Picked after decade-long succession process, Tan Su Shan will be DBS' first female CEO

SINGAPORE: When veteran banker Tan Su Shan takes the helm of DBS, she will be the first female chief executive officer of Singapore's largest bank.

Ms Tan, 56, is currently head of the DBS’ institutional banking group. She will take the top job when Mr Piyush Gupta, 64, retires in March 2025 after 15 years as CEO.

Ms Tan brings “solid credentials” to her new role, DBS said on Wednesday (Aug 7) as it announced the leadership change. 

"Her appointment is the culmination of a decade-long succession process," the bank added, noting that the Singaporean was deemed the strongest among all internal and external candidates.

At a media briefing, Mr Gupta described his successor as someone with "fantastic business instinct" and "great customer skills". She gets along well with team members and is armed with expertise in operations ranging from consumer banking and wealth management to technology, he said.

"I have every confidence that she has what it takes to lead this institution to greater heights in days to come," he added.

BANKING CAREER

Ms Tan graduated with a Master of Arts from Oxford University where she studied politics, philosophy and economics.

She spent more than a decade at Morgan Stanley and Citi before joining DBS in 2010, working on building the bank's wealth management business in the first three years

She subsequently added consumer banking to her portfolio and has been credited with expanding the bank’s consumer and wealth business.

Under her charge, DBS’ consumer and wealth business grew steadily to account for about a third of pretax profit by the time she moved to her current role in 2019, according to a Bloomberg report.

Ms Tan now heads the institutional banking group, another crown jewel of DBS.

Together, the consumer and wealth business and the institutional banking business account for 90 per cent of the bank’s income.

“She’s covered two big parts of the bank … and she has performed well,” said DBS chairman Peter Seah.

Ms Tan also led day-to-day efforts to operationalise the bank’s digitalisation strategy across the businesses she ran, and has been president commissioner of DBS Indonesia since 2014.

With more than 35 years of experience in the banking world, Ms Tan has received international recognition.

In October 2014, she became the first Singaporean to be recognised as the world’s best leader in private banking by PWM/The Banker, a wealth publication by the Financial Times Group.

The publication said then that Ms Tan "received close to unanimous backing from the judges" and stood out amongst a list of 30 leaders from banks in North and Latin America, Europe and Asia.

In 2018, Ms Tan was nominated by Forbes Magazine as a "Top 25 Emergent Asian Woman Business Leader". 

In the same year, she was named "Retail Banker of the Year" by the Digital Banker, an industry news and research agency.

Outside of DBS, Ms Tan sits on the advisory board of Dyson’s family office, Weybourne Holdings. She is also a board member of Mapletree Pan Asia Commercial Trust.

She previously served as a Nominated Member of Parliament in Singapore from 2012 to 2014.

MAKING HER MARK IN A MALE-DOMINATED INDUSTRY 

Ms Tan would be the second woman to head a major bank in Singapore, following in the footsteps of Ms Helen Wong who was appointed chief executive of OCBC in 2021.

Ms Tan has spoken publicly of her experiences working in a male-dominated industry.

At an event organised by DBS last March, Ms Tan recounted what it was like to work in male-dominated dealing rooms in New York and London in the 1990s.

“There’s a lot of posturing … there are all sorts of chest-thumping,” she said.

She also recalled how during a business trip to the Middle East in the 1990s, attendees at a meeting room took "a collective gasp of horror" when she walked in.

"I knew from that moment on that the meeting was going to go pear-shaped … So after a while I said, ‘Look gentlemen, you clearly don’t believe in my ability to work with you … I put the ball in your court. You give me a test. I would do it in front of you. If I pass, you give me a chance."

She passed the test, Ms Tan said with a smile. 

"Not only did they give me a chance, they actually asked me for my agenda," she said. "The head guy took my agenda and called everyone else in the next few meetings that I had … to tell them I was ok.”

Asked for her advice on handling gender discrimination, Ms Tan said having a "resilient attitude" matters.

"If they throw something at you, throw it back," she said at the March event. "Throw it back with gusto."

On taking over as the new CEO of DBS, Ms Tan said: "I'm very grateful for this big opportunity. I'm also very mindful that this is a huge responsibility."

She noted that she has "big shoes to fill" as the successor to Mr Gupta.

"But guess what? Our shoes are different. We wear different kinds of shoes," she told reporters.

"STRONG TRACK RECORD"

Mr Thilan Wickramasinghe, Maybank Securities' head of research in Singapore and regional head of financials, said Ms Tan has "a very strong track record of experience".

One major challenge Ms Tan has to tackle is structural slowdown in North Asia, particularly China and Hong Kong where about a third of DBS' book is, he told CNA's Asia First programme on Thursday.

This also comes as the world expects interest rates "to be coming off on a full-blown scale", with the United States Federal Reserve expected to cut rates soon.

"Managing the banking business, which has enjoyed phenomenal margin growth over the past couple of years, to a point where margins are going to start to come down - that will be one of the key challenges that she will need to manage," Mr Thilan said.