Piyush Gupta - DBS Bank

When you're the worst, copying the best won't save you. Copy someone else entirely.

I bank with DBS. Have for years. The app is fast. Transfers are instant. Customer service actually picks up. It feels more like using Stripe than a traditional bank.

Here's what I didn't know:

In 2009, DBS was ranked dead last in customer service among Singapore banks. Not second-to-last. Last.

Slow. Bureaucratic. Wait 45 minutes to deposit a check. Customers hated it.

That year, Piyush Gupta became CEO.

Most new CEOs in his position would've done the obvious: study the best banks. Benchmark OCBC and UOB. Copy what the leaders were doing.

Gupta looked at the best banks and said no.

Instead, he asked a different question: What if we stopped acting like a bank?

In 2009, he told his team: "We need to act like a tech company."

Not partner with tech. Not digitize some processes. Become a tech company that happens to offer banking.

This was 2009. Fintech wasn't a word yet. Stripe didn't exist. Revolut didn't exist. Most banks were installing ATMs and calling it innovation.

Gupta walked into a Singaporean bank and said we're operating like Google.

Everyone thought he was insane.

Here's what he did.

He brought in engineers to run the bank, not support it. Adopted agile development. Told teams to experiment and fail fast. He implemented "customer hour" — every minute a customer spent waiting was a minute DBS needed to eliminate.

Most banks measured profit per customer. Gupta measured wasted time.

By 2018, DBS had eliminated 250 million customer hours.

That's not a typo. 250 million hours customers no longer spent waiting, filling forms, calling support.

2016: Best Bank in the World (Euromoney). 2018: Best Digital Bank in the World (Euromoney). 2019: Top 10 Most Transformative Organizations of the decade (Harvard Business Review).

From last place to best in the world. In less than 10 years.

Here's what keeps coming back to me:

Gupta didn't save DBS by becoming a better version of what it was. He saved it by copying an entirely different industry.

Most companies benchmark competitors. Study the best in their field. Try to close the gap.

But when you're last, closing the gap isn't enough. You can't out-bank the best banks.

Gupta looked outside. Saw how tech companies operated. Brought those principles into a 50-year-old institution.

The insight isn't "be more like tech." Everyone says that now.

The insight is: when everyone in your industry plays the same game, the only way to win is to play a different game entirely.

The worst competitor won't beat the best by getting incrementally better.

They'll beat them by becoming something else.

What industry should your company be copying that isn't yours?