In late March 2025, there was an extraordinary spectacle outside DBS’ headquarters. Hundreds of staff with placards and balloons lined up to see Piyush Gupta exit the skyscraper for the last time.
How did his departure come to stir up such emotion? It was not just because he had been chief executive for 15 years but more about how DBS had changed so much.
Gupta’s leadership of DBS has coincided with an era when banks from outside the large developed markets have come to the fore. Until 2008, big western banks were gaining market share in retail and commercial banking. Many then lost their advantage in terms of capital, technology and people. DBS and Gupta – who until 2009 had spent 27 years at Citi, ultimately as head of southeast Asia Pacific – epitomised that change.
Since 2009, DBS’s market cap has quadrupled, with an annualised total shareholder return of 13%. Its number of customers has more than tripled. A move to higher returning business has seen its return on equity roughly double to a level far ahead of banks like Citi, HSBC and Standard Chartered. Meanwhile, fellow bank chief executives from around the world have sought Gupta’s advice on technological transformation, thanks partly to testimonies from the big consultancies and cloud providers.
Things were very different 15 years ago. The bank was lagging peers on profitability and losing share in core business. Its customer service had earned it the nickname “Damn Bloody Slow”. A tendency to make decisions by committee meant internal movement was similarly sluggish. Gupta had a vision of being Asia’s best bank yet struggled to convince the team it could be the best in Singapore.
Early on, what became known as his Asia wave involved an unwavering balance sheet commitment to the region and moving away from just being a syndicated loan shop to build fee-rich businesses in transaction banking and wealth management.
“While creating the strategy took us a couple of months, it took much more time to get alignment around that: a common scorecard, KPIs, consistent intentionality at the top and ambassadors at different levels,” Gupta recalls.
There were other elements. DBS’s policies and technology were fragmented between countries when Gupta arrived. It lacked a management information system that could provide a proper understanding of the profitability of businesses in its various markets. “At Citi, this was in place in the 1980s,” says Gupta. “We were flying blind.”
Customers come first
Gupta also made a start on improving the culture including more cohesion and decisiveness in the bank, with more focus on customer outcomes.
Junior call centre staff were soon allowed to decide when to waive card fees without asking managers. In one case, an operations manager decided to remove a security feature on ATMs. It was lengthening queues, not adding much protection and skim cases were few. Criminals quickly took advantage, which meant the bank had to compensate some customers and the financial supervisor asked questions. Far from doling out punishment, Gupta gave the employee an award for putting the customer first.
“If we wanted to get good customer outcomes, we had to start getting more confident about empowering people and letting them make decisions at different levels of the organisation,” Gupta says.
If we wanted to get good customer outcomes, we had to start getting more confident about empowering people
Piyush Gupta
Around the same time, Gupta instigated a programme to encourage staff to switch roles after two or three years, giving managers time to find a replacement. This again reflected his experience of how Citi took stock of talent and stretched future leaders like him by job rotation. It was a shift from how the pay structure and career ladder in the 2000s started to disincentivise traders and investment bankers from moving to different businesses, entrenching business silos.
“Citi did an incredibly good job when I was younger of building up talent, which is why in most emerging markets if you throw a stone, it hits an ex-Citi banker,” says Gupta.
“I learnt most of what I know about banking at Citi in the 1980s and 1990s. I always believed that to be a good banker, you need to have the lateral, horizontal exposure, because that’s the only way you learn to connect the dots: how what is here affects the rest of the bank.”
By 2013, DBS was seeing benefits, including in its home market share and in transaction banking, where its trade book had grown tenfold in three years. The wealth business, almost from scratch, was becoming globally competitive under Tan Su Shan: Gupta’s eventual successor, who he recruited from Morgan Stanley in 2010.
But Gupta needed scope to grow a regional retail and commercial bank without the sort of big M&A deals that regulators were discouraging after 2008. Suddenly, it seemed like the tech companies might get there first – and threaten the bank’s core business.
The GANDALF way
Meeting Alibaba cofounder Jack Ma in 2014 was a game changer. Ma’s tech group had smashed into financial services, gaining hundreds of millions of customers in China and was eyeing southeast Asia. It offered an experience and pace of innovation that incumbent banks could only dream about.
Which other banks could Gupta and his CIO David Gledhill turn to for lessons on how to deal with this threat? None, certainly outside China. Instead, DBS sought to make itself an alternative to the FANG big tech stocks, as they were then known (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google). The DBS version would be GANDALF (Google, Apple, Netflix, DBS, Amazon, Linked In, Facebook). In getting there, it aimed to be recognised as the world’s best bank by 2020.
“We convinced ourselves that there was a new way of conducting banking and that if we were willing to commit to using tech differently, there was no reason why we could not operate like Facebook or Amazon,” Gupta says.
This required much more spending on technology. Yet, far from rejecting the investment programme, DBS’ board agreed to expand it by another S$200 million: even though Gupta made clear the efficiency ratio would suffer in the short term. It helped here to have Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek as the biggest shareholder. There was a sense that DBS could afford it – unlike many large global banks at the time – because, with China’s economy booming, it was seeing such success in growing fee income from the wealth and transaction banking business.
“We had sufficient runs in the short term to allow us the credibility to invest for the long term,” Gupta explains.
We didn’t want to just put lipstick on a pig and focus only on the front end. We also wanted to go and change our back and middle end
Piyush Gupta
Within a couple of years, this was already paying off. The bank started to be acknowledged in the banking industry as a global leader in digital experience. The programme, in addition, brought financial benefits earlier than expected. Moving to smaller data centres and open-source technology, the bank was quickly saving money on everything from air conditioning to licensing fees.
Most big international banks at the time were still obsessing about Basel IV and low interest margins and paid peripheral attention to digitalisation. “I think we had a four or five-year head start over 90% of our industry,” says Gupta.
“We didn’t want to just put lipstick on a pig and focus only on the front end. We also wanted to go and change our back and middle end.”
In 2016, Euromoney named DBS the world’s best digital bank, the first time Euromoney gave that award. A year later, in another industry first, DBS was able to demonstrate to investors why this mattered for them. It showed that its digital customers had a return on equity almost twice as high as others (27% versus 18%) thanks to a much lower cost of acquisition and service, and higher balances, with about twice the average revenue per customer.
In 2019, Euromoney named DBS world’s best bank for the first time, a year earlier than Gupta had hoped.
A cultural legacy
The question was where to go next. One answer was the environmental, social and governance arena: not just being the best bank but the best bank for a better world, reinforcing its development roots. Another was artificial intelligence, following on from earlier efforts to centralise and standardise data, and to build up a central AI team with hundreds of data scientists and engineers. Recently, the AI push has led to more profiles from the likes of McKinsey and Harvard Business Review, and another wave of industry leaders seeking advice from Gupta and his team.
Gupta believes these early moves have given DBS a data advantage and another head start over other banks: not least because of the general attitude it has created towards AI inside the bank. It is, moreover, one of the first banks to publish figures about the financial value that its AI investments are creating.
“The key to me was: how you institutionalise the use of AI, how do you socialise it into the process flow? That’s a lot of work. You need to get people used to asking: ‘How do I plug AI into my journey, into my process?’”
As those early moves in wealth and transaction continue to bear fruit, Gupta left DBS shortly after it reported all-time highs in revenue and net profit for 2024. Its market capitalisation had passed S$100 billion in mid-2024 and kept growing. In 2025, Euromoney has named DBS the world’s best bank for the third time. It is the world’s best bank for corporate responsibility. It is the world’s best bank for customer experience, an area in which DBS has worked even harder lately by moving away from teams structured along product and function lines.
Perhaps Gupta’s most valuable legacy is his work to foster a deep-seated culture of innovation.
That culture of innovation lies not only in AI but also in its attitude to making use of blockchain technology and developing digital asset businesses. Building on its earlier front and back-end technological transformation, the bank has adopted agile-at-scale working methods part its Managing Through Journeys programme. It has tried to industrialise innovation in the bank, as Gupta terms it: borrowing from Netflix’s chaos engineering methods and running things like internal crowdsourcing campaigns.
“It just seemed to me that in the future, competitive advantage will come not so much from what you do, because the pace of change is so fast you have to keep pivoting,” Gupta explains. “Your advantage will come more from building agility and nimbleness in the company and changing the way work gets done.”
