‘You better buckle up’: DBS’s Tan Su Shan prepares for AI, crypto, and geopolitical change
On her mobile phone, DBS Group CEO Tan Su Shan keeps a black-and-white photograph of herself at age 4, sitting beside her grandmother and her mother at Singapore’s Nanyang Kindergarten. It’s a snapshot of three generations of powerful women. Tan’s grandmother, widowed during the Japanese occupation, raised seven successful children. “She grew up in a time when women were not educated,” Tan recalls. Denied schooling, she taught herself to read and insisted that her daughters—including Tan’s mother, the youngest—excel academically, get jobs, and be financially independent. Tan remembers her grandmother as a “hurricane force,” and credits her mother, a pharmacist, for “inculcating that in me.”
Tan is drawing on…
