WHEN DBS Group Holdings’ chief executive Piyush Gupta joined the Singapore bank late last year, he wasted no time in setting a bold new agenda.
He said that while Singapore will be DBS’ anchor market, it would like maybe an “equal business presence in Greater China and South and South-east Asia as well”.
He then revealed an aggressive strategy to slash the proportion of its revenue which it makes in Singapore from about 70 per cent to just 40 per cent within the next five years.
If DBS’ recent senior hires are any indication of how it is implementing this new strategy, it is evident that rapid progress has been made.
All the high-profile hires have been former Citibankers. Many are Singaporeans.
More importantly, all of them have multi-market experience, with knowledge acquired from working in many countries around the world.
It all starts with the man-at-the-top: Mr Piyush Gupta, DBS’ chief executive and now a Singapore citizen, joined the bank late last year.
Mr Gupta formerly served as Citi’s Country Officer for Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore as well as the ASEAN Head of the Institutional Clients Group.
Then there is the incoming chief executive of its Hong Kong business, Mr Sebastian Paredes, who spent 20 years at Citi, with top positions in South America, the Middle East, Asia, Europe and Africa, before joining Indonesia’s Bank Danamon as president director in 2005.
Mr Sim Lim, DBS Singapore’s newly appointed country manager, spent the bulk of his 26-year banking career in Asia, with posts in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan, and the Middle East.
Ms Tan Su Shan, who heads up DBS’ private banking business, has worked in key financial hubs in London, Tokyo and Hong Kong.
DBS has just announced that it has appointed banker Tan Kong Khoon to the post of consumer banking head.
Mr Tan will join DBS from ANZ Bank, where he was most recently the Hong Kong-based head of retail banking and wealth management for Hong Kong and North East Asia.
Prior to that, he was president and chief executive of Bank of Ayudhya, the fifth-largest listed bank in Thailand.
With these hires, DBS has stocked itself with top-calibre individuals with the ability to think across multiple markets and to anticipate diverse consumer needs.
This is important in the fast-changing financial environment and in the potentially more lucrative and faster-growing markets outside Singapore.
But as is the case with all well-thought hiring strategies, the actual implementation remains the most critical part of the plan, which can only be proven with time.
It also remains to be seen how much influence DBS chairman Peter Seah has had on the hiring front. Surely one cannot discount Mr Seah’s connections playing a part somewhat.
Mr Seah, deputy chairman of Fullerton Financial Holdings, which has a stake in Danamon, should be pretty familar with Mr Paredes, for example.
Mr Seah said in an interview earlier this year: “I could then use my experience as a banker to guide the CEO, not in the technical aspects of the business, but more in terms of my understanding and knowledge of the region, plus my own networking after being in the business for 30 over years.”
While nothing can be proven, it can only be inferred that there are all sorts of “intangibles” that Mr Seah brings to DBS. And maybe his invaluable presence does help attract potential top candidates to DBS.
Mr Seah has said that for DBS and the Singapore market in general, he sees it as a duty to develop and continue building a pool of home-grown talent.
With the exeception of Mr Paredes, who is an Ecuadorian citizen, all the latest senior DBS hires are Singaporeans.
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