Piyush Gupta, chief executive officer of DBS Group Holdings Ltd., during a news conference in Singapore, on Monday, Feb. 10, 2025. DBS shares jumped after the lender reported earnings that met expectations and unveiled a investor payout plan.
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After a sterling 2024 when Singapore’s biggest bank by assets booked record net profits, DBS CEO Piyush Gupta said that the bank needs to have “agility” and “nimbleness” to navigate a “choppy” 2025 amid unpredictable tariff and monetary policies from the U.S.
Speaking in an exclusive interview to CNBC’s JP Ong, Gupta said “we are actually quite conscious of the fact that the Trump administration could use economic tools as [a] weapon, and therefore tariffs and tax policies, etc., can change.”
Gupta’s comments come as Southeast Asia’s largest bank by assets posted a solid showing in its full-year results, with net profit reaching a record high.
For the financial year ended Dec. 31, the bank saw an 11% rise in full-year net profit to 11.4 billion Singapore dollars ($8.4 billion), while revenue booked a 10% increase to SG$22.3 billion.
Gupta described the performance as “great” and added that he was “quite pleased with the breadth of the performance.”
DBS attributed the increase to several factors, including a record high fee income and treasury customer sales reaching a new high. The bank’s net interest income, which is the interest a bank earns on loans minus that which it pays for deposits, rose 5% year on year to SG$15.04 billion.
DBS shares surged to a record intraday high of SG$46.5 following the results.
Furthermore, due to reduced expectations of interest rate cuts from the U.S. Federal Reserve, DBS expects net interest income in 2025 to be higher than 2024 levels.
“Interest income is always difficult to predict because the impact of rates is manifold,” Gupta said, adding that DBS had originally projected four rate cuts by the Fed in 2025, but has reduced that forecast to two cuts in its earnings report released Monday.
Following the stellar results, the bank proposed a final dividend of 60 Singapore cents per share for the fourth quarter, an increase of six cents from the previous payout.
This would mean that DBS’ total dividend for the 2024 financial year will stand at SG$2.22 per share, a year-on-year increase of 27%.
On top of the regular dividend, DBS announced a new “capital return” dividend of 15 Singapore cents per share for each quarter in 2025, as part of measures to manage excess capital.
“In the subsequent two years, it expects to pay out a similar amount of capital either through this or other mechanisms, barring unforeseen circumstances,” the bank added.
Gupta said the bank’s capital adequacy is currently at 17%, more than the 13% that DBS said that is its operating range.
Capital adequacy is the ratio of capital a bank has, reported as a percentage of a bank’s risk-weighted credit exposures.
“Therefore, we do have a lot of excess capital, and we have promised shareholders that over time we will be judicious and return the excess stock of capital that we have. So most shareholders have been waiting on our commitment to return that excess capital,” he added.
This results announcement will be Gupta’s last as DBS’ CEO. He will be handing over the reins of the bank to deputy CEO Tan Su Shan on March 28 at the bank’s annual general meeting.
When asked about his plans after 15 years at Southeast Asia’s largest bank, Gupta told CNBC he was going to pursue his personal passions, including in conservation and education, but besides that, “I’m going to take a deep breath, spend three or four months, give myself some time to chill a bit, and then we take it from there.”
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