Biography | Tan Su Shan — The Shenton Way Towers She Joined in July 2010

People now point at Marina Bay Financial Centre Tower 3 and call it the building where Tan Su Shan’s DBS life began.

That tower was not yet the bank’s home in 2010.

FinanceAsia reported on 12 April 2010 that DBS had hired her from Morgan Stanley as head of private banking, including asset management, to start in July.

A later SMU profile, published with her own account, dates the join to July 2010.

The headquarters she walked into was still the DBS Building at 6 Shenton Way, the pair of towers completed in 1975 and 1994.

Tower 1 had been Singapore’s tallest office block when DBS raised it in the mid-1970s.

The bank stayed there for 38 years.

OUE bought the complex in 2010 and later renamed it OUE Downtown.

The staff move to Marina Bay Financial Centre Tower 3 ran through the second half of 2012.

DBS changed its registered address to 12 Marina Boulevard on 19 July 2012.

The formal inauguration of DBS Asia Central was 17 October 2012.

So the July 2010 pin belongs on Shenton Way, not on the bay.

She came in as a wealth-management builder after heading Morgan Stanley’s private-wealth business for Southeast Asia.

Company announcements later summarised the first three DBS years as the period in which she built the wealth franchise, then almost equal stretches running consumer banking and wealth, then institutional banking.

Those businesses, the bank said when it named her successor-in-waiting, accounted for about 90 percent of group income.

The granite towers on Shenton Way are now a mixed commercial complex.

A visitor will not find a DBS name on the crown.

The decision that put her inside the bank still happened here.

Photo: Terence, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons