Who associates banking… with joy?

How GANDALF changed banking – the DBS Bank hashtag#story.

DBS Singapore transformation story

When DBS CEO Piyush Gupta met Chinese business titan Jack Ma, he knew they were in trouble. The way companies like Alibaba used data would soon revolutionise finance.

DBS had to go from being a bank trying to digitalise, to a tech company that did financial services.

So they launched the “Making Banking Joyful program”.

A large part of this was studying successful tech companies:
Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, LinkedIn, Facebook.

Which made a very cool GANALF, but it lacked a D…

DBS decided they wanted to be the D in GANDALF.

Since it was about joy, the acronym GANDALF worked well. An unexpectedly playful reference to ‘The Lord of the Rings’ in the otherwise so serious banking industry.

Casting the right roles in Storytelling

In LOTR, Gandalf is the wizard who mentors the heroes.

In storytelling, that’s the role you want to be in – mentoring and serving your customers on their own hero’s journey.

I first heard the DBS Bank story from Harvard Business School Prof. Ranjay Gulati (author “Deep Purpose”). It was, well, a joy to hear it from one of the key players in this impressive transformation – strategy implementation expert Robin Speculand, who DBS regularly has share the story of their transformation.

Thank you for hosting me, Robin. We are delighted to have you as our Global Peter Drucker Forum ambassador for Singapore.