Ravi Chandran
DBS to help over 30,000 corporate and SME customers save around 200,000 workdays with industry’s first digitalised audit confirmation solution
- DBS’s digitalised audit confirmation solution cuts processing time for audit confirmation requests to under 24 hours, as compared to industry norm of at least seven days.
With corporate Singapore busy closing their accounts for Financial Year 2020, DBS is helping to make that time-consuming task simpler by leveraging its digital capabilities to roll out the industry’s first digitalised audit confirmation solution.
Audit confirmation is a common audit procedure applied by auditors to ascertain the existence and/or completeness of a company’s assets and liabilities. It is required as part of the audit process for financial statements, and DBS receives more than 30,000 requests per year.
From today, the bank’s corporate and SME customers can request for DBS’ confirmation to verify their financial positions and balances digitally. These confirmations are then automatically sent to the customers’ auditors as part of statutory corporate reporting requirements.
With this digitalised audit confirmation process, businesses can avoid the onerous task of manual submissions and expedite the closure of their annual financial statements.
Accessible seamlessly from DBS IDEAL, the bank’s one-stop online corporate banking platform, DBS Audit Confirmation replaces manual workflows between customers, auditors and banks, with all documentation received, reviewed and processed digitally. DBS’ corporate and SME customers can now expect to have their audit confirmation requests processed in less than a day, as compared to the industry norm of at least seven days. The bank also expects a lower incidence of rejections arising from incomplete or incorrect form submissions caused by inadvertent human errors.
Customers can track the status of their requests in real-time at their convenience via DBS IDEAL instead of inquiring over the phone. This resolves the perennial industry pain point of banks needing to cope with high call volumes especially between January and March, when more companies close their books.
The DBS Audit Confirmation solution is expected to benefit over 30,000 of the bank’s corporate and SME customers in Singapore. Customers who do not have access to DBS IDEAL can sign up to access DBS Audit Confirmation as well as a whole suite of other digital solutions. The digitalised audit confirmation is part of DBS digibanking, which enables companies to manage, grow and transform their businesses effortlessly.
Tan Su Shan, Group Head of Institutional Banking at DBS, said, “While audit confirmation is a fact of life for many businesses, we don’t believe it has to be a painful, long-drawn process. With the annual financial book closure peak season starting, we’re bringing to bear our innovation and digital capabilities to offer our customers a service that will drastically reduce the time and effort needed to process their requests. This will free our customers from administrative tedium, which we hope will allow them to focus their energies on tasks that are more important to them as they prepare their businesses for the new year.”
One company that is already enjoying the seamless convenience of DBS Audit Confirmation is Song Fish Dealer Pte Ltd. Dorothy Lim, Director of Song Fish Dealer, said, “My employees and I do not look forward to the audit confirmation process every year because of the amount of paperwork and time involved. We were delighted to learn that DBS is introducing a digital solution to make audit confirmation speedy and fuss-free. The solution is intuitive and easy to use, and we could get our request processed in under a day. This allows my staff to focus on other higher value-added work. We are pleased to have with DBS a banking partner who is always looking for ways to making banking better for us.”
DBS plans to extend DBS Audit Confirmation to its key markets at a later date, enabling its more than 200,000-strong regional corporate customer base to benefit from the digital solution.
DBS’s drive towards aiding SME’s in digitalisation is not new. In November last year, DBS announced that it was the first bank to partner with JD Logistics (JDL), the supply chain and logistics business group of JD.com, to provide supply chain financing to Hong Kong-based small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the fast growing cross-border e-commerce import business. This is also DBS’ first digital solution for e-commerce merchants on a logistics platform.
Through this partnership, DBS will provide supply chain financing to JDL’s e-commerce SMEs who place their inventory from international brands in JDL’s bonded warehouses and sell the imported goods on JD Worldwide (JDW).
With the shift to online shopping, this will significantly improve e-commerce merchants’ cash flow needs to meet the growing demand from Chinese consumers for a variety of imported quality products from international suppliers.
Leveraging DBS’ Application Programming Interface (APIs), the bank will integrate its digital service into JDL’s blockchain platform to enable real time exchange of data and end-to-end digital experience. JDL will be able to refer e-commerce merchants who require financing to DBS. The bank will approve these applications based on real-time supply chain transaction data, such as inventory and sales proceeds collected from the end consumer, from JDL’s supply chain platform. This reduces the physical documentation required.
As added convenience in this pandemic environment, DBS can conduct remote account opening and customer identification and verification via video conference.
Once onboarded, merchants will be able to view their available balances and outstanding loans, as well as to initiate drawdown on a pool of eligible assets, with just ‘one click’ on the JDL supply chain platform, with funds disbursed quickly.
