‘Everything can be reimagined’: Piyush Gupta on building intelligent, resilient brands

For Piyush Gupta, former chief executive at DBS Group, marketing is the most strategic function within an organisation, but its success depends on three things: clarity of purpose, a culture of innovation and removing the fear of failure.

Opening the Digital Marketing Asia 2025 annual conference in Singapore yesterday, Gupta reflected on 15 years at the helm of DBS, a period in which the Singaporean bank transformed from a legacy institution into a global case study for digital reinvention. Harvard Business Review ranked DBS among the top 10 transformative organisations of the 2010–2020 decade, alongside the likes of Amazon and Netflix.

“The message is simple,” Gupta said. “Everybody can change and everybody has the power to change. The question is: what environment allows them to do it?”

At DBS, he said the starting point was purpose. Gupta and his leadership team framed the bank’s mission around “making banking joyful” – shorthand for becoming obsessively customer-centric by delivering simple, fast solutions to enrich lives and transform business.

Purpose, he said, was more than just a slogan. DBS leaned into uncomfortable moments, asking staff and customers to share their biggest frustrations, such as rules preventing call centre staff from resolving credit card disputes without multiple approvals.

“Why not let the agents make these decisions?” he said. “We believed the strength lay in what made sense for the customer. That clarity liberated people to act.”

Learning by doing

The second lever was creating an environment where staff could learn and innovate at every level of the organisation.

Under his leadership, DBS launched its first hackathons, mixing employees with startup founders to solve customer problems. Staff built prototypes in a week, often surprising themselves.

"When you can go home and show your kids an app you created at work, something lights up and changes,” Gupta said. Similar experiments later included company-wide AI challenges using Amazon’s DeepRacer, drawing thousands of employees into hands-on learning.

Similar experiments included company-wide AI challenges like Amazon’s DeepRacer, which resulted in the DBS x AWS DeepRacer League, drawing thousands of employees into hands-on learning.

The third pillar was eliminating the stigma of failure. Gupta introduced a KPI for 1,000 experiments a year and created awards for failed projects that yielded lessons.

“We made heroes of people who tried and failed,” he said. “When regulators came down on us after a failed ATM upgrade, we told them we weren’t punishing the employee – we were recognising them for thinking differently.”

This cultural shift extended to feedback. Gupta launched an anonymous email channel called Tell Piyush, open two weeks each quarter. At first most submissions were anonymous, but as trust grew staff began attaching their names. A third of the suggestions proved to be “gems” that led to policy changes.

“We were very serious about how we responded. We spent months working through some of those emails,” he said.

The heart of transformation

Gupta positioned marketing at the heart of this transformation. Performance marketing, he argued, had been revolutionised by AI-driven personalisation and predictive modelling, producing billions of dollars in incremental revenue lift at DBS.

“Today everything can be reimagined,” he said.

“The question is, can you influence it, and how well can you influence it. So I don’t think people have questions over whether the technology works or not – it’s how well you can customise it.

“That requires you to have architecture around your technology and be fundamentally focused on data. That makes all the difference.”

Gupta stepped down in March 2025 after 15 years as DBS CEO. He now chairs Singapore Management University, Mandai Park Holdings and serves as deputy chairman of Keppel Ltd. He said he planned for years to ensure his post-DBS life balanced board roles with travel, reading, family and nature. Four days after retiring, he set off trekking in the Himalayas.

Reflecting on his journey, Gupta returned to marketing’s central role. “It’s perhaps the most strategic function in the organisation,” he said.

“Seventy-five per cent of DBS’s success came from what we did, but 25% came from the stories we told. Storytelling is very powerful, and marketing’s job is to tell that story.”