Finance
Singapore's Biggest Bank Takes on China Giants in Fintech Battle
- DBS CEO Piyush Gupta invests in technology to fend off threat
- Ant Financial, Tencent push into Southeast Asian payments
Piyush Gupta
Photographer: Wei Leng Tay/Bloomberg
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Piyush Gupta sees himself as uncomfortably close to the action in the battle between traditional banks and China’s insurgent fintech giants.
The chief executive officer of Singapore’s DBS Group Holdings Ltd. has been trying to re-engineer his brick-and-mortar bank so that it operates more like a technology company, in order to give it a better chance in the struggle with Chinese online payment firms Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Ant Financial, owned by billionaire Jack Ma. Both companies are targeting DBS’s core markets of Southeast Asia and India for expansion.