mumbai singapores dbs bank aims to be a disruptor in india even as it awaits the rbis nod to upgrade its branch to a subsidiary which will have unrestricted access to the country the bank is offering digital bank accounts with zero balance requirements 7 interest rate on savings and unlimited access to atms these accounts can be opened by anyone with a smartphone an aadhaar card and a pan cardspeaking to toi piyush gupta ceo dbs said we are trying to be a disruptor there is no question for us that this channel allows us to expand into retail consumer business and provide a different kind of banking which is a much bigger scale than the typical niche banking done in the past the bank has set a deposit target of rs 50000 crore in five years and rs 10000 crore of retail loansthe reason why dbs is going full steam in india even as other multinationals are being cautious on retail is that dbs is primarily an asian bank also the bank sees india as ideally positioned for this kind of disruptionwe are creating the digibank in india as a global first because the digital infrastructure in india is better than anywhere else the whole india infrastructure the jam jandhan aadhaar and mobile trinity and the india stack is underappreciated the india stack refers to four government initiatives the biometric authentication digital records cashless transactions and digital consents where acceptance can be acknowledged without a wet signaturea dbs digibank account can be opened by downloading an app and providing a fingerprint authentication at any one of the 500 designated caf coffee day outlets across the country the bank is in talks to have more centres for biometric authenticationaccording to gupta dbs will always be in a position to offer a better deal than others in minimum balance requirement and on interest rate as its costs are lower not only does the bank avoid branch and people costs it is spending a fourth of what conventional banks spend on back office one reason for this is that it is using robots that will act as virtual assistants the bank is the first to deploy experimental conversational technology from kasisto a spinoff from the stanford research institute that created siri there is recognition that cognitive technology is becoming real much faster than people have thought field after field computers are beginning to mimic human beings fairly well said guptahe added that customer behaviour was already changing as was seen across the world if you look at ing direct it is the third biggest retail bank in germany with zero branches in scandinavia you can see the same thing with customers rapidly moving to digital banking you look at what alibaba has done in china they have been able to create a 100million customer base 100 billion in balances a loan book and a payments book with zero branches said gupta even in dbs home market in