Tan Su Shan, CEO and director of DBS Group—winner of this year’s Best Bank in Asia-Pacific—discusses the benefit of AI investments.
As global banks navigate trade fragmentation, AI disruption and volatile markets, DBS continues to distinguish itself through strong profitability and an aggressive technology strategy.
In this conversation with Deputy CEO Tan Su Shan, the bank’s leadership discusses how DBS surpassed $100 billion in market capitalization, scaled AI across hundreds of use cases and positioned itself to benefit from shifting intra-Asia trade flows.
Tan also outlines the challenges posed by tariffs, foreign-exchange swings and the accelerating evolution of generative and agentic AI as DBS looks toward 2026.
Global Finance: What factors shaped your bank’s performance in 2025?
Tan Su Shan: We delivered a solid financial performance in 2025, reflecting the resilience of our diversified franchise. Our total income and profit before tax hit new highs of S$22.9 billion ($18 billion) and S$13.1 billion, respectively. Return on equity (ROE) was 16.2%, within our medium-term target and several percentage points above our local and global peers.
A big part of our success was being well-positioned to capture structural growth opportunities arising from the shifting macro landscape, including rising intra-Asia trade and investment flows, as well as new trade and supply corridors between Asia and other regions such as Europe.
GF: What role did Al play in that performance?
Tan: We aim to sustain our leadership as an AI-enabled bank with a heart, using technology to deliver a competitive advantage while creating tangible impact for customers.
We have industrialized AI at scale, deploying more than 430 use cases—four times 2021 levels—powered by over 2,000 sophisticated models. These have delivered measurable outcomes, including stronger risk management, improved controls, and productivity gains. In 2025, our data analytics and AI/ML initiatives generated approximately S$1 billion in economic value.
Building on this foundation, we are embedding Gen AI and Agentic AI into customer journeys and internal workflows. Horizontal capabilities such as our DBS-GPT proprietary generative AI platform provide role-based access to millions of internal documents, accelerating decision-making and problem-solving. Vertical solutions such as DBS Joy, our Gen AI-enabled chatbot, deliver always-on, high-quality customer support at scale, improving customer satisfaction by 23% while handling more than 235,000 AI-powered interactions. Together, these capabilities lift productivity, decision quality, and customer experience by combining machine intelligence with human judgment.
GF: Which milestones did DBS reach in 2025?
Tan: It was a landmark year for DBS, notwithstanding global volatility, and the market’s confidence in our franchise has never been clearer. We surpassed the $100 billion market capitalization milestone in June and closed the year at $124 billion, cementing our position among the top 25 banks globally.
Moving ahead, we remain focused on building a resilient, growth-oriented, and future-ready market leader, anchored by our three strategic moats of trust, data, and culture.
GF: What was 2025’s greatest challenge for DBS?
Tan: Undoubtedly, our greatest challenge was the onset of tariffs following Liberation Day and the market volatility that followed. When you layer on headwinds from interest rates and significant FX fluctuations, you create a perfect storm we had to navigate. Despite these pressures, DBS delivered a solid financial performance. We achieved this by being proactive with our balance sheet hedging, securing record deposit inflows, and maintaining a sharp, strategic focus on high-ROE businesses such as wealth management.
At the same time, technology continued to move at a breathtaking pace, especially with the rapid shift toward Gen AI and Agentic AI. Fortunately, we weren’t starting from scratch, as we have been working with AI for more than a decade. Our early and sustained investments in data and technology gave us the robust foundation needed to industrialize AI across hundreds of meaningful use cases, positioning us to move quickly as the techno-logy evolves.
GF: Does 2026 present new challenges?
Tan: Our strategic priorities remain intact, and in 2026, we will continue leveraging our core strengths—what we term the “4 Ds”: Dependable, Diversifier, Digital, and Disruptor—to be a beacon of stability for our customers amid heightened volatility.
We have embarked on our vision to become an AI-enabled bank with a heart, transforming our operating models, leveraging machine intelligence, and preserving human empathy to reinforce the trust customers place in us. We will continue scaling our structural growth engines, which remain relevant even in a more bifurcated world.
This includes prioritizing growth in high-ROE businesses such as wealth management, transaction services, financial institutions group, and treasury customer sales. We also remain focused on our six core markets in Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Taiwan, China, and Indonesia) and on building connectivity between our Western and Asian clients. Strengthening resilience across every organizational layer remains a key, ongoing priority.
