Singapore’s DBS not fazed by entry of digital banks, boss Piyush Gupta says
- Singapore recently awarded licences to a Singtel-Grab joint entity, e-commerce firm Sea, China’s Ant Group, and a consortium comprising Greenland Financial Holding Group
- While the new banks have advanced digital capabilities, none of them have a ‘monopoly on technology’, said Gupta at the Singapore Fintech Festival
Singapore’s DBS, Southeast Asia’s biggest lender, has a “healthy respect for all forms of competition” and is unfazed by the entry of four new digital-only banks, chief executive Piyush Gupta said on Monday.
Speaking during a panel session at the Singapore Fintech Festival, Gupta said while the new entrants had good technology and were likely to have built large customer bases from their respective non-banking businesses, none of the players had a “monopoly on technology”.
On the contrary, the new banks will have to compete with the likes of DBS, which has invested and built up its digital capabilities in recent years.
“It’s not as if Google, Amazon [or] Ant can get technology which DBS can’t,” Gupta said when asked about his reaction to the city state’s award of its first four digital banking licences on Friday.
“We’ve been dabbling and leveraging the same technology now for several years,” Gupta said, adding that with DBS’s 7,500 engineers making up the firm’s single largest workforce, it considered itself a “tech company offering financial services”.
