Accrual Bank's fiscal year 2025 results, commentary, and strategic priorities for 2026. Prepared for the Annual General Meeting held at our Singapore headquarters, March 14 2026.
In the forty-year history of Accrual Bank, 2025 will probably not be remembered as a landmark year. Net interest income rose by 8.2 percent. Our cost-to-income ratio improved. Our loan book grew at a measured pace. We added to our retail customer base and our commercial book. We paid a modest dividend increase. No individual line item was dramatic.
2025 will be remembered, in the longer arc of the bank, as the year we stopped treating our platform investments as a cost to be managed and started treating them as a capability to be compounded. Nothing about that change is visible in the income statement. Everything about it is visible in what we will be able to do in 2026.
Three things. First, our commercial lending business rebuilt its core workflow from a 47-step process diagram into a case-based model, and in doing so cut its average time-to-decision from 11 business days to 2.9. The effect on the 2025 income statement is small. The effect on the shape of Accrual Capital over the next five years is significant, because a bank that can say yes or no to a commercial deal in under three days wins deals that a bank that takes eleven days does not even see.
Second, our Services unit rebuilt the HR onboarding pipeline on a hybrid integration pattern that survives vendor deprecation gracefully. Again, invisible on the P&L. Very visible in the fact that our 2,400 annual new hires consistently show up to a working laptop and a scheduled manager meeting on day one. The operating leverage that comes from boring reliability at the edges of a bank is hard to overstate.
Third, we put AI ROI on the standing board agenda. This is a sentence you could write about many companies in 2025 and roll your eyes at. At Accrual, it is not marketing. It is a commitment that the board will see the same four metrics every quarter for the rest of its term, and will ask us what is moving them and why. Our CIO has written publicly about the framework.
Accrual has always been a boring bank by design. We believe our customers want their bank to be boring in the places banks should be boring, and thoughtful in the places banks should be thoughtful. Our 2025 investments, and our 2026 plans, are built on that belief.
We are investing in our platform so that our bankers can spend their time on the parts of banking that benefit from human judgment. We are investing in AI so that tedious work happens quickly and well. We are investing in our people so that the 8-person platform team, the 22-person COE, and the bankers they support can keep the bank running without working weekends we promised we would not ask them to work.
The bank you want is the bank you will not have to think about. We have been working on that for forty years. We are not done.
Global regulatory movement on AI governance, including the EU AI Act and Singapore's Model AI Governance Framework evolution. We are a bank in 28 countries and we will comply everywhere. This will cost us money and time. It is worth it.
Commercial lending margin compression driven by competitive pressure across APAC mid-market. Our faster decision cycle is part of our answer. Structural pricing discipline is the rest.
Retail deposit mix as interest rate environments shift. We are advantaged because our Compound Checking product has a sticky customer base with a relatively long average tenure. We are disadvantaged because a portion of that base is more rate-sensitive than our historical cohorts. We manage both.
To our 8-person platform team who keep the bank running without fanfare. To our 22-person automation COE who have turned discipline into a compounding asset. To our relationship bankers who make the second conversation with a customer better than the first. To our board who ask good questions, some of which keep us up at night, which is the point of a good board. And to our customers, many of whom have been with Accrual longer than they have had their current address.
Thank you. See you next year, compounding.
Priya Ravindran
Chief Executive Officer
Accrual Bank
Four priorities. Each tied to a measurable outcome. Each reviewed quarterly by the board.
Extend our orchestration platform to host more of the bank. Target: 14 orchestration processes live by end of 2026, across BPMN, flow, and case management.
Our coding agent is productive for bot authoring. We are extending it to flow authoring and to credit memo drafting. Target: 35 percent of eligible net-new work drafted with agent assistance.
Pilot relationship banker co-pilots in commercial, and self-service assistants in retail. Measure NPS every quarter. Roll back anything that erodes it.
Publish our responsible AI principles. Run annual external audit. Maintain our platform uptime above 99.94 percent. Do not launch anything we cannot explain.
Eight non-executive directors plus the CEO. Average tenure 4.7 years. Four directors added AI governance to their committee responsibilities in 2025.
Chaired by an independent director with thirty years of banking audit experience. Meets monthly. Reviews all P1 platform incidents.
Chaired by an independent director with a compensation advisory background. Oversees executive and broad-based comp.
Established Q3 2025. Reviews AI strategy, responsible AI principles, and technology risk. Meets quarterly.
The 2025 Annual Report is, in fact, the page you are reading. We are a fictional bank and we do not have a longer one.