DBS Group CEO Tan Su Shan Leads Southeast Asia’s Largest Bank Into The AI Era

The first woman boss in the banking giant’s 58-year-history is preparing for the future by seeding AI deep and wide across the organization.

In May, Tan Su Shan, CEO of DBS Group, Southeast Asia’s largest bank by assets, was on a flight when her cell phone lit up. A disgruntled retail customer had just vented his frustrations on LinkedIn about an unresolved problem he faced on the bank’s app. Tan, who along with other senior DBS executives was tagged in the post, responded midair with the assurance that the bank’s tech team would resolve it. Grateful for the CEO’s speedy action, the customer deleted his post.

This hands-on approach, emphasizing a personal touch, is signature Tan, the first woman boss in the 58-year history of what used to be the Development Bank of Singapore. A DBS veteran of 16 years, she was named to the post in 2024, which earned her a place on Forbes Asia’s Power Businesswomen list that year, and moved into the C-suite in March 2025. While her tech-savvy predecessor, Piyush Gupta, was credited with giving DBS a leading edge in digital banking, Tan, 58, is crafting her own imprint at a time when AI has advanced banking’s next tipping point.

Under Tan, DBS is fast embedding generative and agentic AI—software that can act autonomously to reason, plan and use tools to complete tasks—in every aspect of its internal operations while also preparing for what she describes as the “potential eventuality” of AI agent-to-agent banking, whereby AI agents representing clients and banks will interact with each other.

“It’s frontier stuff,” she tells Forbes Asia in an interview at DBS headquarters in Singapore’s central business district in late June. “In an agentic world, you won’t need banking applications anymore, it’s a complete leapfrog. You will create agents that can do payments…wealth transactions…foreign exchange, that can do loans,” she says.

Dressed in red and black, the colors of the bank’s logo, Tan admits this is her preferred sartorial choice when she’s meeting investors and clients. On the day of the interview, she’s also squeezing in a photoshoot, a presentation to the board of Temasek, the state-owned investment firm that owns about 28% of DBS, and a private banking event she’s hosting that evening.

Setting The PaceDBS is ahead of its local rivals across several key metrics and is also the most valuable Singapore-listed company.

Source: DBS, Bloomberg

*As of Dec. 31 **As of July 31

The CEO’s accelerated push into AI comes as DBS—which has 40,000 staff across 19 markets in three core businesses: retail banking and wealth management, institutional banking, and treasury markets—has to deal with a perfect storm of challenges, including the Middle East war, fluctuating oil prices, an unpredictable interest rate outlook and growing competition.

But Tan is working from a solid base. In 2025, the bank’s total income advanced 3% to a record S$22.9 billion, while net profit fell 3% to S$11 billion due to higher tax expenses. With DBS’ net profit growth accelerating 9% year-on-year to S$3.1 billion in the second quarter and total income climbing 6% to S$6.1 billion, she raised the full year guidance, saying total income in 2026 will surpass that of last year.

Tan acknowledges the uncertain environment that has marked her tenure so far. “We’ve had tariffs, we’ve had wars…we’ve had a lot of unprecedented volatility in rates, in currencies and markets,” she says. According to a May report by Thilan Wickramasinghe, an analyst at Malaysia’s Maybank, DBS has stress-tested scenarios such as oil at $120-$200 a barrel, 20%-30% drops in key currencies and higher inflation.

Meanwhile, Tan is upbeat about structural growth opportunities in Asia, underpinned in part by robust intraregional trade. She notes a surge in China-India trade as well as new trade corridors between countries such as Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Vietnam.

At the same time, one of the bank’s strongest businesses, wealth management, which along with retail banking accounted for 46% of DBS’ 2025 total income, continues to gain momentum, driven by an influx of the ultrarich and their family offices into Singapore, with its reputation as a safe haven. The bank estimates its retail and wealth assets under management (AUM) will surge at least 58% to more than S$1 trillion by 2030 from S$632 billion at end-2025, fueled partly by the AI push.

Wealth Is HealthDBS’ earnings are underpinned by its retail banking and wealth management business, which is benefiting from an influx of high-net-worth individuals into Singapore.

Source: DBS

*As of Dec. 31 **DBS target

Investors seem confident in Tan’s leadership, with the stock rising 60% since she took charge, scaling all-time highs and outpacing the benchmark Straits Times Index. “Amidst high levels of macro uncertainty, DBS’ scale, capital and increasing AI integration gives the group strong positioning to leverage opportunities,” says Maybank’s Wickramasinghe. The bank’s adoption of enterprise AI “to improve resilience and reduce human error,” he notes, could “drive further efficiencies.”

The AI drive has begun to pay off. All told, DBS had more than 2,000 active AI models as of end-2025 and says it achieved an estimated S$1 billion in economic value last year through revenue gains and cost reductions.

Part of the bank’s AI strategy is DBS-GPT, a generative AI platform that employees can use to access information such as internal policy documents and product data as well as for research. They can also use the platform to build their own personal agents, about 26,000 so far, thanks to Tan’s evangelizing efforts: At an offsite with the bank’s senior executives in March, she distributed a T-Shirt emblazoned with the slogan, “Talk is cheap, show me your agent.” Tan cites the example of a staffer responsible for collating the deposit rates of multiple banks in order to calculate what rate DBS should offer and who now uses a personal agent to do the grunt work.

“If everyone is using agents…if you still want to be the bank of choice…you better make sure your services, your products are lined up first in place, not last in the queue.

Eleven enterprise AI initiatives that span multiple departments such as legal and compliance, institutional banking, marketing and wealth management, have also been embedded. For example, an AI-powered workflow for writing credit memos has helped corporate bankers substantially reduce the amount of time they spend on such a task, according to Tan.

But potentially the most seismic shift in the industry is still to come: the introduction of AI agent-to-agent banking. The concept is still in its embryonic phase and DBS has yet to disclose specific plans, but it’s already testing the agentic commerce space. In February, it partnered with global payments giant Visa to allow AI agents to make payments on behalf of consumers using tokenized credit card details, a digital security measure that hides the card number.

Shortly after that collaboration, other banks joined a similar Visa program, including Oversea-Chinese Banking (OCBC), United Overseas Bank (UOB) and Standard Chartered. In March, Mastercard linked with both DBS and UOB for its first live agentic transaction in Singapore when an agent booked an airport ride using its framework. London-based Gartner vice president analyst Alistair Newton says that experimenting with agentic commerce first makes sense and banks are gleaning lessons from that space.

Competitors are likewise investing heavily to integrate AI and digital initiatives, with OCBC saying in July it would raise its annual tech outlay to about S$1 billion for the next few years. DBS declines to reveal how much it is spending on its AI roll-out, but Tay Wee Kuang, head of research at CGS International Securities Singapore, says it has a head start and, “in terms of trying to catch up, the other banks will have to do more to try to narrow the gap.”

DBS is also being challenged on its prime turf of wealth management. OCBC, with banking assets under management of S$342 billion as of Mar. 31, agreed earlier this year to buy the retail banking and wealth management assets of HSBC’s Indonesia arm and has pledged to double its retail wealth banking business by 2029. It’s set to hire 600 relationship managers over the next three years, and in July it launched an AI banking app that uses avatars to offer wealth management services. UOB, with wealth AUM of close to S$200 billion as of end-March, reportedly plans to expand its relationship management team by 60% to 450 in the next five years.

But Tan is determined to stay at the front of the pack. By deploying AI tools in its wealth management operations, the bank says it takes half as much time to onboard new wealth clients and it has helped to speed up investment decisions. By mid-August, it plans to integrate a generative AI-powered bot or vitual assistant into its digiWealth platform to help customers access wealth-related information. On the brick-and-mortar side, the bank will upgrade 36 of its wealth centers across Asia and open 18 new ones by end-2027. It also plans to add 600 frontline advisors and platform engineers in six key markets, including Singapore, mainland China, India and Taiwan, by 2028.

DBS-GPT, a proprietary gen-AI digital application that employees can use to help streamline their workflows.

COurtesy of DBS

As for AI agent-to-agent banking, DBS is planning for “base case, bad case and bull case” scenarios, according to Tan. “If everyone is using agents…if you still want to be the bank of choice…you better make sure your services, your products are lined up first in place, not last in the queue,” she asserts. “We have to prepare for [it], whether it happens in two years, five years, 10 years,” she adds.

It may not take that long, says Gartner’s Newton. “Pretty much every conversation I have with tier one, tier two bank clients across the globe, they are having digital knocks on their front door from [AI] agents and machines,” he reveals. By 2029, 25% of banks’ customer service interactions will use AI financial assistants or machine customers, up from 8% in 2025, according to Gartner.

The banks are grappling with how to interact with entities whose identities they can’t validate, says Newton. While some are tempted to close the door, “A larger proportion are trying to figure out how to engage with them, because while they know there are bad actors…increasingly they know these are agents acting on behalf of customers,” he says.

Indeed, both agentic and agent-to-agent banking are fraught with potential risks related to governance, trust, cybersecurity and sovereignty. DBS says it is working on “control plane” software to ensure rigorous oversight of all agents it deploys. Having guardrails in place is key, Tan maintains. “Your agents have to be grounded in very good data [relating to] the customer…in controls, in governance, in policies,” she says. With regard to the AI-powered credit-memo-writing workflow, for example, “we’ve put some stops and gates just to make sure there is human cognition,” she adds.

The spread of AI raises the spectre of layoffs. In May, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters was widely criticized and had to apologize for referring to the nearly 8,000 support staff set to lose their jobs because of AI as “lower-value human capital.” In Singapore, the parliament supported a motion in May that AI disruptions should not lead to jobless growth. Tan is mindful of treading a fine line. “Other people might say it’s easier, just fire everyone and then hire again, but if you do that, then where is the humanistic appreciation of people who’ve been with you 30 years, 40 years, 20 years?”

Tan elaborates that for staff willing to morph, “we want to save them.” DBS employees are being urged to reskill and roles are being redesigned, she adds. To help employees adapt, DBS has built an online learning hub where they can access more than 10,000 classes. The bank also organizes hackathons, teach-ins and trips to Silicon Valley to meet fintech startups.

“I wanted to get somebody who had the capacity to work collaboratively and in private banking, it’s not easy, because it’s an industry made up of a lot of prima donnas.”

— Piyush Gupta

Since she took charge, the number of entry level production engineers, who work on routine operations, has been reduced to 135 as of July from 3,000 due to AI, but the bank says those affected were retrained and moved to other tech positions within the organization. That said, DBS has acknowledged that some 4,000 temporary or contract roles could be phased out in the coming years due to AI adoption.

Born and raised in Singapore, Tan interned at DBS while studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University. After graduating in 1989, she worked for several financial institutions, including Barings Securities, a unit of Barings Bank that posted her to London, Tokyo and Hong Kong to cover institutional equity and derivative sales before it collapsed in 1995.

MUNSTER CHEONG FOR FORBES ASIA

After that, two stints at Morgan Stanley, where she pivoted to private banking, punctuated by a stop at Citi Private Bank, a division of Citibank, deepened her wealth management experience. In 2010, Gupta, an ex-Citi colleague, hired her back to DBS as group head of wealth management. She knew the movers and shakers and culture-wise, she was a good fit, says Gupta, now chairman of both Singapore investment company Keppel and the board of trustees at Singapore Management University. “I wanted to get somebody who had the capacity to work collaboratively, and in private banking, it’s not easy, because it’s an industry made up of a lot of prima donnas,” he says.

Tan went on to head up the retail banking and wealth management business as well as institutional banking at DBS. Over the years she honed her ability to strike a rapport with key clients. Billionaire hotelier Koh Wee Meng counts Tan as a private and corporate banker he has come to trust. She “connects with people very easily” and has built a “strong and long-term partnership” with his businesses, says Koh, who made his early fortune from property development and the budget Fragrance Hotel chain in Singapore, and also owns hotels in Australia and the U.K.

Tan worked closely with Gupta, whom she considers a mentor alongside longtime DBS chairman Peter Seah, as he transformed DBS into a digital bank. There were lessons along the way, including one related to an early attempt at AI adoption. In 2014, the bank worked on an AI tool to give wealth clients advice in real time, but after 18 months, Gupta pulled the plug. The key takeaway, he recalls, was that the bank needed to be “more pragmatic in our choice of use cases and try to focus on internal rather than external applications at first pass.” But the experiment, he says, gave DBS “a lot of learning to build on.” Tan agrees that the setback paved the way for the bank’s AI journey. “Learning from that failure was [something] money cannot buy,“ she says.

But as keen as Tan is on leading DBS into the AI future, she says that some things about banking won’t change, such as the personal touch, which, she insists, will remain indispensable. “You can use AI to answer questions,” but “You need humans to do what humans do best, which is to create long-term human-to-human relationships,” she says. “At the end of the day, that’s what being human is all about.”

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