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Tan Su Shan has led DBS’s efforts to become the leading home-grown bank for wealth management in Asia, during a decade in which the number of billionaires in the region has soared.
When Singapore’s financial regulator, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), led the formation of the nation’s Private Banking Industry Group after the financial crisis, DBS’s Tan Su Shan was invited to co-chair it alongside them.
She well understood the importance of risk controls and conduct, having been no stranger to a crisis.
Tan’s career in finance began at Barings Securities at the end of the 1980s, working in institutional sales in London, Hong Kong and Tokyo, before Nick Leeson’s rogue trading in 1995 brought Barings Bank down. She returned to Singapore to join Morgan Stanley in wealth management shortly before the Asian crisis of 1998.
And after an eight-year stint as the region head for Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia at Citi Private Bank, she returned to Morgan Stanley in May 2008 four months before the global financial crisis began.
These were crucible moments, Tan says.
“During the Asian crisis, I was at a US bank and able to diversify our Asian clients into the burgeoning US and European markets that Asian investors were seeking. In the 2008 crisis, I found myself at a US bank when US investment banks were dropping like pins.”
She recalls queues forming outside US financial institutions as clients panicked and tried to withdraw their funds, as she spent the evening of her...