I'd do it differently, if I were to do it again: DBS CEO on bank's tech

Outgoing bank chief says he did not consider operational complexity enough

- Prisca Ang

Outgoing DBS chief executive Piyush Gupta would have done things differently if he were given another chance to build the bank's technology capabilities.

Mr Gupta's 15-year tenure as head honcho saw DBS go all in to develop tech systems that transformed much of the bank's operations.

DBS, South-east Asia's largest bank, started its digital transformation in 2014, the same year it launched its PayLah! mobile wallet, that has since found a home in the smartphones of many customers. This was followed by other milestones, such as eliminating physical tokens for corporate transactions.

But the bank has also had several disruptions in recent years, including a two-day outage to its digital banking services in November 2021.

Those seemed uppermost in Mr Gupta's mind when he told the Singapore FinTech Festival on Nov 7 that in regard to digital capabilities: "I did not actually think enough, and hard enough, about the operational complexity that comes with a distributed microservice architecture".

In microservices, software is composed of independent units that communicate with one another.