To protect the confidentiality of the participants, I did not audio record the meeting. The conversation quotes are to the best of my recollection. Please don’t sue me for them. I don’t have the money to pay our lawyer fees. On a serious note: if you think you’ve been misquoted, please email me.

Well, DBS always has something up its sleeve. Last year, it felt like a long eulogy to Piyush Gupta, the outgoing CEOs, as board members and GIC read their farewell letters to him.

This year, it was the crowd.

2 stories.

Peter Seah, Chairman of DBS, looked like he had a new hairdo. Blacker hair, thicker strands, and seemingly, a much younger person. But no one could have expected what came next.

Standing at the microphone, the portly man declared,

I know you’re not the real Peter Seah!

I laughed. The whole hall of a thousand odd people groaned.

What was he doing?

Earlier in his questions, he had asked everyone to refer to the $107 billion of Government Security and treasury bills on page 114 of the Annual Report. He then demanded,

Can I know what’s the yield on that?

“We don’t have to disclose it,” she explained. It was market-sensitive information. The man told her,

“See, you’re not telling the full picture.”

“It’s good,” she said, to applause from the audience.

He then proceeded,

So far all the answers you’ve been giving are qualitative.

I want to know the quantitative, not just the qualitative answers.

You could see he was winding up his big fat pitch.

Then came the argument.

Can you all explain why you’ve bought Hong Kong office floors at HK$27,028 per square foot, when the other transactions were at $19k psf?

Su Shan clarified that the $19k was at lower floors. According to Mingtiandi, they bought the floor for $83.1m, which is chum change compared to the $22.9b they made.

And Peter proceeded to tell him that it was a strong assertion to be saying that the board was being frivolous with how it spent its money.

The crowd was getting riled up. One woman proceeded to stand up at microphone 2 and say,

Hello sir. This is mic 2.

You’re wasting our time. Can those in the hall who agree please raise their hands if they want us to get a move on?

Well, that was strange.

The Singaporean pastime of complaining in coffeeshops, and AGMs

This wasn’t the AGM I expected. It kicked off with an elderly gentleman sharing his feedback about how he was unable to cancel his credit card as a Treasures customer whilst in South America. His anecdote was startling,

The Panama police tried to call Customer Service 40 over times.

40?!

Su Shan apologized, and said that they would look into how they could do better.

Another elderly man shared more feedback about not knowing where his 3 shares were, and calling customer service multiple times to ask.

On and on he went, and you could sense the boredom of the crowd. Credit to Su Shan, she listened patiently and told him that they would take it offline and help him with that.

The first two queries were complaints, before we got into the proper, professional questions. 

But one could hardly understand what they were complaining about. This was a great year for DBS.

1. Dividends went up.
2. Share price appreciated.

So why were people still so unhappy?

Well, if I could hazard a guess, it was possibly because they felt no one was paying attention to them. And maybe that was escalated by Su Shan’s closing slide on being an AI bank with a heart. How could you have a heart if you weren’t even answering my calls?

The AI-enabled bank with a heart?

Yes, we know. Long queues at DBS that take an average of 2 hours to clear. Phone calls that go unanswered (I haven’t had that experience and I’ve called twice in the past 3 months to cancel my cards, at 9pm at night).

Yes, all of these experiences are true, but they don’t seem to be stopping DBS from reaching record heights.

Bank the family, baby

DBS recorded $64 billion in inflows, the highest in the bank’s history. I asked the question around whether the bank could sustain this momentum, and Su Shan mentioned about how this was partly cyclical because of the volatility, but that she had hope that the wealth business continued to have momentum.

As Su Shan explained, they can now bank for the corporate, and the family running the corporates. That’s a strong proposition, and makes them incredibly sticky.

But what about Malaysia?

I pointed out to Su Shan that there were rumors around them acquiring a 30% stake in Alliance Bank in Malaysia. Wouldn’t there be a worry that they would lose business along that trade corridor between Malaysia and Singapore? Were they already ceding the Johor SEZ to their OCBC and UOB peers?

It was a real concern. If you had no onshore license in Malaysia, and Malaysia was a key supplier, you would find a bank that had an onshore license.

Cheekily, she said, “As you’ve said it’s confidential, I won’t disclose more”.

But in my later conversation with a senior member of management, the person mentioned that Malaysia’s absence was not for lack of trying.

So without that, where else would DBS’ growth come from?

Go get that high ROE business in private banking and wealth management

Many are chasing wealth management now. And Su Shan observed that this was the first time in Euromoney’s 22 year award history that they issued a Best Private Bank award to an Asian bank.

Meaning - trust us, we’ve got our shit together. We won!

But more importantly, they have been on a chase for wealth from consumers too. Just look at their non-interest income from credit cards, foreign exchange fees, and people buying their wealth products.

It’s a lot of money.

Numbers wise? They had $39b in net new money.

Playing the macro game

DBS is very smart.

They do know that the poles are shifting to Asia, and they are anchoring their work in the twin wealth hubs of Singapore and Hong Kong. That’s why they continue to be bullish on their prospects, especially as they have created a stronger proposition in North Asia, with India, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (chips, anyone?).

But what would AI do to them?

We can’t guarantee that the job will be there

We are not here to protect jobs. We are here to protect you.

DBS says it’s constantly reskilling its employees, to take advantage of the AI wave.

But at the end of the day, beyond the fancy schticks of AI chatbots, and DBS-GPT, one knows the unsaid elephant in the room.

Jobs will be lost.

But DBS seems keen on preparing their employees for the next wave.

And as Su Shan left the hall, flanked by her staff, I stepped aside to let her pass. She put a gentle pat on my arm, and said,

Hi, thanks for the questions!

Well, she didn’t have to do any of that. I was a small retail shareholder, with no relation to DBS. She could have walked past, nose in the air, not making eye contact with anyone, as she rushed for the next important thing to do.

But she chose to say thanks. She chose to listen to those long complaints rather than cutting them off.

She chose to stay firm, even when shareholders tried to demand confidential answers, and insinuate that DBS was making unwise decisions (like buying Hong Kong real estate at a slump). Was this because she was a woman?

I would have found this hard to imagine at Piyush’s AGM.

The tides of power have shifted, and stakeholders would do well to know that the boss now, is a boss.

Not a pushover.