The first woman boss in the banking giant’s 58-year-history is preparing for the future by seeding AI deep and wide across the organization.

In May, Tan Su Shan, CEO of DBS Group, Southeast Asia’s largest bank by assets, was on a flight when her cell phone lit up. A disgruntled retail customer had just vented his frustrations on LinkedIn about an unresolved problem he faced on the bank’s app. Tan, who along with other senior DBS executives was tagged in the post, responded midair with the assurance that the bank's tech team would resolve it. Grateful for the CEO’s speedy action, the customer deleted his post.

This hands-on approach, emphasizing a personal touch, is signature Tan, the first woman boss in the 58-year history of what used to be the Development Bank of Singapore. A DBS veteran of 16 years, she was named to the post in 2024, which earned her a place on Forbes Asia’s Power Businesswomen list that year, and moved into the C-suite in March 2025. While her tech-savvy predecessor, Piyush Gupta, was credited with giving DBS a leading edge in digital banking, Tan, 58, is crafting her own imprint at a time when AI has advanced banking’s next tipping point.

Under Tan, DBS is fast embedding generative and agentic AI—software that can act autonomously to reason, plan and use tools to complete tasks—in every aspect of its internal operations while also preparing for what she describes as the “potential eventuality” of AI agent-to-agent banking, whereby AI agents representing clients and banks will interact with each other.

“It’s frontier stuff,” she tells Forbes Asia in an interview at DBS headquarters in Singapore’s central business district in late June. “In an agentic world, you won’t need banking applications anymore, it’s a complete leapfrog. You will create agents that can do payments…wealth transactions…foreign exchange, that can do loans,” she says.

Dressed in red and black, the colors of the bank’s logo, Tan admits this is her preferred sartorial choice when she’s meeting investors and clients. On the day of the interview, she’s also squeezing in a photoshoot, a presentation to the board of Temasek, the state-owned investment firm that owns about 28% of DBS, and a private banking event she’s hosting that evening.

DBS is ahead of its local rivals across several key metrics and is also the most valuable Singapore-listed company.

The CEO’s accelerated push into AI comes as DBS—which has 40,000 staff across 19 markets in three core businesses: retail banking and wealth management, institutional banking, and treasury markets—has to deal with a perfect storm of challenges, including the Middle East war, fluctuating oil prices, an unpredictable interest rate outlook and growing competition.

But Tan is working from a solid base. In 2025, the bank’s total income advanced 3% to a record S$22.9 billion, while net profit fell 3% to S$11 billion due to higher tax expenses. With DBS’ net profit growth accelerating 9% year-on-year to S$3.1 billion in the second quarter and total income climbing 6% to S$6.1 billion, she raised the full year guidance, saying total income in 2026 will surpass that of last year.

Tan acknowledges the uncertain environment that has marked her tenure so far. “We’ve had tariffs, we’ve had wars…we’ve had a lot of unprecedented volatility in rates, in currencies and markets,” she says. According to a May report by Thilan Wickramasinghe, an analyst at Malaysia’s Maybank, DBS has stress-tested scenarios such as oil at $120-$200 a barrel, 20%-30% drops in key currencies and higher inflation.

Meanwhile, Tan is upbeat about structural growth opportunities in Asia, underpinned in part by robust intraregional trade. She notes a surge in China-India trade as well as new trade corridors between countries such as Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Vietnam.

At the same time, one of the........

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