MYbank presents its AI-driven banking solutions at the Singapore Fintech Festival 2025

The global banking industry is currently navigating a period of profound transformation, one where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer an auxiliary technology but the core engine of operational efficiency, customer service, and, crucially, financial inclusion. The innovations unveiled by MYbank at the Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF) 2025 stand as a powerful testament to this change, directly addressing the persistent challenges of serving small and micro businesses (SMEs). Simultaneously, the latest analysis from McKinsey underscores the urgent, macro-level implications of this shift for the entire sector’s cost structure.

At SFF 2025, MYbank, a Chinese digital bank affiliated with Ant Group, showcased how AI is being embedded directly into core operations to make finance more accessible and fair for the SME segment, a demographic historically underserved by traditional banking models. According to Zheng Bo, General Manager of MYbank’s AI Department, their experience demonstrates that AI can extend high-quality and diverse financial services, previously hard to access, to everyday small businesses, thereby fostering greater inclusion.

MYbank’s most compelling application lies in its AI credit assistant, which aims to streamline the due diligence required for mid- to large-sized SME loans, a process often reliant on labor-intensive offline methods. This sophisticated system is capable of multimodal analysis, digesting research reports, assessing industry value chains, and evaluating company operations through inputs like phone calls and video. A clear example of its precision was shown in the assessment of a Zhejiang electronics company with limited public information. The AI not only confirmed the company held 27 patents but also mapped its vital role in the communications electronics supply chain and verified its facilities via video, ultimately recommending a precise credit line. The rapid development of this technology is evidenced by its performance: after just five months of deployment, the alignment between the AI assistant’s recommendations and those of human credit officers soared from 39% to a remarkable 90%, signaling its growing reliability in complex credit risk management.

Beyond lending, MYbank is leveraging AI to empower SMEs’ cash management and investment planning. The system forecasts cash flow across various industries, providing critical assistance to bank-affiliated investment managers in anticipating subscription and redemption timings. By optimizing cash flow, the solution concurrently helps SMEs achieve better returns on their idle funds. This system, already utilized by 14 institutions, has proven its stability, reporting product return volatility that is 5 basis points lower than the market average, providing a significant edge in wealth management for small businesses.

The focused, high-impact work demonstrated by MYbank is a leading indicator of a sweeping global trend. As AI adoption in banking rises across the world, McKinsey’s Global Banking Annual Review 2025 provides a powerful estimate of the tectonic shift underway, projecting that banks’ overall cost base could fall by a substantial 15–20%. This net saving, even after accounting for increased spending on new technology, cybersecurity, and fraud prevention, represents a staggering opportunity for the industry to boost profitability and reinvest in innovation.

In response to this imperative, major banks are aggressively integrating AI to improve efficiency and reduce costs, embracing the report’s central thesis that the future of banking will be defined by precision, not heft. For example, institutions like Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) are partnering with tech giants to help staff draft and review loan documents, automating time-consuming operational tasks. Similarly, Singapore’s UOB is using AI for anti-money-laundering (AML) purposes, an application that has cut the time required to detect suspicious transactions by an impressive 60%.

The ultimate impact of this AI-driven revolution, McKinsey notes, will not be equally distributed. Banks that act as Pioneers, embedding AI into their core business to reinvent their models, stand to capture a significant competitive advantage. These decisive actors could see their Return on Tangible Equity (ROTE) increase by up to four percentage points and capture substantial market share from their slower-moving rivals. The message is clear: the era of broad, monolithic banking strategy is yielding to one of targeted, AI-powered precision, where the ability to leverage data to solve specific problems—from assessing a Zhejiang SME’s patents to slashing AML detection times—will define the winners of the next decade.