‘You better buckle up’: DBS’s Tan Su Shan prepares for AI, crypto, and geopolitical change

On her mobile phone, DBS Group CEO Tan Su Shan keeps a black-and-white photograph of herself at age 4, sitting beside her grandmother and her mother at Singapore’s Nanyang Kindergarten. It’s a snapshot of three generations of powerful women. Tan’s grandmother, widowed during the Japanese occupation, raised seven successful children. “She grew up in a time when women were not educated,” Tan recalls. Denied schooling, she taught herself to read and insisted that her daughters—including Tan’s mother, the youngest—excel academically, get jobs, and be financially independent. Tan remembers her grandmother as a “hurricane force,” and credits her mother, a pharmacist, for “inculcating that in me.”

Tan is drawing on that legacy as the first woman to lead Southeast Asia’s largest bank. In March, she took over as chief executive, succeeding Piyush Gupta, who during his 15-year tenure transformed DBS from a stolid national lender to one of the world’s most digitally advanced—and profitable—financial powerhouses. As CEO of a bank that now has 38,000 employees, operates in 19 countries, and manages assets of more than $600 billion, Tan faces a formidable challenge: to sustain that extraordinary momentum and keep wresting market share from much larger global competitors in a moment marked by geopolitical turmoil, falling interest rates, and warp-speed technological change.