Meet the Woman Rewiring Asia’s Biggest Bank
DBS Group’s CEO is on a plane. Her phone buzzes. A customer has just posted an angry rant on LinkedIn about a broken app feature — and tagged her by name. Most executives would deal with it later. Tan Su Shan didn’t wait. She replied right there, mid-flight, promising the tech team would fix it fast. The customer was so relieved, he deleted the post.
That one small moment says a lot about how Tan runs things. She’s not the type to hide behind titles. And since taking over as CEO of DBS Group in March 2025, she’s been just as hands-on about something much bigger: turning Southeast Asia’s largest bank into an AI powerhouse.
Let’s dig into how she’s doing it.
Who Is Tan Su Shan, Really?
Tan made history the moment she got the job — she’s the first woman to lead DBS in its 58-year story, and the first CEO ever chosen from inside the company. Before her, Piyush Gupta ran the bank for 15 years and turned it into one of the most digitally advanced banks around. Big shoes to fill.
But Tan wasn’t a stranger walking in. She’d already spent 16 years at DBS, running everything from consumer banking to wealth management to institutional banking. Before that, she worked at Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, in cities like Hong Kong, London, and Tokyo. She’s even talked about losing her job back in 1995 when Barings Bank collapsed — a rough moment early in her career that she says helped build the toughness she leans on today.
DBS itself is no small operation. It has about 40,000 employees working across 19 countries, and its stock market value recently crossed $100 billion. That’s the machine Tan now steers — and she’s steering it straight toward AI.
The Secret? DBS Started Early
Here’s the thing people miss: DBS didn’t just jump on the AI trend last year. It’s been quietly building AI tools for more than a decade. That head start is exactly why the bank could move so fast once generative AI and “agentic AI” (AI that can act on its own) became the big story in tech.
Right now, DBS runs more than 430 different AI tools across the business — four times what it had back in 2021 — powered by over 2,000 AI and machine learning models. These aren’t science projects sitting in a corner. They’re woven into how the bank manages risk, serves customers, and shapes new products.
Tan put it simply when she spoke with Global Finance: because DBS invested in data and tech early, it had the foundation to scale AI across hundreds of real, working uses instead of starting from scratch.
And the payoff shows up in the numbers. In 2025, DBS pulled in a record S$22.9 billion in total income and a record S$13.1 billion in profit before tax. Its return on equity hit 16.2%, way ahead of other banks, local and global. The good run kept going into 2026 too — net profit jumped 9% year-on-year to S$3.1 billion in the second quarter, and total income climbed 6% to S$6.1 billion. Tan was so confident in the trend, she raised the bank’s full-year guidance.
AI You Can Actually Touch
A lot of companies talk about AI. DBS actually uses it — every day, in ways employees and customers can feel.
Take DBS-GPT, the bank’s own AI assistant for staff. It gives employees access to millions of internal documents, so they can quickly translate materials, draft letters to customers, or get up to speed on tricky topics like small business banking. No more digging through old files or bugging the one person who “knows everything.”
For customers, there’s DBS Joy, a chatbot for business and small company banking that launched in July 2025. It’s already helped more than 20,000 corporate and small business customers, offering support any time of day. That’s helped push customer satisfaction scores up by 23% — a real jump for something that used to be a pain point.
Behind the scenes, a tool called CodeBuddy mixes generative and agentic AI to help DBS’s tech staff save up to 20% of their time on coding work. Other tasks — like writing test cases or documenting projects — have shrunk from months of work down to just weeks.
And it gets personal too. DBS built over 100 AI tools that study customer data and send helpful nudges through the app — a warning about a possible cash shortfall, a smart suggestion, that kind of thing. The bank also uses AI, paired with a bit of behavioral science, to catch suspicious transactions and prompt people to pause before sending money — a simple trick that’s helping cut down on scams.
Add it all up, and independent researchers estimate DBS’s AI tools have created hundreds of millions of dollars in real value over the past couple of years, closing in on roughly S$1 billion total. The bank isn’t just guessing at these numbers either — it compares results with and without AI to make sure the gains are genuine.
What’s Next: AI That Thinks and Acts
If the last few years were about AI that could write and chat, Tan’s eyes are now on agentic AI — systems that can reason through a problem, come up with a plan, and carry it out mostly on their own. As she told McKinsey, “AI is eating the world,” and staying ahead means staying flexible and open-minded.
Her big dream goes further than saving time behind the scenes. She wants DBS’s AI to eventually work almost like a personal financial advisor — something everyday customers can chat with directly in the banking app for real help with their money. This isn’t a new interest for her, either. She was one of the first DBS executives to champion AI in the first place, according to Fortune’s reporting on her career.
When CNBC asked her at Singapore Fintech Week whether AI was actually paying off, she didn’t hesitate. “It’s not hope,” she said. “It’s now. It’s already happening. And it will get even better.” That’s a bold thing to say at a time when a lot of big companies are still wondering if their AI spending is worth it.
Moving Fast — But Not Recklessly
For all her excitement about AI, Tan is just as clear that it needs limits. As DBS leans more on systems that act with less human oversight, she talks a lot about the bank’s responsible AI framework — rules that help make sure these tools are used safely, not just quickly.
That balance shows up in how she talks about leadership overall. Her personal rule: when things are going great, don’t lose your head. When things are going badly, don’t lose your heart. It’s not just something she says in interviews — it seems to genuinely guide how she runs DBS’s AI push. She’s said she doesn’t just want the bank to be “AI-enabled.” She wants it to be a gen-AI bank with a heart.
That care for people shows up in practical ways too. DBS has rolled out training programs to help staff learn new skills as AI changes how they work, instead of just leaving them behind. Tan has said openly that she expects AI to keep moving fast, and she treats preparing her people for that as seriously as building the tech itself.
Steering Through Rough Weather
None of this has happened during calm, easy times. Tan has had to guide DBS through real turbulence — tension in the Middle East, swinging oil prices, an interest rate picture nobody can quite predict, and tougher competition across Asian banking. And yet the bank’s results have held up strong. Tan credits that to keeping the business diversified and sticking to what she calls the “4 Ds”: Dependable, Diversifier, Digital, and Disruptor.
That mix of a steady strategy and smart use of AI seems to be helping DBS make the most of shifting trade patterns across Asia, even with so much uncertainty in the air. Raising full-year guidance in the middle of all that says a lot about how solid the bank really is under the hood.
Writing Her Own Chapter
Piyush Gupta will always be remembered for giving DBS an early lead in digital banking. Tan looks like she’s writing her own chapter — turning that digital groundwork into a bank that runs on AI as naturally as it runs on money. She’s landed on Forbes Asia’s Power Businesswomen list and even made the cover of Forbes Asia’s August 2026 issue, which tells you how closely people across the region are watching her next move.
What stands out most, though, is that Tan doesn’t treat AI like a buzzword for press releases. She treats it like real infrastructure — something to build carefully, measure honestly, and keep in check. She’s called this moment “frontier stuff,” which captures both how exciting she finds it and how seriously she’s taking it.
Heading deeper into 2026, DBS has record profits, hundreds of AI tools already running, and a CEO who still finds time to personally reply to a frustrated customer on social media. That combination says something simple but powerful: this isn’t a bank just trying to keep up with the AI moment. It’s trying to show everyone else what doing it right actually looks like. And for a bank that started in 1968 helping Singapore’s young businesses get off the ground, that feels like exactly the right story to be writing next.
