Speaking with the Boards 2025
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Piyush Gupta: Bring the outside in for fresh perspectives
The board veteran and former CEO of DBS Group takes personal interest in creating a culture of high performance, including developing senior executives for succession planning and career growth.
Formed to finance Singapore’s industrialisation in 1968, DBS has reimagined banking and the notions of what a bank should be. At the forefront of leveraging emerging technologies and with deepening presence in the key Asian axes of growth – Greater China, Southeast Asia and South Asia – Southeast Asia’s largest lender has a keen entrepreneurial bent. “Most people will tell you that DBS today is a very different bank” says Piyush Gupta, it’s long-serving CEO who stepped down at the conclusion of the banks’ annual general meeting in March. “The main difference is the culture of the place – the culture of leaning in, being entrepreneurial, being a little bit more risk taking.”
Taking the helm of the local banking icon in 2009 – in the “throes of the global financial crisis” – Gupta is credited for the incisive leadership that transformed DBS into a global financial powerhouse at the forefront of leveraging digital technology. The Chairman of Singapore Management University and Mandai Park Holdings takes personal interest in creating a culture of high performance, including developing senior executives for succession planning and for their own career development.
DBS actively works to give its senior executives board exposure as part of their development. Some might consider this approach progressive, given the demands on a person’s time and potential conflicts of interest. Tell us about this programme you started.
First, we have a very structured talent development programme based on the Triple Es: Education, Exposure and Experience. Staff are given opportunities to work on tasks and projects and to do a shadow programme called Be My Guest”, where they shadow someone from a different department.
But for more senior talent, exposure to other parts of the bank is inadequate. They need exposure to the outside world. Because at that level of seniority, we expect them to bring the outside in. Banking is a general discipline. If we want them to be leaders, then they must have much broader perspectives. Serving on a committee or on an external board or at a statutory board exposes you to other areas and other ways of thinking.
So as part of the exposure pillar of the Triple E programme, we consciously look at board assignments and board placements for our senior executives, starting with my one-downs and my management committee and a few who are two-down – both men and women.
It’s to make the bank a better performing bank. As a team, we become a better team able to bring in perspectives from outside.
We’ve heard there’s one other thing you do to introduce staff to boardroom discussions and duties.
I encourage our senior executives to sit in during board meetings. It’s mandatory for the executive committee to attend, but everyone else is just as welcome. By sitting in on the board meetings, they get to observe how a board functions.
Can you tell us about some of the success stories from the programme?
For the first time since founding, DBS has a homegrown female CEO in Tan Su Shan. She came up through this focused talent programme – that tells you something – and was appointed CEO after a robust and rigorous selection process. Her potential was identified at least 11 years ago, and just as with our other high potential talent, was given the kinds of exposure, coaching and even reverse mentoring, needed to grow into the top job. From private banking head, we moved her to run the consumer bank and then institutional banking, and along the way she chaired our subsidiary in Indonesia and took on external board roles as part of her growth.
With Su Shan’s elevation, her replacement in the corporate bank was internal. The replacement of that replacement was internal. Altogether we have six moves, all of them internal. The fact that we can move people around the business and grow them internally right up to CEO, says a lot about the long-term view of our talent programme.
Another fantastic example is Jeanette Wong, who was our Group Head of Institutional Banking before retiring in 2019. On retirement from DBS, she took on appointments on global boards – UBS Group AG and Prudential Plc. To get on a global board, you’d need to be familiar with Europe, the US, etc. You can’t go in green. You can only do it if you’ve been able to grow. She’s a fantastic case study of how you can groom talent to be helpful to the company, and to be helpful to them later in life.
What if DBS talents were to be poached by other firms. Would it be disappointing after having invested so much into their growth journeys?
When people get noticed and move on, it’s not because we gave them a board opportunity. Very few would have been noticed because of their board work. If they are noticed, it’d be for having a profile or a body of work. I don’t necessarily like losing people, but I recognise that people have careers to build. And we can think of it as contributing to the industry and to the country.
If you want to hang on to people by not developing them or exposing them to external opportunities and to see more of the world, you would be doing a disservice to your company and your shareholders. If you want to create performance for the company, you need high quality talent within the company. You need to help create that dynamism.
"If you want to create performance for the company, you need high quality talent within the company. You need to help create that dynamism. Second, you’ve got to create an environment where people lean in and are self-starters in looking for opportunities."
Having run the board component of DBS’ talent development programme for a decade, do you have any advice for other firms that want to encourage their senior executives’ advancement into boardrooms?
My advice is there are horses for courses. It’s not easy for first-timers to be placed on a large for-profit board. People will ask, “What experience do they have?” So you’ve got to look into laddering up. Allow and encourage appointments to your subsidiary boards and to external committees and professional associations. Then, serve on the board of a statutory board or non-profit to build up experience before stepping up into a large company board.
Second, you’ve got to create an environment where people lean in and are self-starters in looking for opportunities. In the beginning, I worked very hard to find board opportunities for staff who are capable and keen. I’d go through my contact list and talk to people. Now we’re at the point where our people are reaching out to organisations themselves. They now come to me and say, “I’ve got a board opportunity at this organisation. Should I do it?” Once you create an environment where it’s okay for staff to take on external responsibilities as part of their development, they will proactively seek out these opportunities.
You just stepped down as CEO after growing DBS into Southeast Asia’s largest lender. What achievement are you proudest of?
Most people will tell you that DBS today is a very different bank from what it was 15 years ago. The main difference is the culture of the place – the culture of leaning in, being entrepreneurial, being a little bit more risk taking. That is number one. Second is in using technology to reimagine banking. We’re really at the vanguard of banking’s digital transformation.
This conversation was first published in Speaking with the Boards 2025, an accompaniment to Singapore Board Diversity Review 2025.
Diversity on boards approaching a momentous milestone