The Singapore-headquartered bank says it is breaking fresh ground in Southeast Asia with the test pilot of a robo-advisor platform.

Oversea Chinese Banking Corp, the parent of Bank of Singapore, says it has become the first lender in Southeast Asia to test run a robo-advisory service, a sign of how banks in the region are jostling to keep out front with automated business platforms. The platform is being provided in partnership with WeInvest, a Singaporean fintech firm.

Investors can put money into portfolios of stocks and exchange traded funds using the service. The platform offers a “guided investment journey” with regular rebalancing of portfolios and cuts out the need for clients to talk to a relationship manager, the bank said.

Under the pilot programme, participants can invest into two categories of investment portfolios, starting from as low as S$3,000 ($2,125), OCBC said in a statement. The first category consists of five portfolios made up of ETFs and equities listed on the Dow Jones and Nasdaq. Customers must first fill out a questionnaire using the platform to determine their risk profile and investment goals, enabling one of the five portfolios to be suggested to them. Once that is done, the platform will automatically monitor the chosen portfolio. 

If market conditions change and the performance of the portfolio diverges from investment goals, investors will be alerted via SMS or email with proposals to rebalance their portfolio.

The second category of offering, via a basket of stocks, is designed to appeal to more “savvy investors” and offers them the opportunity to hold equities listed on the Dow Jones and Nasdaq exchanges. The basket consists of stocks of technology companies or fast-moving-consumer-goods companies, or leading Dow Jones companies, the statement continued.

The pilot will first involve accredited investors but will later be opened up to non-accredited investors, the statement added.

One of the central themes around fintech, the rise of so-called robo-advisors, which use modern computer technology to execute clients’ risk and goal preferences in investments, has created a great deal of interest in Asia, Europe and North America. With the cost of providing wealth advice becoming more costly because of regulation and compliance, robos are seen as a potential solution to bridging an advice “gap”, as well as being more in tune with a tech-savvy millennial generation. 

A report by MyPrivateBanking Research, a Swiss firm, has argued that a “hybrid” model of robo-advisor that does not exclude human RMs from client interaction may prove a more compelling solution for people uneasy about entrusting vital financial affairs to artificial intelligence-driven systems they barely comprehend, let alone trust. (See article here.) See another report on a study from Temenos, a wealth and banking technology business, here.