SINGAPORE: DBS Group aims to grow assets under management (AUM)in its wealth business to more than S$1 trillion (RM3.2 trillion) by 2030, its unit’s head said, as Singapore’s biggest bank bets on rising Asian wealth and inflows into regional financial hubs.
The target spans the lender’s retail and wealth segments and marks an increase of about S$400 billion from S$632 billion in wealth assets under management at the end of 2025.
“From full year 2015 to 2025, in 10 years, we grew our AUM by S$400 billion. Looking at the traction, our ambition now is to grow the same S$400 billion by half the time,“ Shee Tse Koon, DBS’s group executive and group head of consumer banking and wealth management, said at a media briefing.
“Many of the macro trends that we see, for example the rise of wealth in Asia, and also the shift of wealth into Asia, I think these macro trends are what will be tailwinds.”
Global banks have been ramping up their wealth offerings across Asia to tap the region’s rapidly growing affluent population.
Singapore has been a key beneficiary of that push. Its safe-haven appeal has fuelled a steady stream of wealth inflows at a time of heightened geopolitical and economic uncertainty, lifting the fortunes of the city-state’s three largest banks.
As of May, the number of newly onboarded high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients at DBS, which banks more than a third of single-family offices established in Singapore, had risen 20% from a year earlier.
The lender is also planning to hire more than 600 relationship managers or frontline advisers and platform engineers by the end of 2028, mainly across its core markets of Singapore, Hong Kong, China, India, Indonesia and Taiwan.
“It’s not just about the frontliners. We need the engineers, the tech people, the platform people to create that capability and the capacity,“ said Shee.
“Our wealth continuum is about really winning in every segment… it’s about serving them most appropriately in that segment, because as I said, customers are not homogeneous.”
Last month, DBS announced that it would open 18 new wealth centres across Asia by the end of 2027 and upgrade 36 existing centres over the next 18 months, marking the largest physical expansion of its wealth franchise to date. – Reuters
