DBS logs record profit amid digital banking fail

Even as it received a censure from the city-financial state’s authority after an outage of its digital services last year, DBS Group Holdings, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, has announced a record profit for 2021.

The country’s largest local lender said on Monday that it made a net profit of 6.8 billion Singapore dollars ($5 billion) last year, up 44 percent from 2020, and that it was seeing “a trend of consistently increased profitability” as the COVID-19 pandemic’s interruption subsides.

The net profit for the three months of October to December was SG$1.4 billion, up 37% year on year.

Piyush Gupta, the company’s CEO, cited strong loan book growth, as well as “solid” and “spectacular” fee-generated income growth of 15% on buoyant results from businesses such as wealth management, as signs of a reviving economy.

The nonperforming loan rate at DBS fell to 1.3 percent in the fourth quarter, down from 1.5 percent the previous quarter.