EP. 107 | Building a Bank with a Heart: Inside DBS’s Approach to Crypto, Compliance, and AI with Chee Kin Lam

Chee Kin Lam, Head of Legal and Compliance at DBS Bank — one of the world's first major banks to receive a digital payment token license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore — joins Ari on this episode of TRM Talks.Chee Kin shares a career spanning 30-plus years across JP Morgan, Standard Chartered, and DBS Bank, and what he learned along the way about people, culture, and getting things done across continents. He walks through DBS Bank's digital-first roots dating back to 2013–2014, how the bank thinks about blockchain as both an emerging asset class and the future of financial infrastructure, and how his own thinking on crypto risk evolved from early conversations about "poison tokens" and coin purity to today's more mature, technology-augmented risk management landscape.The conversation covers the growing scams and fraud epidemic — including the critical shift from unauthorized to authorized scams that exploit human psychology — and why Chee Kin believes every stakeholder in the digital economy, from telcos to social media platforms to device manufacturers, shares a corresponding duty to protect it. He also shares how DBS Bank is deploying generative AI to write suspicious transaction reports at scale, why framing AI as an employee value proposition matters, and what it means in practice to be an "AI-enabled bank with a heart."Plus: balut in the Philippines, life-changing homemade adobo, fast cars, computer games, and a compliance lawyer who would have been a rock star in another life.