By Sydney Severn
The Development Bank of Singapore (DBS) has appointed its first female CEO, Tan Su Shan. Having contributed to the company as deputy CEO and group head of institutional banking, Shan will replace the current CEO of 14 years, Piyush Gupta, upon his retirement in March 2025.
“I am really deeply honored and humbled by this,” Shan said. “Piyush is very big shoes to fill.”
Shan graduated with a Master of Arts from Lincoln College at Oxford University, where she studied politics, philosophy and economics. She completed executive leadership courses at the business schools of Harvard, Stanford and Singularity University.
Before leading the institutional banking business, Shan served as the group head of consumer banking and wealth management for almost a decade, in addition to being president commissioner for PT Bank DBS Indonesia. She sits on the advisory board of Weybourne Holdings, has membership in Mapletree Pan Asia Commercial Trust and served as a nominated member of Parliament in Singapore from 2012 to 2014.
Shan has 35 years of experience in consumer banking, institutional banking and wealth management. Her career took off at ING Baring Securities in institutional equity and derivative sales, after which she became executive director at Morgan Stanley in 1997, regional head at Citigroup in 2005 and then back to Morgan Stanley as head of private wealth management for Southeast Asia in 2008.
She joined DBS in 2010, spending her first three years there building its wealth management business, and is now set to become the second female leader of a major Singaporean bank.
Shan was recognized in Singapore as the Best Leader in Private Banking in October 2014; nominated by Forbes as one of the Top 25 Emergent Asian Women Business Leaders; and was also named Retail Banker of the Year in 2018.
“Her appointment is the culmination of a decade-long succession process,” DBS noted, further declaring her as the strongest candidate for the job with “fantastic business instinct” and “great customer skills.”
Financial analysts vocalized their support of Shan as well, detailing how, “[Her] appointment signals continuity and stability, given that she is already a major contributor to the group’s current culture and business mix,” said Thilan Wickramasinghe, Maybank Investment Banking Group analyst.
Shan says coming to DBS over14 years ago was a “homecoming” and that she truly did not know that the best was yet to come.
“[I’m] very grateful to have had [Piyush] as a mentor all these years,” she said. “But guess what? We wear different kinds of shoes. Our styles may be different, but some things will not change going forward.”
A devotion to doing the right thing can—and surely will—be best exemplified during Shan’s time as CEO of DBS, if her admiration of the late British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, says anything about it: “I think she was so single-minded in pursuing what she thought was right…she didn’t care one bit about popularity. She cared about doing the right thing.”
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