Discover Singapore’s Top Private Bank

It appears that the biggest bank in Southeast Asia has surpassed itself. Leading trade journal Euromoney has named Singapore-based DBS Bank the “world’s best bank” for the fourth consecutive year. It also won the “world’s best digital bank,” title, which is the first time the same organization has held both honours. 

The best private bank Singapore has owes its recent successes to audacious measures taken during the pandemic, such as the creation of new online marketplaces for carbon credit trading and blockchain-based financing, but its rise to prominence is the result of a digital revolution that has been developing for years.

CEO Piyush Gupta and his executive team initiated such change in 2014. Making banking enjoyable is their goal. Considering the industry’s damaged reputation following the worldwide economic downturn and the increasing trend toward online financial transactions, this is an ambitious goal. 

Indeed, according to a U.S. survey, three out of four millennials preferred banking services from companies like Google and Amazon, and 71% would rather visit a dental office than their neighbourhood bank. 

Gupta was made aware of the threat posed by technology when he met with Alibaba CEO Jack Ma earlier in 2014. Gupta was persuaded by the disruptive forces coming from China that would transform banking during that one-hour meeting. 

DBS realized that in order to attract a younger set of clients, it needed to compete with digital startups by using new technology to make traditional banking less complicated. Its goal was to make banking “joyful,” to put it briefly. The three strategic tenets of being digital to the core, making DBS “invisible,” and fostering a culture of “30,000 people start-up” would form the foundation of this strategy. 

Getting completely digital 

DBS’s ability to be creative in overcoming obstacles related to digital transformation that other organizations face is a key component of its success. Executives underestimate the project’s scale and impact, which contributes to the failure of two out of every three digital transformations. At the outset, DBS’s top executives made the decision that the bank must integrate emerging technology and data use across all departments. 

The change was swiftly successful. First, DBS significantly shortened the time it took for new items to reach the market. For instance, it introduced India’s maiden digital-only bank in 2016 via a mobile app that received weekly updates. Over one million new customers had joined Digibank by the next year.

Starting a new business

Early on in the bank’s digital transformation, DBS’s leadership posed the question, “What is the biggest barrier to implementing a start-up culture?” It turned out to be a problem with meeting procedures, which plague many big, intricate organizations. Too many meetings were held, and numerous ones had a clear goal or were unsuccessful. 

DBS’s revenue jumped from S$9.6 billion in 2014, the year it started its digital journey, to S$14.6 billion last year, propelling it to become the “world’s best bank.” However, it is not taking it easy. 

With an emphasis on sustainability and on-going digital transformation, the bank has developed a new vision: becoming a better bank in a better world. It seeks to provide goods and services that assist sustainable development, support social entrepreneurs and companies that have a positive social impact, participate in sustainable procurement, and give back to the communities where it operates.