The fact that DBS Bank is the winner of Asiamoney’s awards for best investment bank and best bank for small and medium-sized enterprises in Singapore this year reflects the kind of franchise chief executive Piyush Gupta runs. DBS works with small, early-stage, businesses but is equally able to add value to the biggest Singaporean corporations looking for advisory and financing services.
The overall numbers are certainly impressive. In the 2022 financial year, DBS reported a 20% lift in net profits to a record S$8.19 billion ($6.2 billion), a rise in return on equity from 12.5% to 15%, and 16% growth in total income to S$16.5 billion.
On the downside, DBS’s digital banking services faced unexpected disruptions, forcing it to set up a committee to investigate several service outages and boost its capital requirements in line with the central bank’s requirements.
Despite that, the bank continued to excel across numerous business lines.
In investment banking, a dip in deal flow, a bearish economic outlook and difficult funding conditions made this a tough year for both issuers and banks. But the DBS teams, under the leadership of Seat Moey Eng, group head of capital markets, Choe Tse Wei, managing director for strategic advisory, and Clifford Lee, global head of fixed income, came through.
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