After 15 years at the helm, Piyush Gupta announced last month that he will step down as CEO of DBS Bank in March 2025, to be succeeded by Tan Su Shan, who will become the bank’s first female head and first internal candidate to be chosen for the top spot.
Tan, 56, joined the Singaporean multinational lender in 2010. She will spend the transition period as deputy CEO alongside her present role as group head of Institutional Banking. Her appointment is the culmination of a decade-long succession process, the bank said. In a press briefing, DBS chair Peter Seah noted that the process included rotating succession candidates through different parts of DBS’s business and evaluating their performance.
Tan’s resume since joining the bank has included building the foundations of its wealth management business, managing consumer banking and wealth management, and leading day-to-day efforts to operationalize digitalization across those businesses. She was the unanimous choice to succeed Gupta of both the DBS board and an independent consultant that helped benchmark candidates against top names both within banking and outside the industry.
“Su Shan built a very strong foundation for wealth management,” Seah said. “She’s covered the two big parts of the bank that contribute the lion’s share of the bank’s income and she has performed well.”
Tan has big shoes to fill as Gupta’s successor, she told reporters, but “our shoes are different. We wear different kinds of shoes, so our styles may be different. But some things will not change going forward.” The way forward, she said, will still center on the “four C’s” that are integral to DBS: culture, customers, collaboration, and continuity. Tan emphasized the bank’s deep roots as the Development Bank of Singapore, but also its core philosophy of “Neighbors First—Bankers Second.” Having worked in multiple divisions, she added, “I would like to think I can bring a lot more of that collaboration internally: bringing a One Bank solution.”
