DBS regains the best bank in Asia award it first won three years ago, for showing how innovation, digital vision and creative thinking can not only sound good but also translate into record profits and resilient margins.

Australia Best Bank

The Singapore-based bank has developed into a business fit for purpose in the modern world. Is this the model for the bank of the future?

Almost 10 years into his role as chief executive of Singapore-based DBS, Piyush Gupta has spent the last six of them on a mission to make an institution that looks more like a tech company than a bank. His message and methods are working, as digital disruption shreds costs and creates new revenue streams. Has DBS created the template for how successful banks will need to look in the future?

DBS named world’s best bank in Euromoney Awards for Excellence 2019; JPMorgan is the world’s best investment bank; Erste’s Treichl recognized as banker of the year.

As part of Euromoney's 50th anniversary coverage, we profile some of the biggest names that we interviewed for our May Asia focus.

Tan Su Shan has led DBS’s efforts to become the leading home-grown bank for wealth management in Asia, during a decade in which the number of billionaires in the region has soared.

For many private banks that set up in Asia in the last decade, the cost of doing business kept them locked out of the vast expansion of wealth in the region; those that didn’t leave are settling into a more mature industry, but they are a long way from being able to relax.

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In a supposedly slow-moving industry, the amount of change in global wealth management over five decades has been remarkable.

Profits are up, but the markets hits it – for good and bad – for being the bank/tech hybrid Gupta has modelled.

UOB responds with announcement of Grab alliance.

Alternatives to green bonds and loans needed to boost Asian green finance; engaging retail investors will be key.

Asia offers a unique client set of young entrepreneurs; it also offers the challenge of new generations inheriting wealth with different expectations from their predecessors. That is a great opportunity, but it requires private banks to be nimble, thoughtful and technologically adept.

There are only two truly global, fully fledged cash management banks today, but the digital arms race in transaction services gives far more banks the opportunity to be world class.

DBS marked its 50th anniversary by commissioning a musical based on its web series 'Sparks'.

Neal Cross brought a range of unusual experiences to his job as chief innovation officer at DBS, one of the world’s most impressive banks for digital ideas. His desire to disrupt and transform doesn’t stop at the bank – it extends to Sumatran orangutans.

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HSBC maintains its dominance of the cash management industry.

After two years, OCBC loses its crown to local peer DBS this year as Euromoney’s best bank for small and medium-sized enterprises. The two Singapore houses remain almost unique in building a meaningful SME business that operates across borders.

DBS, under CEO Piyush Gupta, is not the biggest name in transaction services in Asia, but it is the one that impresses most in its trajectory.

DBS

It is a big ask to win any Euromoney award for three years consecutively, but DBS’s leadership in the digital realm is unarguable.

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