Singapore is Asia’s leading private banking hub – and at the heart of that story is DBS, a bank that has remade itself over the past decade and a half into one of the world’s best wealth managers.
DBS wins this award for many reasons. For one thing, in a year where many private banks suffered an outflow of client capital, the firm saw net new money double in 2022, hitting a record S$24 billion ($17.8 billion). Assets under management inched up 3% year on year in 2022, to $224 billion, with wealth management pre-tax profit jumping 40% to $2.03 billion. In the five years to the end of 2022, DBS has more than doubled the share of recurring fees to 25% of total fee income.
A good measure of that new money came from existing clients in the region, but a sizeable chunk came from new regional as well as global customers.