Piyush Gupta: The veteran banker who led DBS for 15 years

SINGAPORE — After 15 years at the helm of Singapore’s largest lender, DBS CEO Piyush Gupta will leave his post.
DBS announced on Wednesday (Aug 7) that Mr Gupta will retire at the next annual general meeting on March 28, 2025.
The bank’s group head of institutional banking Tan Su Shan, 56, will succeed him.
During an analyst briefing in May, Mr Gupta, 64, was asked about chatter in the market that he could retire this year.
“No, I am not retiring this year,” he responded at the time. 
At a media briefing on Wednesday, Mr Gupta said that in 2021, he told the board that he wanted to retire at the age of 65. 
“43 years of a banking career, 15 years of having run DBS, and it would be a great time to pass the baton,” he said.
Asked if he was writing a memoir, Mr Gupta said he has no plans to.
“I do want to, you know, do a lot of other different things — nature and conservation being one — but no time for memoirs,” he said. 
Mr Gupta has worked for only three companies so far, two of them major banks.
In 1982, he started his career in Citibank’s office in Kolkata, India, working in the back office as a manager of clerical staff, according to an interview with the New York Times in 2013.
Climbing the ranks, he became the CEO of Citibank in Indonesia by 2000.
That was when he took the leap of faith and started his own business — a start-up called Go4i.com.
It was at the height of the dotcom bubble and he entered the venture together with the Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest newspapers.
Soon, however, the bubble burst and Go4i.com folded.
“I went through two months of a shake-up in my self-confidence – having anxiety around what I wanted to do, what was going to happen in the future,” he said, according to a chapter on him in the book Lessons For My Younger Self.
He returned to Citi in 2001, where he became the CEO for South East Asia-Pacific, and was responsible for all of Citi’s business — financial markets, investment banking, wealth management and more — in those markets.
DBS appointed him as CEO in 2009. In a statement at the time, DBS said his “broad-based banking experience” positions him well to grow the franchise, and added that he is known for being a “well-rounded leader”.
“Gupta has successfully managed businesses in good and challenging times, and is a seasoned Asia hand,” the statement said.
Mr Gupta was born in India in 1960 and became a Singapore citizen shortly after taking on the role of DBS CEO.
The top job at DBS was vacant for a few months before Mr Gupta was appointed.
His immediate predecessor, Mr Richard Stanley, died in April the same year from leukaemia.
This also happened while the world was trying to recover from the global financial crisis of 2007 to 2008.
Because of the crisis, banks were distracted and too focused on “the battles of yesterday”, he said in an interview with the National University of Singapore’s Business School in 2015.
“As a consequence, banks have not thought enough about the battleground of tomorrow. But it is changing — in the last two years, digitisation has now become the number one agenda for most banking CEOs,” he said.
Things like digital payments, online banking and blockchain technology emerged and became popular during his tenure. 
For example, digital wallet PayLah! was launched in 2014 and now has more than 2 million users.
Mr Gupta on Wednesday praised the board for its role in the transformation of DBS over the years.
“Even though I’ve been the face of DBS in many ways, banking is a team sport, and the most important part of this team has been the DBS board,” he said.
The board will bring continuity during the executive leadership transition where Ms Tan and Mr Gupta will play “tag team” while she gets comfortable with running the bank.
Both DBS and Mr Gupta received awards over the years, as a testament to his leadership.
In 2022, DBS received its fifth “World’s Best Bank” title from US-based publication Global Finance. It was also named “World’s Best Digital Bank” by Euromoney in 2018.
Mr Gupta was one of the world’s top 100 best-performing chief executives in 2019, according to the Harvard Business Review. In 2021, he was named Global Indian of the Year by the Economic Times.
But his time at DBS was not always smooth sailing.
As early as 2010, the year after he became CEO, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) criticised the bank for a seven-hour system-wide outage, according to Finextra, a fintech news website based in London.
All consumer and business banking services and ATM and point of sale transactions went down on Jul 5 that year, and MAS said the bank failed to put in place a robust technology risk management framework.
In November 2021, digital banking services suffered a two-day outage. MAS said it was a “serious disruption”. 
Both times, MAS imposed an additional capital requirement on the bank, though the amount in 2021 was much larger.
After another day-long outage in March 2023, MAS said the disruption was “unacceptable” and that the bank had fallen short of expectations.
In October that same year, DBS was hit by yet another disruption that affected ATMs and digital services. Citibank services also went down.
The outage prevented 2.5 million payment and ATM transactions from being completed.
In November, MAS barred DBS from acquiring new business ventures for six months and instructed the lender to pause all non-essential IT changes for six months.
This April, MAS said it would not extend the six-month pause, but that DBS must still set aside additional regulatory capital by applying a multiplier of 1.8 times to its risk-weighted assets. CNA
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