital transformation journeys. This work has become The allDigitalfuture PlaybookTM (TaP) and is explained in Chapter Five of the book. It's whatever a digital leader needs..