DBS Private Bank has appointed two senior bankers to its Indonesia team. Stanley Puah Soon Kwang and Tan See Wee joined in January and are both based in Singapore.
The two hires bring the number of staff on the Indonesia team to about 40, an increase of nearly 25% during the past year. At the end of 2010, DBS Private Bank employed more than 330 staff across the region.
Indonesia, together with China, India and Taiwan, are priority growth markets for DBS, as group chief executive Piyush Gupta announced in his “strategic roadmap” last year. Regional wealth management is also a major focus as DBS attempts to fulfil its ambitious plans to become Asia’s top private bank.
Puah joined DBS at the beginning of the year as a senior vice-president and team leader for the Indonesia market. He manages a team of 10 private bankers, who aim to increase the bank’s share of Indonesia’s $80 billion private banking market. The business is concentrating on the principal cities of Jakarta, Medan, Bandung and Pekanbaru.
Puah was previously a senior director with HSBC Private Bank in Singapore where he managed cash for very wealthy clients in Indonesia and other countries in the region. During his 22 years in the private banking industry, he has also worked with Merrill Lynch, Citi Private Bank, Coutts and UBS.
Tan rejoined DBS in January as senior vice-president and deputy team leader. He has 20 years of experience in investment management, asset allocation and risk analysis across a range of asset classes, including stocks, bonds, private equity and hedge funds.
He started his banking career with DBS in the early 90s, focusing on asset management and investment banking, and was most recently head investment strategist for the regional investment division at Great Eastern Life Assurance. Tan has worked at UBS, Citi Private Bank, Invesco Asia in Hong Kong and with Merrill Lynch Investment Managers in London. He was also a founding partner of VinChi Capital, a private equity firm that focuses on real estate and infrastructure opportunities in Vietnam.
Both Puah and Tan report to Chan Kwee Him, DBS Private Bank’s Indonesia country head.
"Asia is minting millionaires at a much faster rate than anywhere else in the world. [Puah] and [Tan] will enable DBS to better capture opportunities in Indonesia and bring us closer to our ambition of being a leading private bank there,” said Chan.
Tan Su Shan, DBS's group head of wealth management who was recruited from Morgan Stanley last year, added that, although “one of [the bank's] priorities over the past year has been to focus on training and grooming talent from within...to support our growth ambitions, we have supplemented this with a number of strategic hires”.
