Singapore-based DBS, the largest bank in Southeast Asia, was one of four winners of the inaugural CashTech Innovation awards, presented at the Future of Cash Conference in Madrid in September.
CashTech is defined as the encounter between cash and technology, bringing together companies who leverage software and modern communications technology to fill the gap left by banks reducing their branches, ATMs and cash centres.
DBS was a joint winner of the Best CashTech Award for its Bank-in-a-Box, which enables notes and coins to be deposited in one transaction, overcoming one of the significant barriers to an efficient cash cycle, namely lack of effective and convenient coin deposit facilites.
As a result of network transformation, DBS has created Self-Service Branches (SSBs), where customers can only perform transactions at branch teller machines (BTMs). At the same time, it embarked on a replacement programme for its fleet of coin-deposit machines (CDMs) at SSBs, which had reached the end of their depreciation period.
The replacement is the Bank-in-a-Box. As there wasn’t a machine in the market that could not only handle note and coin deposits, but high volumes of coins (whether mass market or corporate deposits), and integrate them into a single deposit channel, DBS designed its own from scratch, determining that a coin sidecar was the best add-on feature.
Not only doesn’t the Bank-in-a-Box enable faster, accessible and less error-prone deposits, but it also simplifies end-to-end processes for the replenishment and reconciliation of cash.
Its introduction makes DBS the first bank in Singapore to combine both deposit functions in one integrated solution. It plans to introduce the Bank-in-a-Box across all its branches between now and May 2023.
