About
Enabling consumers to make a real difference in saving the earth through providing compelling financing options for residential homes, renovations as well as private transportation.
Innovation presentation
Financial institutions have largely succeeded in developing innovative green financing solutions in the corporate and commercial banking spaces but there has been a conspicuous gap in the consumer banking segment in Singapore and Southeast Asia.
OCBC is pleased to announce the Eco Care Suite of Consumer Loans (ECSL) offering, which is a game-changing, first-of-its-kind in Singapore and likely Southeast Asia. The ECSL is a term that refers to 4 highly demanded loan products launched within this suite: 1) Digital Eco-Care Residential Home Loan (EHL); 2) Digital Eco-Care Instant Renovation Loan (ERL)); 3) Digital Instant Solar Panel Loan (SPL); and 4) Digital Instant Electric Vehicle Loan (EVL).
The ECSL enables Singapore consumers to make concrete changes to their daily living through financing access to environmentally friendly electric cars and solar panels, as well as attractive interest rate packages for mortgages and renovation loans if they make committed changes to home energy usage. As the application processes are fully digital, paper usage is eliminated – further increasing the ESG aspect of this offering.
The success of the ECSL is overwhelming and can be attested to by the fact that year-to-date, more than $500 million Singapore dollars in loan sales have been recorded across the four loan products, materially accelerating lending sales across the four products. This has benefitted around 5000 consumers thus far, and we expect adoption rate to rise significantly in the near and medium term.
To date no other bank has been able to replicate the ECSL suite in full. As such, we do not see any credible competitors in this space still, although we do observe green shoots as other financial institutions have offered part of the four main loan products that constitute our ECSL.
Uniqueness of the project
This innovation is disruptive as we are the first in Southeast Asia to provide a full suite of sustainable financing solutions for consumer loans - homes, renovations, solar panels and cars.
ECSL’s differentiating factors
1) Strategic nature – signalling OCBC's commitment to saving our environment not only in the corporate banking space, but in the consumer banking segment as well
2) Economic behaviourism – fully digital journey and external energy efficiency framework for homes (designed by the Building & Construction Authority of Singapore) enable us to help shape consumer behaviour, with the use of preferential interest rates and other material incentives used to nudge consumers towards these sustainability-related lending products
3) Transformational nature - galvanized the consumer financing sector to rethink loan offerings. Our Solar Panel Loan (SPL) was launched in Jan 2021 and the rest of the ECSL suite offerings in March 2021. We are proud to see that shortly after in April 2021, DBS Bank, Singapore's largest bank by market capitalisation, similarly made available solar panel financing and green home renovation to their customers. The local financial institutions are jumping on this bandwagon, which has fomented the rise of the sustainability-related consumer lending sector.
