In a 2019 study of companies around the world that have made the most successful strategic transformations in the last decade, DBS Bank ranks among the top 10, according to Harvard Business Review. In this achievement, DBS joins the likes of Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Tencent and Alibaba, who were similarly recognised.
The study – “The Transformation 20: The top global companies leading strategic transformations” – by strategy consulting firm Innosight involved the screening of all companies in the S&P 500 and Global 2000 using three lenses: new growth, repositioning the core and financials. The final 2019 Transformation 20 “ranked highest in their new-growth transformation. Each excelled in the development of new products, services and business models; repositioning its core business; and financial performance”, it said.
DBS was also recognised for “transforming from a traditional regional bank to a global digital platform company, around a culture-based vision of becoming a 27,000-person startup”.
The Innosight study identified that the top 20 most transformative companies had certain ingrained behaviours. These included creating a higher-purpose mission, seizing the digital opportunity via new platforms and business models, and ensuring that innovation was not isolated to a department but was a strategic capability.
DBS CEO Piyush Gupta said, “We are delighted that DBS continues to be recognised as being among the world’s best for our digital transformation. Conventional wisdom is that it is difficult for a legacy company to transform at scale. Our own journey has shown otherwise, and what has worked for us is attacking the core; making transformation mainstream by changing culture company-wide. A few years ago, in running the company, we started to act less like a bank and more like a tech company. That startup culture has infused the entire organisation from top to bottom, front to back, enabling us to truly reimagine banking.”
This year, DBS has also been recognised by Euromoney as the World’s Best Bank. This follows similar recognitions in 2018 from Global Finance and The Banker, making DBS the first bank to hold three global best bank titles at the same time.
