In his 16 years in charge of Singapore’s biggest bank, DBS chief executive Piyush Gupta has had to steer through technological disruption, the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the overhaul of a stodgy institution.
But as Gupta — one of the few global bank heads whose tenure can rival Jamie Dimon’s two decades at JPMorgan — finally steps down, he says life will be no easier for his successor.
Donald Trump’s tariff wars threaten to disrupt DBS’s mainly Asian client base. Falling interest rates threaten to undermine profits at the bank, which generated an 18 per cent return on equity last year. And the fintech threat to traditional lenders is only set to increase with advances in artificial intelligence.
Incoming chief executive Tan Su Shan, who takes over following the bank’s annual meeting on Friday, “will face both geopolitical and macroeconomic [challenges]”, said 65-year-old Gupta.
“I was lucky — I inherited the company at a low, so it was easy to go up,” he said. “She’s inheriting the company at a high.”
Under Gupta, DBS’s share price has risen more than 300 per cent, while net profits have increased fivefold to S$11.4bn. Customer numbers have jumped from 5mn to 18.5mn, while the workforce has nearly tripled to 41,000 as Gupta refocused towards areas such as transaction banking and wealth management.
“In all honesty, we can attribute a lot of the success DBS has had over the past 16 years to Piyush, but without the tailwinds of a strong Singaporean economy — as well as growth in China, India and the wealth management market — it would not have worked,” said a DBS board member.
“Macro makes a huge difference.”
Gupta joined DBS, still reeling from the global financial crisis, in 2009 after 27 years at Citigroup and describes finding “a stuffy bank, a loan shop” with a “bureaucratic government kind of culture”.
Unlike its main domestic rivals — OCBC and UOB, with roots in Singapore’s Chinese community in the early 20th century — DBS was founded in 1968 as the Development Bank of Singapore to finance the country’s industrialisation and support urban development.
Its 1998 takeover of Singapore’s Post Office Savings Bank created a sizeable retail business and catapulted it to be the country’s largest lender by assets. But before Gupta, DBS had been through four CEOs in less than a decade and lost ground to local and regional rivals.
“It lacked ambition,” recalled Gupta. “We spent the first few years trying to convert DBS into a classic western-style, meritocratic, individually driven organisation.”
A meeting with Alibaba founder Jack Ma in 2014 convinced Gupta that DBS needed a different course. Alibaba was about to list in New York and Ma laid out his vision for Alipay, the ecommerce group’s payment platform.
“He’d got 300mn consumers and 3.5mn [small and medium companies] he was lending money to, he had an insurance business and he was using this thing to move money around,” said Gupta. “And he had zero branches, zero sales people, and he didn’t even have a banking licence, for God’s sake.
“This was going to redefine the future, so we decided that we needed to think like a tech company.”
Gupta was given S$200mn by his board to invest in digitising. DBS began to ape tech companies, with Gupta telling staff they should ask “what would [Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos do?” rather than “what would Jamie Dimon do?”
But running a regulated bank like a Silicon Valley start-up came with problems. In 2023, after a series of outages that affected online banking, cash machines and payment services, DBS was censured by the Monetary Authority of Singapore for what the domestic regulator called “unacceptable” disruption.
The MAS increased DBS’s regulatory capital by S$1.6bn ($1.2bn) and blocked it from acquisitions or non-essential IT upgrades for six months. Gupta’s pay was docked by more than a quarter, or S$4.4mn, over the outages, which he said were his biggest mistake as CEO.
“The tech [failure] was the most painful because when you’ve been called the world’s best digital bank for five or six years, it’s a bit of a slap in the face,” he said.
“We are a regulated industry, so you have to get the right balance between leaning into innovation versus reliability.”
Using AI was part of DBS’s strategy as early as 2013, but the bank has stepped up its usage. It now runs 1,600 models, supporting 350 tools, which it estimates generated S$800mn of value last year.
While most are used in marketing to customers, Gupta believes AI can lead to the bank cutting its number of contract workers by 4,000 — equivalent to 10 per cent of the global workforce — within the next three years.
DBS was one of the few banks that could define how it would make money out of AI, said Jayden Vantarakis, head of ASEAN equity research at Macquarie.
Over Gupta’s tenure shareholders have had total returns of more than 400 per cent, helped by a doubling of dividend payouts over the past five years and the bank’s recent commitment to buying back S$3bn of stock.
“Piyush has unlocked very significant value for DBS, its franchise, the financial services sector and all of its shareholders,” said Dilhan Pillay, chief executive of Temasek, the Singaporean state-owned investment company that owns 28 per cent of DBS stock.
Tan joined DBS in 2010, having run Morgan Stanley’s private wealth management business in south-east Asia. At DBS she has run wealth and consumer banking, and more recently institutional banking, before becoming deputy chief executive last year.
“She is clearly very focused on the wealth side and that’s her background,” Vantarakis said. “I think she will double down on that part of the bank.”
“Her operational experience and successful development of two of the bank’s fastest-growing businesses should extend DBS’s leadership position in technology,” said Bryan Lloyd, an analyst at Harding Loevner, a top 10 shareholder in the bank.
“She does have some work to do in making the technology backbone more robust and resilient, however.”
Three weeks ago DBS had another outage in its digital banking and cash machine services, its first since May.
“Other than dealing with macro pressures, Su Shan will need to think about the next phase of DBS’s tech transformation,” said the board member. “There is still some way to go on simplifying and streamlining the technology infrastructure . . . If you look at the banks from Korea or China, especially the ones with no legacy systems, they are the most ahead in the tech space.”
Gupta is sympathetic to his successor. “Trump will come, stimuli will change, geopolitics will happen,” he said. “[She’ll] just have to keep pivoting.”
