“In 2024 we told the market that we were going to target AUM of $500 billion by 2027 which looked ambitious because we were in the range of $300 billion. One year later, I came out to say we would achieve this a year in advance. In 1Q we had $492 billion in AUM and we will exceed this target well within 2027,” Shee says at a media briefing.
Shee Tse Koon, Group Head of Consumer Banking and Wealth Management at DBS announced a new target of $1 trillion in assets under management by 2030, through deepening AI integration and investment in frontline and technology staff. DBS also plans to open 18 new wealth centres and to upgrade 36 existing wealth centres. During a two-hour media briefing, Shee brought up concepts such as customer and employee journeys, the wealth continuum and connectivity, first introduced in 2017, updated for the age of AI.
Wealth management is important to DBS because it is a high ROE business, and DBS has a stabilised, sustainable ROE target of 17% which is used to estimate the stock’s valuation. In 1QFY2015, the first full quarter following DBS’s SocGen Asian private banking and selected trust business, DBS’s fee income from wealth management was $158 million. In 1QFY2026, DBS’s fee income from wealth management was $907 million. The private bank’s cost-to-income ratio was 46% in 2025 while ROE was 72%, the lowest and highest respectively in developed markets.
