DBS CEO Tan Su Shan Is Building for a Future Where Banking Apps Don't Exist
Source: VnExpress International
Singapore's largest bank is preparing for a future in which the banking app itself becomes obsolete. DBS has spent the past year embedding generative and agentic AI across nearly every part of its operations, and CEO Tan Su Shan says the endgame is AI agents transacting directly with each other.
Singapore's largest bank is preparing for a future in which the banking app itself becomes obsolete. DBS, Southeast Asia's biggest lender by assets with about 40,000 staff across 19 markets, has spent the past year embedding generative and agentic AI across nearly every part of its operations — and its first female CEO, Tan Su Shan, now says the endgame is AI agents transacting directly with each other, with no app interface in between.
Forbes Asia's August cover profile of Tan lays out how far the bank has gone. Employees have built around 26,000 personal AI agents on DBS-GPT, the bank's internal generative AI platform, and DBS was running more than 2,000 AI models as of end-2025, which it says delivered an estimated S$1 billion in economic value last year through revenue gains and cost cuts. Tan pushed adoption with an internal slogan — "Talk is cheap, show me your agent" — and eleven enterprise-wide AI initiatives now span legal and compliance, institutional banking, marketing and wealth management.
The frontier bet is agent-to-agent banking. DBS has already tested agentic commerce with Visa, letting AI agents make payments using tokenized card credentials, and joined Mastercard's first live agentic transaction in Singapore, where an agent booked an airport ride. By mid-August it plans to add a generative AI assistant to its digiWealth platform for wealth clients, and it is upgrading 36 wealth centres and opening 18 more across Asia by end-2027. Rivals are racing to respond: OCBC has pledged roughly S$1 billion a year in tech spending and launched an avatar-based AI banking app in July, while UOB is expanding its relationship manager headcount.
The harder problem is governance, not technology. DBS says it is building a "control plane" to oversee every agent it deploys, grounding agents in vetted data and keeping human oversight for decisions like credit assessments. The workforce question is equally delicate: entry-level production engineers have fallen from about 3,000 to 135, with staff retrained into other tech roles, and the bank has acknowledged roughly 4,000 temporary or contract positions could be phased out. A reskilling hub with more than 10,000 classes, hackathons and Silicon Valley trips are part of the answer, as Gartner projects 25% of bank customer-service interactions will involve AI assistants by 2029, up from 8% in 2025.
Why it matters for Singapore: DBS is the bellwether for how Singapore Inc adopts AI — when the country's most valuable listed company moves from internal automation to agentic systems that act on customers' behalf, it sets the pace for every bank, insurer and enterprise here. Singapore's regulatory and payments infrastructure already makes it a natural testbed for agentic commerce, and DBS's bet suggests the city-state could be among the first markets where agents, not apps, become the default way money moves. What happens to the 26,000 personal agents, and the jobs reshaped around them, will be the practical case study for the rest of the region.
