Julius Caesar allowed bankers to confiscate land in lieu of loan payments, and that became one of the early examples of banking transactions. Since the Roman Empire, the banking industry has transformed tremendously. Or has it? Is it a cookie-cutter system or one that’s driven by innovation and differentiation?

We chatted with Lim Him Chuan, General Manager and Chief Executive Officer of DBS Bank Taiwan, who shared his views about innovation in the banking industry and his secret desire to invent something.

The business of innovation can sometimes be restricted by the daily churn of routine. Do you think most people are too fixated on rules and regulations to break out of their comfort zone?

I always try to remind people around me to be less rigid. Sometimes we follow the rules so much that we fail to question the rationale behind them. This can cause a mental block and prevent us from challenging status quo.

Most of my colleagues can do their job very well. But we need to address more than the functional aspects of our job. We need to look into the social and emotional bits — what else can we do to fulfil these aspects?

法理情 (Fǎ lǐ qíng) comes to mind. Individually, the Chinese characters refer to the law, logic and emotions. When it comes to the enforcement of laws and regulations, it’s common to use logic to argue for or against a case. That’s a functional solution. But what about the social and emotional aspects of the case? We need to think beyond the usual framework that has become a part of our day-to-day work.

Interesting take.

We’re talking about innovation. It’s not always about creating something completely new. That’s why we talk to our customers to understand their real needs and to enhance what we can offer them. It’s all part of design thinking.

We keep innovating but banking, honestly, is about serving an individual, a corporate, or a business. The things we do revolve around five key areas — finance, investment, risk management, collection and payment, and treasury. But just because it’s always these five doesn’t mean that we can’t do something extraordinary.

Simply Brilliant is a book I read recently that inspired me a lot. I remember an excerpt: “There’s no such thing as an average or old-fashioned business, just average or old-fashioned ways to do business. In fact, the opportunity to reach for extraordinary may be most pronounced in settings that have been far too ordinary for far too long.”

Our business is probably one of the oldest industries in the world. But it doesn’t mean that we should just accept status quo or assume that there’s nothing else we can do. Before we look into innovation, I also want to make sure we understand the logic behind why we do certain things. If every manager can embrace that kind of mindset, then we will probably find a great way to resolve things or make certain changes.

You certainly set high standards. What is the most innovative or most differentiated product you’ve come across recently?

I’d say it’s DBS Treasury Prism. It came from a very simple problem statement. When companies, especially large ones, want to engage a bank to resolve their cash management problems, they have to put out a request for proposals (RFP) so that different banks can bid for it. The whole process is very cumbersome. The customers don’t always know what to ask for and mostly rely on the banks to tell them what’s available. We democratise this by creating Treasury Prism to allow companies to use their own dataset to run different simulations on their own. With that, they know better what to demand from banks.

It’s a very effective way for us to start conversations with companies that don’t know how DBS can help them. Corporate cash management business is not a new one so it’s not easy for us to unlock or pull customers away from their incumbents unless we have something very different.

Other banks may have something similar but only their sales teams have access to it. The clients don’t get a chance to use it directly. But for ours, you don’t even have to be a DBS customer to use it.

Treasury Prism started to win us awards the next day after it was launched, and the awards just kept coming. It has disrupted the marketplace as no one else had done it before. We were bold enough to come up with something like that to create new value for our customers.

Sounds like Treasury Prism has solved many pain points. Since we’re on that, is there any problem you want to solve? What would you invent for that?

I want to develop a coaching tool that provides training for logical thinking and writing skills.

It could be like an AI self-help tool. Better yet if this machine can learn from people who have been refining their skills for years. By codifying this sort of algorithms, we can simply place a set of documents through the machine to get an analysis of what has gone wrong, or things we can do differently.

Speaking of learning, Amazon opened their innovation centre in Taipei. Would you consider opening one for DBS in Taipei?

Yes, why not. In fact. we have something in Taipei called the Fintech Space that we sponsor but that’s part of a government initiative. We also work with fintech start-ups on different initiatives and it’s always a good source of inspiration for the bank and our colleagues to be more innovative.