OCBC's AI Bet on Wealth: GenAI-Trained Advisors, Avatar Bankers and a Doubling by 2030

Singapore's banks have spent the past year proving AI can do real work inside a regulated industry — DBS describing agentic systems across its operations, UOB automating compliance checks, OCBC halving the time it takes to onboard wealthy clients. The next phase of that race is now coming into view, and it points AI at the people whose jobs were once considered the hardest to automate: the relationship managers themselves.

OCBC said it will grow its wealth business on a combination of AI and human advisors, with wealth income — already up 56% year on year in May — targeted to double by 2030. The bank plans to add more than 100 relationship managers in Malaysia by 2028 and hire six times that scale in Singapore over the next three years, while arming those advisors with generative AI. A GenAI-powered training programme launched in Singapore in April for 900 wealth advisors, covering investment advisory, client management, product mastery and wealth planning, rolled out to Malaysia last month — replacing the one-on-one, supervisor-led training that traditionally takes far longer.

The training play matters more than it sounds. Wealth advice has always been taught through years of supervised apprenticeship, which is exactly why scaling advisory headcount is slow and expensive. A GenAI coach that can simulate client conversations and drill advisors on product knowledge compresses that cycle, and it sits inside a broader OCBC stack: an agentic AI platform handling due diligence and onboarding in Singapore, plus OCBC WoW, the bank's new app where two AI avatars, Wendy and Wayne, deliver round-the-clock, hyper-personalised wealth guidance. Malaysia is slated to get the same agentic tools and avatars next year.

What this signals for Singapore's financial sector is that AI is not displacing client-facing roles so much as redefining what they demand. OCBC is hiring more advisors and equipping them with AI at the same time — a pattern regulators have been tracking closely, and one MAS's guidelines on agentic AI were drafted to govern. The customer experience shifts too: an avatar that knows your portfolio and answers at 2am is a very different interaction model from a quarterly review meeting, and the industry is still working out how far that can go.

Why it matters for Singapore: OCBC is building and proving this strategy in Singapore first — the training programme, the agentic onboarding platform and the avatars all launched here before expanding regionally. That makes wealth management, already one of Singapore's flagship industries, the test bed for how a major bank blends humans and AI at scale, and a live example of AI capability developed on local infrastructure being exported across the region. The bet, in the bank's own words, is that the combination doubles the business by 2030.