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Most of us know the frustration of waiting 20 minutes for customer support over a simple request. For business owners, however, the same delay could be critical, as it may hold up a supplier payment, month-end payroll payment or a time-sensitive transaction.
Reliable access to banking services is an essential part of running a business, especially when banking matters are often handled by business owners themselves after working hours or within tight deadlines.
In this context, faster support is more than just a better customer experience. It can directly improve productivity by helping businesses resolve issues quickly and get back to their core operations. This is where technology, including artificial intelligence, can play an important role in helping businesses get the support they need more efficiently.
Productivity Cost Goes Beyond Time Spent Waiting
One way to think about this is to compare the experience of a business owner with that of someone working in a large company. The impact of a banking issue can vary depending on how a business is structured. Some larger organisations may have dedicated finance or operations teams to handle administrative matters, while in many businesses, owners or employees juggle these responsibilities alongside their day-to-day work. When banking issues arise, resolving them can still interrupt operations and divert attention from higher-value tasks.
For business owners, the impact is more direct. A delayed banking issue does not just mean spending time on hold or waiting for a reply. It may mean pausing customer work, delaying sales conversations or stepping away from day-to-day operations to resolve the matter. Even after the issue is settled, time and focus are needed to get back into the flow of work.
How AI Is Making Banking Support Available Around The Clock
Many banking queries are routine and time-sensitive. Business owners may need to check a transaction, clarify how a feature works or resolve a simple account issue outside normal working hours. These requests may not require a human agent, but they do require a quick and reliable answer.
This is where AI-powered support can be useful. DBS Joy, first launched in 2018 as a virtual assistant for corporate banking, was upgraded with generative AI and rolled out to all DBS corporate clients in November 2025.
Available through DBS IDEAL, DBS Joy gives business owners round-the-clock access to a chat-based assistant. Unlike older chatbots that rely heavily on fixed scripts, it uses large language models connected to DBS’s knowledge base to understand a broader range of questions and respond more naturally. Beyond answering banking queries, DBS Joy can also help business owners complete common banking tasks such as checking their account balances and their recent transaction history more efficiently, all within the same chat interface. This reduces the need to switch between different screens or wait for assistance with routine requests. With these integrations of real-time insights on balances, transactions history, and even specific eForms statuses, business owners will be able to do more in one place.
What DBS Joy Looks Like In Practice
For routine requests, DBS Joy is designed to provide an answer immediately rather than require customers to wait for a human agent to become available.
Since the upgraded version started trials in February 2025, it had handled over 120,000 conversations by the time it rolled out fully, with around 4,000 corporate clients now using it every month. DBS has also reported that customer satisfaction went up by more than 23% during this period, with shorter waiting times and smarter chatbot responses being the main driver for the improved satisfaction. Any time banks can improve customer satisfaction, whether that’s for corporates or individuals, that’s a huge win as it shows their client base that they’re actively addressing real pain points.
For more complex issues, customers can still be escalated to a human customer service specialist. Instead of requiring them to repeat the same details, DBS Joy passes the conversation history and relevant context to the specialist handling the case. This allows the customer to continue the conversation without having to start over.
Why Safety Checks Are Important
Speed matters, but only if the response is accurate. A fast answer that turns out to be wrong can end up taking more time to fix, which defeats the purpose of using AI to reduce waiting times in the first place.
To address this, DBS has built multiple layers of internal checks into DBS Joy, designed to catch and filter out unreliable responses before they reach customers. Internally, there is also a dedicated team who review past conversations and identify areas where the system’s underlying knowledge can be improved.
The goal is not simply to make the AI assistant faster, but to ensure that it becomes more accurate and useful over time.
For anyone wondering whether this kind of AI rollout is mainly about cutting costs, this part of the story suggests otherwise. Trust matters greatly in banking, and a system that is fast but unreliable does not really solve the problem.
What Better Banking Support Brings To Business Owners
Business owners typically compare banks based on fees, financing options and digital features. While these are important considerations, the responsiveness of a bank’s support (or lack of) can be just as vital. A seemingly minor banking issue can have knock-on effects on cash flow, supplier relationships, staff confidence and customer commitments.
The value of AI-powered support therefore lies less in the technology itself, and more in the operational friction it removes. When business owners can get reliable answers without allowing one unresolved issue to derail the rest of their workday, they gain greater certainty over how they manage both their time and their business. When your bank is able to support you effectively through the right combination of AI and human touch, your own business operation also becomes more efficient.
DBS Joy offers one example of how banking support is being redesigned around this reality: the less time owners spend managing their bank, the more time they can spend building their business.
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