[SINGAPORE] The year 2024 was a stellar one for South-east Asia’s largest lender.
Full-year net profit hit a new high of S$11.4 billion, while return on equity was kept at a record 18 per cent, driven by balance sheet management and digital transformation.
While 2025 is plagued by looming interest rate cuts and uncertainty in the market outlook, the bank remains optimistic it can weather the volatile environment. And leading the bank’s resilience building is chief financial officer Chng Sok Hui.
“Balance sheet management has been one of my top priorities since I took over as CFO in 2008,” said Chng.
“What we focus on – and more so in this environment – is scenario planning, stress testing; we aim to be resilient across multiple scenarios.”
And this has paid off. In the second quarter of 2025, DBS managed to beat expectations and post a 1 per cent increase in net profit to S$2.82 billion.
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Even as peers were hit by an unexpected fall in Singapore and Hong Kong benchmark rates, DBS managed to weather the “perfect storm” – it gained from hedges it put on earlier and benefited from a rise in deposit volumes.
For her work, Chng bagged the “Best CFO” Award for companies in the big cap category, at the Singapore Corporate Awards 2025 on Sep 1, while the bank also won the “Best Risk Management” Award. Chng won the same award in 2013.
Stewardship
Chng, who has spent a total of 42 years at DBS – including six years as head of risk – noted that her job had always been about “building what is not there”.
“Before I was CFO, I was head of risk, and during that period, we didn’t have a lot of the capabilities that are more mainstream today.”
Indeed, Chng has introduced several key capabilities in the bank that have driven the success of DBS today.
One key finance function is the bank’s stewardship corporate treasury function, which she introduced in 2008. This function looks after the balance sheet of the bank and ensures that it is resilient across multiple economic scenarios.
“The key to the corporate treasury function within DBS is that it is a strategy function: there are no profit and loss (P&L) key performance indicators for this team,” she said.
This is on top of the two other main segments of the finance team – delivering core finance, which is the bank’s reporting and regulatory functions; and business agility and impact, where the CFOs of the various work functions report to Chng and provide the finance team visibility across the bank.
Another area that Chng calls the “secret sauce of (DBS’) success” is an organisation-wide score card, which she implemented in 2009.
This score card includes the bank’s goals for the short term, long term, as well as a section to work on making banking joyful through digitalisation.
“Everybody is clear about what they actually have to deliver for the year, and we say, anything else is a hobby, because there is a lot to achieve,” she said.
But Chng said one of her key contributions to DBS’ success today is her investment in building talents.
“People tell me that finance is the biggest giver of talent in the organisation, because we are good at hiring and also training,” she said.
Chng has launched training programmes for the finance team, and signed up for many courses herself – she is certified in areas such as cybersecurity and sustainability.
“If they sort of come under something that I have to manage, then I expect that I would need a working knowledge – I may not be a specialist at these topics, but I constantly try to stay updated,” she said.
Staying ahead
Looking ahead, constant adaptation remains the key challenge to navigate the future, she said.
The world is currently facing a “tectonic shift” in geopolitics and its effect on the global economy.
“Instead of trying to guess whether (rate cuts) will come in six months or two years, our objective has been to stay resilient across multiple scenarios.”
There are also emerging trends, such as in digital assets and agentic artificial intelligence, that the bank as a whole is studying.
She said: “For finance partnerships, (to) earn your seat at the table, you need to understand as much as the business and be able to provide the kind of support that they will need, to see whether it’s worthwhile and how much benefit these new initiatives bring.”
“Some of these things are, frankly, quite hard to measure at this stage, but we try to stay ahead of the curve.”
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