THE days of DBS flying in all sorts of outside talent to be its top brass are over, says bank chairman Koh Boon Hwee.
Instead, it now prefers to promote from within its ranks and move its brightest people from department to department.
'If you look at the people in the key positions now, they have all been with the bank for a good part of their career and we have successfully rotated them from one job to another so that they actually understand the whole bank better,' he notes.
As a result, he is convinced that the bank's senior management team is 'much, much stronger today than it was when I first came on board' in 2006.
Citing examples, he notes that Mr Rajan Raju, who heads front-end consumer banking, has a strong background in back-end technology and operations.
Ms Jeanette Wong, who now heads institutional banking, was chief financial officer for a long time.
'When you put people with experience in the control and operations side of the business on the front line, not only do they understand customers, they understand the totality of the end-to-end job.'
Of course, DBS can never exclude the need to bring in good talent from outside the organisation, Mr Koh adds. DBS did just that by hiring a new head of technology and operations recently.
'But I'm a firm believer in developing our own people. Where our people are ready, especially younger people, the philosophy I have is a very simple one.
'If the man or the woman who has worked with us is 51 per cent ready, I will give him or her the job. But he will come up to speed so that he is 100 per cent ready in a short space of time, or we will deal with the problem. It's fair.'
This is important if one is to foster a sense of purpose in the bank, he adds.
'People we hire must know they have a career with this bank, that every high level position that comes up isn't filled with the most convenient person from the outside.'
Mr Koh says he has tried to entrench a strong customer-centred culture in DBS and encourages people to act with the entire bank's interest in mind, not just their own department's.
'If a bank is to be saved from itself, it is because of its culture,' he says.
'If we are headed down the wrong track, there will be people who are willing to stand up and say: Stop. That's really important because no system can ever substitute, finally, for human judgment.'
This article was first published in The Straits Times on November 12, 2008.
