The Singapore-headquartered bank has opened a centre designed to be a haven for creative tech ideas.

Singapore-headquartered DBS Bank is keeping the “innovation lab” trend high on the fintech agenda with the official opening of a facility in the suitably futurist Sandcrawler building in Singapore.

The DBS Asia X facility, or DAX for short, is a 16,000 square-foot space with facilities catering for up to 100 people, the bank said.

The opening of DAX coincides with the inaugural Singapore FinTech Festival, a week-long affair. It was officiated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s deputy managing director, Jacqueline Loh, and DBS's chief executive, Piyush Gupta.

DBS has, it says, made digital banking and technology a core part of its overall business strategy. Like a number of its peers, it is seeking to keep ahead of disruptive fintech start-ups challenging established business models. Firms have used tacks such as creating so-called innovation labs to foster ideas in areas such as blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robo-advisory, “gamification” and use of big data. In Asia, one firm making big strides in the wealth management space, China-based e-commerce company Alibaba, is not even a traditional bank. In the US, meanwhile, one of the largest fintech players is arguably PayPal.

As well as DAX, the bank will run numerous programmes to fuel innovation, such as creating the "FinTech Foundry", a start-up engagement initiative, and holding regular “hackathons” for application programme interfaces (APIs) involving start-ups and small- and medium-sized enterprises.