OCBC rolls out its ‘avatar banking’ platform with ‘Wendy’ and ‘Wayne,’ two virtual financial advisors, as banks integrate AI into wealth management

Singapore’s OCBC Bank unveiled an AI-enabled ‘avatar banking’ app, allowing clients round-the-clock access to virtual relationship managers. Yet CEO Tan Teck Long pledged the new AI avatars won’t replace the bank’s human employees, as he pledged to hire 600 new relationship managers. “Instead of thinking that AI will reduce our workforce, we hope to use it to increase the workforce and support a much larger business,” Tan said during a press conference at OCBC’s Singapore headquarters on July 1, in one of his first engagements with the press since becoming CEO on Jan. 1. The platform currently features two avatars named “Wendy” and “Wayne,” modelled after OCBC’s own staff members. Users can pose questions to the avatars, trained on proprietary data from the bank’s research team. “They know your portfolio and are personalized to you,” Tan explained. “For example, you can ask them what it might mean to add SpaceX to your portfolio, and whether the stock is speculative.” The new app, named OCBC WoW, will first be rolled out as a beta version to fifty users, then to OCBC’s wealth clients, and eventually to its retail banking segment. “We’re not starting with our retail clients, since they tend to have simpler needs,” Tan explained. Currently, OCBC’s avatars will only speak English. The bank hopes to train the AI to eventually converse in Mandarin, Bahasa Indonesia, and Bahasa Melayu. (OCBC has four core markets: Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Hong Kong). Banks are starting to explore using AI to boost the productivity of their wealth management departments, especially as rising incomes and welath boost the demand for financial advice. A 2025 McKinsey report estimated that the U.S. alone might face a shortfall of up to 110,000 advisors by 2045. AI’s ability to ingest and summarize large amounts of data might allow banks to offer high-quality advice to a larger group of customers at lower cost. Yet a recent