DBS : D05 0% has hired Eugene Huang, who was chief executive officer of Ping An’s technology arm, to be the bank’s chief information officer (CIO), it said in a bourse filing on Wednesday (May 8).
Huang, with more than 36 years of technology and banking experience under his belt, will be under pressure to fix several outage issues that have plagued the bank since the beginning of last year. As a result of the disruptions to service, members of the bank’s group management committee, including its chief executive officer Piyush Gupta, have taken pay cuts.
Last Thursday, DBS customers appeared to have issues logging into the bank’s digibank and PayLah! apps. That came on the heels of five outages that happened through 2023.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore had tasked the bank to resolve these outages, which it said was “unacceptable”. The central bank has already penalised DBS by raising its capital requirements twice in over a year.
Huang will take over the role of CIO from Han Kwee Juan from Friday. Han has been double-hatting as acting CIO and Singapore country head since November 2023, when the bank split its technology and operations function into two units under its drive to improve technology resiliency.
With Huang joining the group, Han will return to being Singapore country head full-time from Jun 1.
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According to the bourse filing, Huang’s role in Ping An was to take charge of a 22,000-strong team that provided IT services – including those for infrastructure, cybersecurity and customer-facing applications – to all businesses under the umbrella of the Chinese financial services holding company.
Before that, Huang, an American citizen, was chief technology officer and chief operating officer at OneConnect Financial Technology, a technology-services platform for financial institutions launched by Ping An in 2015.
Gupta said that Huang’s immediate focus will be to build on the work the bank has done since last year to strengthen its technology resiliency.
“He will be a strong addition to our leadership bench, and I look forward to his contributions as we continue to deliver on our promise of providing reliable and seamless banking to our customers,” he added.
Shares of DBS fell 0.6 per cent, or S$0.22, to close at S$35.71 on Wednesday.
