The bank has continued to build resiliency by, for example, taking on “proactive balance sheet hedging” to help cushion the impact of sharp declines in interest rates.
It also powered ahead with growth areas like wealth management and digitalisation, all lending well to the bank’s ability to mitigate market volatilities.
“The diversification of (your) income stream (and) creating a fortress balance sheet to mitigate whatever the markets throw at you is important,” said Ms Tan.
Strong performers for the bank in the second quarter included fee income and treasury customer sales, which rose to their second-highest quarterly levels.
Ms Tan described the bank’s fee income as “firing on all cylinders”.
Fees for the wealth management segment surged to S$649 million in the second quarter, up 25 per cent from S$518 million a year earlier, driven by broad-based growth in investment products and bancassurance. Investment banking fees were also higher – at S$31 million in the second quarter, from S$19 million a year ago – due to increased debt and equity capital market activity.
Treasury customer sales and other income increased 9 per cent to S$522 million from S$478 million a year ago.
Its markets trading performance also more than doubled to S$418 million from a year ago, while deposits saw strong growth – a trend that will likely continue through the year.
Commenting on the US tariffs, Ms Tan said the bank was “not affected by the first-order impact of the US tariffs”, although it did decide to be “conservative” and set aside S$205 million of general allowances in the first quarter in light of the escalation in macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty.
The bank also sees “almost negligible” first-order impact from the latest US tariffs imposed on India for now, as it is not exposed to the affected sectors such as textiles, jewellery and apparel.
Singapore, which is DBS’ biggest market, faces the baseline 10 per cent tariff.
On whether the US’ trade deals with various countries might mean an improvement in the business outlook ahead, Ms Tan said: “It’s a bit of a moving target, because, you know, every day you have a new tariff number.”
That said, she remains hopeful that some of the business activities that were paused amid the uncertainty in the second quarter will resume in the months ahead.
“Business people don’t like uncertainty, so (in the second quarter), we did see people press the pause button,” she said.
“(For the third quarter), I’m hopeful that some of that will come back. We are beginning to see that coming in.”
