UOB scales innovation to strengthen regional competitiveness

UOB’s Innovation Group is driving bank-wide adoption of AI, blockchain, and productivity-boosting tools.

UOB is accelerating its innovation agenda through an expanding portfolio of AI, blockchain, and automation initiatives designed to boost productivity, enhance customer engagement, and sharpen the bank’s competitive edge across ASEAN.

According to Lee Zhu Kuang, Head of the Innovation Group at UOB, the mandate is clear: embed emerging technologies with strong governance while ensuring employees are fully equipped to use them.

The bank’s recent achievements highlight the pace at which these capabilities are scaling. “We have won five awards from the Digital Banker… from an AI perspective,” Lee shared at the sidelines of Singapore FinTech Festival 2025, citing recognition in areas such as credit decisioning, risk management, and predictive analytics. On blockchain, UOB has also earned accolades including the International Innovation Award and Digital Asset Initiative of the Year.

Internally, UOB has rolled out copilots to more than 32,000 employees, with over 20,000 trained in prompt engineering. “We are one of the highest users of copilot according to Microsoft, where we send millions of prompts on a daily basis,” Lee said. The bank has also deployed a suite of customer-facing and internal bots, including SG branch bots used to answer product queries. “We have rolled out around eight of these bots, and there's another five to complete by the end of the year,” he added.

For UOB, innovation is rooted in purpose and measurable value. “Innovation is the creation of new value… to create new tools to augment our people,” Lee said. As an ASEAN-centric bank, UOB’s strategy focuses on orchestrating services across embedded ecosystems and maintaining strong governance in all innovation efforts.

Looking ahead, the Innovation Group will continue to scale AI, strengthen data and blockchain infrastructure, and invest heavily in employee training. “We need to make sure that we reskill them, we upskill them, to augment them with the technology that's required,” Lee said.