After 15 years at the helm of DBS Bank, Piyush Gupta will step down on March 28, leaving an indelible mark with his unique leadership style
Often lauded as a star banker, Piyush Gupta spent the past 15 years transforming DBS Bank into a global powerhouse for digital banking and innovation. Come March 28, he will retire and step down as chief executive officer of DBS Group, leaving a lasting legacy with his unorthodox leadership.
Born in Meerut, India, Gupta spent 27 years at Citigroup, where he held various leadership roles across Asia. In 2001, he launched his entrepreneurial venture, the digital platform Go4i.com, in collaboration with the Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest newspapers, but it was cut short by the dot‑com bubble burst. The failure of his start‑up was a humbling experience—one that Gupta has openly discussed, including its impact on his mental health. Yet, the setback fortified his resilience and shaped his tech‑forward banking approach.
When he joined DBS Group in 2009, Gupta inherited a bank that had a reputation for inefficiency, earning the nickname of “Damn, Bloody, Slow”, wrote the bank’s former chief data and transformation officer Paul Cobban in his 2017 article 10 Lessons Learnt When DBS Came Out of the Stone Age. Gupta was aware of the challenges that awaited him. “Years ago, I came across research that stated that 71 per cent of people prefer going to a dentist [as] compared to going to a bank,” he recalls, referencing a three‑year study by Scratch, a creative‑consulting team operating within media company Viacom. “And that’s not a good way to feel after a whole career in banking.”
Piyush Gupta on the cover of Tatler Singapore’s January 2025 issue
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As group CEO, Gupta knew that a radical shift was needed, starting with the bank’s mission. “We came up with a quirky mission statement, which is to make banking joyful,” he shares. This notion of “joyful banking” initially seemed unconventional—even strange—but it was a deliberate choice to break away from the industry’s traditional image. “We convinced ourselves that we could do a different kind of banking … in a way that people thought took pain out of their lives and made things easy,” he says. To truly transform, DBS Bank needed to embrace digitisation at its core. To achieve this, it looked to fintech firms and tech start‑ups for inspiration. The digital transformation strategy Gupta put in place entailed embedding digital technology across operations, fostering a customer‑centric approach and driving cultural change. By integrating cutting‑edge tools such as artificial intelligence and cloud technologies, the bank streamlined operations and enhanced decision‑making.
At the same time, a strong emphasis on customer needs informed product innovation and service upgrades, ensuring that DBS Bank stayed ahead in meeting changing demands. The most ambitious pillar, however, was a culture overhaul. Gupta envisioned a dynamic, start‑up‑like culture for the bank’s employees. “One of our rallying cries has been, ‘How do you create a 22,000‑person start‑up?’” he noted in a 2017 McKinsey Quarterly interview. To cultivate a unified approach that encourages creative problem‑solving, Gupta merged teams focused on customer experience and innovation, and ran initiatives such as hackathons, pairing bank employees with start‑ups to co‑develop apps in an engaging environment. And it worked.
