Issues · Issue #001 · · ~3-minute read
The bank that grew by getting customers to do the selling
Trust Bank's first profitable month, Singapore's digital-bank scorecard, and the AI coach that lifted advisor revenue 50%.
Good morning. Most banks pay a lot to find new customers. Singapore's Trust Bank got its customers to do most of the finding for it, and in March it booked its first profitable month. Today: how the referral machine works, who's winning among Singapore's five digital banks, and an AI coaching trick from OCBC worth copying.
🔍 The Big One: The referral machine
What happened. Trust Bank, the digital bank backed by Standard Chartered and FairPrice Group that opened in September 2022, turned a profit in March 2026. That's just over three years after launch. It still expected a loss for Q1 as a whole, and it didn't disclose the base numbers for March. But the direction is clear: in March, risk-adjusted revenue (revenue after credit losses) grew 67% year on year while costs fell 9%.
The full-year picture. For FY2025, revenue rose to S$135M (from S$97M), costs fell to S$146M (from S$157M), and the loss narrowed to S$54M from S$93M (The Business Times). Our take: revenue growing about 39% while costs shrink is the combination every bank CFO wants and few get.
How the funnel works. The cost side starts with acquisition:
- Referrals. Every customer gets a referral code. At launch, when a friend signed up, both got a FairPrice voucher instantly, in the app. Today the reward is an in-app cashback scratch card (Trust, Refer and Earn). More than 70% of new sign-ups came through referrals (Fintech News SG).
- Speed beats size. Trust's CMO, speaking to Campaign Asia, put it this way: customers are comfortable with a smaller reward if it arrives instantly. She put Trust's cost to acquire a customer at roughly one-seventh of the traditional industry norm (Campaign Asia, 2025), a figure Trust's CEO has also cited (The Straits Times). It's the bank's own claim.
- Distribution it didn't pay for. FairPrice is Singapore's largest retailer, so Trust started with in-store promos and shopper data from day one (same source).
From sign-ups to revenue. Cheap customers only matter if they stick around and use the product. The signals Trust points to:
- Cards are used about 25 times a month per customer, and 30% of deposit balances sit with customers who have their salary paid in (BT).
- Roughly 170,000 customers treat Trust as their main bank. More than a million customers make it Singapore's fourth-largest bank by customer count (Fintech News SG).
- Loans rose to S$1.2B from S$800M, while credit losses grew more slowly than the asset book (29% vs 46%), per the CEO (BT).
Our take. A referral reward is marketing you only pay for when it works. The clever bit isn't the reward, it's how fast it arrives. If you're an incumbent whose "refer a friend" bonus shows up 60 days later on a statement, you're paying a similar price for much less effect. The open question for Trust is the next step: turning a million cheap sign-ups into more of those 170,000 main-bank relationships. That's where deposits, card spending and lending all come from.
🧮 Under the Hood: Singapore's digital-bank scorecard (FY2025)
| Bank | What it's built around | FY2025 income | FY2025 bottom line |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLDB | SME supply-chain finance, no retail customers | S$71.8M | Profit S$16.1M |
| Trust | Mass-market retail, referrals | S$135M | Loss S$53.5M (first monthly profit Mar '26) |
| MariBank | Inside the Shopee ecosystem | S$37.4M (+53%) | Loss S$55.6M (widened) |
| ANEXT | SMEs, flat pricing, remote onboarding | S$42.6M (−5%) | Loss S$49.8M (widened) |
| GXS | Gig workers and thin-file borrowers | n/a | Biggest loss of the five, but narrowing two years running |
Source: Fintech News Singapore, 2026 Singapore Digital Banking Report.
For scale: DBS booked S$13.1B in pre-tax profit for FY2025 (same source). The incumbents haven't left a technology gap for anyone to exploit. So the digital banks that are winning picked a customer the big three underserve, not a better app.
🚀 Launch Pad
- Revolut gets into the till. Revolut Register is a point-of-sale system for Revolut Business users, bundled with "Pay with Smile" facial-recognition checkout that carries 0% processing fees. The pilot ran at three Kiss the Hippo cafés in London (Hospitality Tech360). So what: free acceptance gives merchants a reason to steer customers toward Revolut's own payment method, so the merchant becomes the acquisition channel.
- Revolut's points go hotel- and rail-shaped. RevPoints now transfer to Accor, Radisson, Wyndham and I Prefer (Fintech Global), and to Club Eurostar at 10:1 (Eurostar). So what: loyalty partners are cheap engagement. Revolut doesn't pay for the room, it buys the points.
- Ant's Antom adds Affirm. US merchants on Antom can offer Affirm pay-over-time from $35 to $30,000, and the UK follows this year (Affirm). So what: payment platforms win by adding credit options without holding the credit risk themselves.
📘 The Playbook: OCBC's AI sparring partner for advisors
The problem. OCBC's 900 wealth advisors in Singapore could wait up to three weeks for a one-on-one practice session, because each supervisor coaches up to 10 people on top of their day job. That meant uneven feedback from one supervisor to the next (OCBC).
The method.
- AI plays the customer. A gen-AI tool, built over 12 months on anonymised customer-behaviour insights, plays realistic clients: building a portfolio, profiling risk, adjusting to market moves.
- Practise on demand. Advisors rehearse as often as they want on their work devices.
- AI writes the gap report, humans do the coaching. Each session produces a gap analysis for the supervisor, so in-person coaching goes straight to the weak spots.
Reported result. In the first three months, trained advisors booked twice as many weekly client appointments as peers who hadn't done the programme yet, and saw a 50% revenue uplift versus the prior three months (OCBC's figures). Malaysia and Hong Kong are next.
How to adopt it. Pick one high-value conversation your front line has every day, such as a mortgage refinance or an SME credit review. Script five realistic customer personas. Use AI for repetition and scoring, and save managers' time for coaching on the gaps. Then run a fair test: compare trained and untrained groups over the same period.
🛰️ The Scout
| Region | What launched | Why it matters | Adoptability (Banks / Fintechs) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Americas | JPMorgan's deposit token, JPM Coin, is now live on Ethereum for institutional clients, after Base (J.P. Morgan) | A big bank is putting bank money on a public chain, betting clients want on-chain cash that is still a deposit | 2 / 1 |
| Europe | Revolut resumed onboarding in Gibraltar and got a licence there for crypto custody, trading and staking (HM Govt of Gibraltar) | Building the crypto product one licence at a time, wherever regulators allow | 2 / 3 |
| Middle East | Ant International won UAE retail-payments and stored-value licences (Ant International) | Lets Antom offer card acceptance for merchants and WorldFirst offer cross-border accounts locally | 1 / 3 |
Adoptability: 1 = hard to adopt, 5 = could ship next quarter. Our editorial judgment.
🌏 APAC Desk: Grab's quiet bank build-out
Grab's financial services revenue grew 59% year on year to $134M in Q2, and the segment's adjusted EBITDA loss shrank to $15M from $26M. The loan book tripled to $2.3B (it doubled without newly consolidated Superbank), and deposits across GXS, GXBank and Superbank reached $2.5B. In July, Grab completed its acquisition of US investing app Stash (Grab Q2 2026). Why it matters: it's a super-app using ride and delivery data to decide who to lend to, across three countries and three bank licences.
🔢 Number of the week: ~1/7
Trust Bank's estimate of its customer acquisition cost compared with the traditional industry norm (Campaign Asia).
📊 Poll: When does your bank pay out referral rewards? Instantly · Within a week · Within a month · Longer · We don't have one
Behind the Bank is independent analysis based only on public sources, linked throughout. Nothing here is investment advice. Spotted an error? Hit reply. We publish every correction.