DBS is positioning itself to capture financial activity generated by shifting capital, wealth and trade flows across Asia. At its second-quarter briefing, chief executive officer Tan Su Shan identified institutional equities, business-to-business wealth and faster intra-Asian trade as emerging areas of growth. She also cited Taiwan and India as important markets, with semiconductor and data centre investment supporting activity in Taiwan, while manufacturing, renewables, artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and wealth drive opportunities in India. These developments reflect broader shifts across the region, including wealth moving towards Asia, deepening Asian capital markets and changing cross-border trade corridors, which could generate additional funding, investment and transaction services across the bank’s regional businesses.

DBS reported second-quarter 2026 net profit of SGD 3.08 billion ($2.4 billion), up 9% year-on-year, while total income rose 6% to SGD 6.09 billion ($4.7 billion). Group net interest income fell 2% to SGD 3.58 billion ($2.8 billion) as net interest margin narrowed 18 basis points to 1.87%, while net fee income rose 25% to SGD 1.46 billion ($1.1 billion).

Asian capital markets add institutional activity

Tan said DBS had not previously discussed the growth it was seeing in institutional equity sales. “We’re seeing good growth in institutional equities,” she said, adding that equity structured products were also growing across the franchise. She linked both to structural growth in Asian capital markets and the expansion of wealth management and institutional asset management.

DBS’s first-half results show stronger equity-related activity, with treasury customer income rising 27% year-on-year to SGD 1.70 billion ($1.3 billion), mainly from higher sales of equity derivatives and foreign-exchange products. Markets trading income increased 10% to SGD 858 million ($663 million), its strongest performance in five years, while second-quarter markets trading income rose 21% from the previous quarter, driven by equity derivatives and credit activities.

Deeper Asian capital markets are creating greater funding, investment and risk-management needs. Tan said DBS wants to capture this growth through a broad range of products, from markets services for institutional investors and asset managers, to financing and capital-markets services for corporate clients.

Institutional banking provides an existing base for that activity. First-half income rose 1% to SGD 4.54 billion ($3.5 billion), with net interest income down 3% while non-interest income increased 11% to SGD 1.49 billion ($1.2 billion) on higher treasury customer income, cash-management fees and investment-banking fees. Treasury and investment-banking income rose 17% to SGD 685 million ($529 million).

Activity has also increased in Hong Kong, one of DBS’s main regional financial centres. Equity capital-market fundraising rose 164% year-on-year to $103 billion in 2025, while cash-market average daily turnover increased 89.5%, according to Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing. The figures indicate a larger pool of issuance and trading activity available to banks, although they do not show how much DBS will capture.

Tan identified Taiwan as another market where corporate expansion and capital-market development are occurring together. She pointed to infrastructure around Nvidia and the semiconductor and data-centre supply chain, as well as the growth of Taiwan’s stock market. In India, she cited the shift towards manufacturing and the production-linked incentive programme, alongside opportunities in renewables, AI infrastructure and wealth. Corporate investment in those areas can create financing and treasury requirements, while expanding capital markets and wealth can generate investment and markets activity. Tan also acknowledged that market-driven income will fluctuate, so deeper capital markets do not necessarily translate into steady quarter-to-quarter earnings.

Wealth providers create a B2B opportunity

In wealth management, Tan focused on an opportunity beyond managing assets directly for DBS’s own private-banking clients. “The new opportunity is not just the B2C wealth opportunity, it’s also the B2B wealth opportunity,” she said. “As more and more players want to come in and do wealth, we are actually ready to service them from an institutional perspective.” Under that model, DBS could provide markets products and other institutional services to firms managing wealth for their own clients without directly managing the underlying assets. Tan said the proposition sits within the bank’s financial-institutions business, whose franchise spans 15 countries and covers banks, insurers, sovereign wealth funds and fintech companies.

The model gives DBS another way to participate in the expansion of Asia’s wealth industry alongside its direct private-banking business. It is also an established institutional market. UBS, for example, serves external asset managers and other financial intermediaries through investment products, custody and execution services. DBS would therefore be competing for similar institutional relationships through its Asian banking, markets and financial-institutions network rather than creating a new category of wealth business.

Intra-Asian trade shifts working-capital demand

First-half transaction-services fees increased 10% to a record SGD 513 million ($396 million). Tan linked the increase to earlier investment in digitising corporate servicing and payments, saying “the snowballing effect of a high velocity of transactions is coming through.” She also pointed to faster trade within Asia. India’s imports from China roughly doubled from $65.2 billion to $131.6 billion over about five years, according to India’s Department of Commerce. Tan said Taiwan-to-India trade had increased by about three to three-and-a-half times, and linked the broader expansion of intra-Asian trade to companies diversifying their upstream supply chains.

DBS finances part of that adjustment through inventory and receivables financing, particularly in the technology, media and telecommunications sector, Tan said. These products give the bank exposure to the working-capital requirements created when companies add suppliers, shift production or hold inventory across several markets, rather than limiting the opportunity to payments generated once goods are sold. Inventory financing supports funding while goods are being produced or held, while receivables financing advances funds against amounts owed by customers.

The trade trends also intersect with the growth Tan identified in Taiwan and India. The semiconductor and data-centre ecosystem in Taiwan depends on regional supply chains, while manufacturing expansion in India can create new supplier and working-capital requirements. DBS identifies trade, payments, treasury customer products, financial institutions and telecommunications, media and technology (TMT) among its institutional banking capabilities, allowing it to address different stages of the same corporate relationship through financing, payments and liquidity services.

Other banks with regional corporate networks are pursuing many of the same flows. Standard Chartered has highlighted India-ASEAN trade of more than $120 billion and linked its development to manufacturing expansion and supply-chain realignment. The competitive issue for DBS is therefore how much of the financing and transaction activity generated by these changing corridors it can capture through its existing regional network.

DBS keeps its AI options open

Tan said access to technology itself would not provide a durable advantage because similar tools are available to competing banks. “Tech in itself is never a differentiator. Tech is widely available to everyone,” she said, pointing instead to the bank’s data, culture of innovation and its practice of managing customer journeys from end to end. She also linked AI productivity directly to growth, saying generative AI can reduce the time required for work while agentic AI can assist with transactions and operating processes. “The time and effort that you save, you can redeploy into growth,” Tan said. Higher institutional, wealth and transaction volumes could therefore be handled without technology, operations and front-office resources increasing at the same rate.

DBS is also avoiding dependence on a single AI provider or model ecosystem. Tan said the bank uses both United States and Chinese tools and considers geopolitics, cyber-security risks and over-reliance on individual suppliers. “We talk to everyone, we use everyone. We test everyone. The market changes every three months,” she said. The same approach applies to proprietary and open-source models, with DBS testing both and selecting models according to the use case, model parameters and computing requirements. Tan said DBS does not send its data to external large language models for training and keeps it protected within its network, whether in cloud or on-premise environments.

The bank is separately deciding which parts of its technology stack it should control directly. “What do you want to have as sovereign and what may not be sovereign? What will you buy? What will you build?” Tan said, referring to code, models and an AI harness. In this context, sovereignty concerns which capabilities should remain under DBS’s control and which can be supplied externally. DBS began its digital transformation in 2013 and its data programme in 2016 and has since organised more of its work around end-to-end customer journeys. “Those moats take years to build,” Tan said, while acknowledging that competitors will catch up.

Execution depends on connecting the businesses

Tan’s comments suggest that DBS sees scope for the same regional shifts to generate activity across several parts of the bank. Deeper capital markets may create demand for trading, structured products and financing, while growth in Asia’s wealth industry and changes in regional supply chains could generate additional institutional and transaction activity. This does not establish that DBS will capture those flows. Rather, it points to an execution question around whether the bank can connect its institutional banking, markets, wealth and transaction businesses around the clients and corridors it has identified.

DBS reported higher treasury customer income, record transaction-services fees and stronger institutional banking non-interest income in the first half. Tan said AI-related productivity gains could be redeployed into growth, while the bank said its synthetic securitisation expands its capacity to support customer financing. Those developments may increase the capacity available to support additional business, but they do not demonstrate that the structural opportunities identified will translate into sustained revenue. That will depend on how much activity develops, how competitors respond and how much of those flows DBS is ultimately able to capture.