Content first published by Euromoney on 18 July 2025
The world’s best for HNW: DBS
When she greets Euromoney in the bank’s headquarters this summer, Tan Su Shan comes straight from meeting an important client. The client is heavily affected by the fallout from Donald Trump’s trade policy, and as they navigate the impact on their business, they want assurance that DBS will continue to support them.
Conversations like this go to the heart of where DBS stands today, and why it can continue to grow and capture market share – including from bigger global banks – in the years ahead. The meeting also speaks to the strategic building blocks that came out of a DBS group leadership conference in March, marking the end of the transition between former CEO Piyush Gupta and Tan.
Over the past decade and a half, Gupta visualised three waves of transformation in the form of simple house designs: with a roof, windows, and foundations representing different elements of the strategic vision.
Now, with the global economy entering a period of new uncertainty because of tariffs, that house has become a lighthouse. “In turbulent times, we want to be that lighthouse that people gravitate towards – a haven in a sea of volatility, and a bank that travels with you through thick and thin,” says Tan.
Better than ever
Trust and safety, in other words, lie behind all the bank’s advantages, including its proven ability to realise value from cutting-edge technology like blockchain and artificial intelligence.
“When customers choose DBS in the corporate or private bank, it is often because they feel that we’re very future-forward, but they also know we’ll also be safe through the cycle, and therefore reliable,” Tan says.
Gupta retired from DBS amid resoundingly good financial results. After three consecutive years of growth, DBS revenues and net profit reached all-time highs in 2024: up by 10% to S$23 billion ($18 billion) and by 11% to S$11.4 billion, respectively. The cost/income ratio was 39.9%, partly due to operational changes and technology investments. In a market where all banks are doing well, DBS’s 2024
return on equity, at 18%, was several percentage points higher than local and most global peers.
Now, even if lower rates bring down net interest margins, Tan says DBS can still earn a return in the mid-to-high teens, as it continues to increase market share and realises gains from AI.
DBS has been one of the few large banks globally to put a number on how much value it is gaining from its AI investments. It is running hundreds of use cases spread across the consumer and institutional bank and in its internal auditing, human resources, finance and risk functions. The figure reached S$750 million in 2024 and it expects another S$250 million in 2025.
Passing the baton
The market appears convinced. In 2024, DBS already reached more than 1.5x book, becoming the first Singaporean company to cross S$100 billion in market capitalisation in May and ending the year at S$124 billion. Total shareholder returns in 2024 reached 51%, one of its best years ever.
Growth in high-returning businesses, notably wealth management and parts of wholesale banking, means DBS should even maintain return on equity at 18%, justifying a 2x price-to-book ratio, according to Morgan Stanley analysts.
Even as China’s growth has slowed, India has been one of DBS’s best growth stories recently, particularly in large corporate banking. The bank grew India income by 25% in 2024. It now sees more scope to grow, including in SMEs: leveraging its digital and AI technology and the country-wide branch network that came with its 2020 acquisition of Lakshmi Vilas Bank.
“We have built up a diversified pool of businesses in the high-growth markets of Asia,” Tan says.
Beyond financial results, the CEO transition further demonstrates DBS’s ability to steer through change. In a different organisation that transition might have brought instability, given the former CEO’s longstanding leadership of the bank.
The DBS board named Tan as Gupta’s deputy and CEO-designate in August last year, after a decade grooming potential successors, then benchmarking them against external candidates. The day after the announcement, she and Gupta synchronised their diaries. They then sat down to plan how to split the CEO’s job between managing past and future, travelling together around the network to involve the wider organisation in passing the baton. “We created the playbook on transition,” Tan says.
Wealth management playbook
Shortly after he became CEO in 2009, Gupta recruited Tan from Morgan Stanley to lead what was then DBS’s small wealth management business. Today, that business is going from strength to strength as DBS wins over new markets and clients, while deploying balance sheet in a disciplined way.
Compound annual growth of assets under management in wealth has topped 20% over the past three years. In 2024, DBS’s wealth management income rose by 18% to S$5.2 billion, while non-interest income in wealth rose by 45%.
In India, the North Asian wealth business is primed for more growth, following the integration of Citi’s former consumer business in Taiwan – and thanks to investments in the Greater Bay Area, including an increased stake in Shenzhen Rural Commercial Bank.
Shortly after joining, Tan says she took the unusual step of asking Gupta to demote her so that she would have a better hold on the client continuum from retail to the private bank. In 2024, around 40% of new DBS Private Bank clients came from its affluent unit, DBS Treasures – making it much more cost-efficient than peers that acquire clients when their net worth is already high.
“As our clients grow in wealth, and as they engage with us and find us to be a compelling wealth manager, they tend to move more assets to DBS and then have access to the full range of capabilities in DBS Private Bank,” says Shee Tse Koon, group head of consumer banking and wealth management.
Those capabilities are today capable of rivalling any global bank. When DBS’s private bank was much smaller, Tan oversaw the sale of its sub-scale asset manager and a move to a more open-architecture model. That included launching a private asset offering which today might give clients access to privately traded stocks such as Neuralink or Space X, alongside other structured and semi-liquid investments.
“If you want to build world-class wealth management, it’s about the distribution: you have to own the clients,” Tan says. “You don’t need to own the manufacturing of the products, because you want to be best in class, and no one can claim to be best in class at everything in asset management.”
With Singapore and Hong Kong’s status as a hub for offshore wealth rapidly outpacing the US and European hubs in growth, DBS banks about a third of Singapore incorporated single-family offices. It has launched what it calls the world’s first bank-backed multi-family office, making use of Singapore’s variable capital company structure. Unlike many international firms in Asia, it benefits from links to the commercial bank, helping structure innovative financing solutions that might help a group of tech founders monetise their interests in an IPO, for example.
One step ahead
Meanwhile, in the institutional bank – which Tan led after 2019 – DBS is continuing to invest in new products, and in growing its business along burgeoning Asia-related trade and investment corridors.
An example is international investment in China’s local bond market, spanning sales, foreign exchange and custody. It received a licence last year to underwrite non-financial corporate bonds, including international issuers, in the China Interbank Bond Market.
Another example is gold, as part of a physical commodities business, catering to rising demand in Asia and beyond. DBS also launched an API-based payments business, GlobeSend, including a new partnership announced last June for customers of Dubai’s Mashreq Bank to do peer-to-peer cross-border payments in real time.
For Tan, investing in key trends and areas of expertise is key. The institutional division created a new digital economy group five years ago to focus more on banking early-stage companies. It also combined its metals and mining team with its automotive team to pre-empt the ascent of electric vehicles and auto-industry supply-chain disruptions.
Tan gives the example of leading a consortium of banks in a $625 million 2021 financing for Indonesia’s first high-pressure acid leach smelter, as the country sought to position itself within the EV supply chain. “We were prescient in moving ahead of supply-chain and tech disruption in the auto industry, and being able to bank the whole ecosystem,” she says.
“We were able to onboard a lot of institutional clients in the last six years, because of these industry insights.”
Embedded innovation
That industry-specific focus, combined with a relatively early rollout of an agile-at-scale organisational structure which it calls Managing through Journeys, has resulted in higher customer satisfaction and growth – including among SMEs. The bank recorded a 30% reduction in the turnaround time for corporate account opening, and a halving of the time it takes to implement SME payment and collection API mandates in Singapore last year.
“Managing through Journeys has enabled us to gain a higher cadence and quality of customer insight and service, resulting in compound annual growth between 2022 and 2024 of 26% in SME numbers and 22% in SME revenues,” says Han Kwee Juan, group head of institutional banking.
The new organisational structure has run alongside a renewed effort over the past three years to infuse data, AI and innovation even deeper into the operating model and culture. Excellent customer experience has become a responsibility that is increasingly shared and rewarded.
That culture of innovation is one of DBS’s greatest assets and one of the most valuable legacies of Gupta’s tenure. “My job as CEO is to continue to inspire, and encourage the teams to learn, digest and then experiment, but to stay relevant, safe and resilient,” says Tan.
Among DBS’s recent gen-AI projects, a tailormade co-pilot in its wealth business is helping relationship managers distil data from multiple proprietary sources into a curated view on the client and portfolio, highlighting any information gaps to fill and suggesting appropriate actions – saving hours of preparation.
Last year, in an important step for all the firm’s employees, it released DBS-GPT to help staff search and synthesise internal bank information. This might make it easier for retail branch managers, for example, to serve SME customers, as the AI highlights which documents are needed for a credit application.
Existential questions
AI, of course, is changing rapidly. The release of DeepSeek’s R1 model has potentially radical implications for how banks can feasibly use AI to automate tasks. “I’m asking existential questions of my team now, because things are evolving as we speak,” says Tan. “The challenge we have is to keep pushing the envelope around change and not to be afraid of it. What was done last year could be obsolete today.”
Organisational agility is essential. “The mindset is more important than the tools,” says Tan. “The tools will change and evolve. That’s why I keep telling my managers: hire for attitude, don’t hire for knowledge. Knowledge is ubiquitous and democratised; attitude is not.”
DBS’s relative embrace of blockchain technology suggests a receptive attitude to technological change is already widespread at the bank. In October last year, it launched DBS Token Services for transaction banking clients, after a pilot earlier in the year with Ant International, a fintech affiliate of Alibaba. The scheme allows firms like Ant to settle multi-currency transactions within their group around the clock on DBS’s permissioned blockchain.
The bank also launched crypto options trading and structured notes for institutional investors and wealth clients in September, amid rising demand for its custody services and booming volumes on its digital assets trading platform.
“We are serving the whole digital-asset ecosystem from origination and trading to custody,” says Tan. “Our clients see how digital assets are becoming more mainstream, and more are looking at stablecoins as a potential use case for payments in emerging markets, where currencies are more volatile.”
While this digital asset business is already bringing the bank a new earnings stream and adding a new differentiating factor versus bigger and more global banks, trust is a vital differentiator – as in AI. Appropriate guardrails are vital for any bank to gain the confidence that they can deploy AI safely. Agentic AI now threatens to bring a new era of disruption in how customers access financial services, opening new inroads to big tech or fintech companies.
First-mover advantage
DBS’s transformation of its technology, data and customer processes makes it far less vulnerable than other incumbents. At the same time, a stable and secure reputation remains front and centre. While DBS has been at the forefront of using AI to make fraud prevention more accurate and efficient, events elsewhere in the world have recently showed how digital banking can speed up deposit runs on weaker banks.
“People keep their hard-earned savings with us, so security and resiliency are existential,” says Tan. “You’ve got to earn people’s trust, and you’ve got to be able to do what people expect you to do. We are a bank first, a tech company second, but we are a tech-enabled and tech-transformed bank.”
DBS started beefing up AI capabilities and data readiness over a decade ago. This included setting out data-usage principles in 2018 under the PURE (Purposeful, Unsurprising, Respectful, Explainable) framework. It has since become a core player in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Mindforge consortium on responsibility and innovation in gen AI in financial services.
“With the advent of gen AI, we have enhanced our governance around data, so we continue to use AI safely while continuing to reinvent the bank,” says Derrick Goh, group chief operating officer. “It’s about being purposeful in how we operate, and mindful about our role in society.”
DBS moved much earlier than other banks to replace older mainframe systems with microservices, APIs and open-source technology, alongside a reorganisation of working methods around customer journeys. Its tech stack today is cheaper and
more malleable for updates and new features, allowing quicker transaction-processing speeds and smoother operations overall. The bank has seen the effect, for example, in bigger transaction volumes, and in better in customer satisfaction and engagement metrics, both in the institutional and consumer bank.
One equity analyst covering DBS stock says the hours of disruption DBS customers experienced in 2023 would be business as usual in other developed markets, attracting at best passing attention.
But DBS has taken the threat to its name from that disruption extremely seriously. It quickly put in place stronger IT governance and access rules and has also automated systems so they are less subject to human error. It ensured alternative pathways for every element of its operation, from telecoms and datacentre to cybersecurity providers, guaranteeing customers can transact even in a worst-case scenario of a core-system outage.
Learn, unlearn, relearn
In early 2024, the bank appointed a new chief information officer, former head of Ping An Technology Eugene Huang. He has brought new rigour in making sure the bank can detect, diagnose and fix problems in minutes, with proven success this year in a major third-party outage.
According to Tan, being able to manage IT and data complexity effectively is becoming more important in the AI era, especially with the advent of potentially autonomous AI agents. “This was one step back, two steps forward,” she says of the reaction to the 2023 service disruption. “We’ve regrouped, redesigned, rehired, and made ourselves stronger. We’ve also created a better foundation from which to grow in agentic AI.”
As at other banks, AI will reduce the need for many DBS contract workers. But Tan insists the scope to repurpose staff to higher-value jobs, notably as relationship managers, is core to AI at DBS.
AI-powered chatbots can increasingly answer basic transactional questions previously fielded in call centres. Even when calls do come through, customer service officers are spending less time searching through bank policies and filling out post-call documentation, thanks to DBS’s gen-AI CSO Assistant.
“When there’s so much job transformation happening, it behoves us to continue to let our staff learn, unlearn, and relearn,” says Tan. “For us, that’s exciting. It keeps the innovation and transformative juices alive, and it helps us to partner with our customers to help them transform.”
Staying the course
Tan compares this commitment to staff to how there is a career continuum to fit the client wealth path between the retail and private bank, so junior staff will get trained and moved up, breeding loyalty. Like with clients, the attitude is that what is good for staff is good for the bottom line.
“Our staff turnover rates are low, and I think that’s because we are really bounded by a higher purpose,” Tan says.
That purpose, she says, is present in a S$1 billion 10-year programme to help vulnerable communities which it started rolling out last year as part of its community initiatives. It is also present in its net-zero transition strategy, at a time when other banks are ditching or watering down decarbonisation pledges.
“Being a responsible bank means that if you make commitments about trying to get your clients’ emissions down, then do it right, don’t flip flop,” Tan says.
One of her proudest achievements in recent years is a funding tool developed in India after a trip to Stockholm to meet Helena Helmersson, then CEO of Swedish clothing firm H&M. The tool allows H&M suppliers to get favourable funding from DBS to invest in more sustainable manufacturing methods based on an H&M offtake agreement. That led to the bank spearheading a wider initiative to green the fashion industry launched last year with a project in Bangladesh and involving Bestseller, Gap, H&M and Mango.
The bank has also pioneered blending private and multilateral financings in deals such as the Karian Water Services project in Indonesia, securing access to fresh water for millions of people in Jakarta.
All told, DBS’s sustainable financing commitments, net of repayments, rose by 27% to S$89 billion in 2024, a figure Tan expects to continue rising. “We believe that decarbonisation continues to be a business imperative and a business opportunity,” Tan says.
She harks back to DBS’s origins as the Development Bank of Singapore, set up by the government in 1968 to fuel Singapore’s economic miracle, and the later acquisition of the much older Post Office Savings Bank, whose motto was “Neighbours first, bankers second”.
“It’s all very well to get paid, and promoted, and have fun at work, but it’s also meaningful, especially to the younger generation, to be bounded by a common purpose. That’s really served us and our clients very well, especially in a very bifurcated world. People want to be with a bank that can stay above the noise and the geopolitics, have real-world impact, and keep customers safe.”
World's Best Bank 2025, 2018 - 2022
Euromoney, Global Finance, The Banker
Asia’s Safest Bank, 2009 – 2024
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