Singapore Takes Collaborative Approach to AI

Singapore is taking a tightly coordinated, public-private approach to the adoption of AI in banking, pairing hands-on engagement by public authorities with large-scale workforce retraining to limit job losses while accelerating deployment, as reported by Bloomberg.

Rather than treating AI as a purely internal transformation, banks are pressure-testing tools and controls in close dialogue with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). Kelvin Chiang, Head of Financial Crime Compliance Analytics at Bank of Singapore, for example, told Bloomberg that he took his team to meet with MAS ahead of the rollout of five new agentic AI models. They walked through safeguards and escalation plans, including how staff would respond if the system hallucinated, to ensure the regulators were satisfied with the bank’s risk controls.

The broader aim is to stay ahead of the disruption already playing out in other markets. Singapore Minister for National Development Chee Hong Tat, who also serves as Deputy Chairman of MAS, has said that Singapore’s local banks will retrain all 35,000 of their domestic staff over the next one to two years. “[Singapore] is banking on a higher level of government involvement to help carve out a path for workers that focuses on improving skill sets and cushions the need for mass layoffs,” Bloomberg wrote.

AI is already generating productivity gains in day-to-day work, compressing tasks that once took hours into minutes. “Inaction is not really an option for us or anybody,” Alvin Eng, UOB’s Head of Enterprise AI, told Bloomberg. “It’s a slow path to irrelevance.”