Piyush Gupta: Challenges are not all digital

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DBS and, in particular, its chief executive, Piyush Gupta, are considered visionary in the digital disruption space. But it seems he overstated the case when he said, a few years ago, that in the next five to 10 years we would start to see banks failing because they had not embraced digital.

“I think that was wrong,” he says now. “Three years down the road, I’m not seeing any banks getting to the stage of failing in the short term. There’s a lot more resilience than I anticipated.”

Now, he thinks if banks are going to fail, it will be a matter of capital, not liquidity, as beating the cost of capital becomes more difficult.