DBS chief executive officer Piyush Gupta is to take a 30% pay cut as punishment for a series of disruptive outages that hit the bank's payments and ATM services last year.
While Gupta suffered the deepest cut, other members of the bank's management committee also saw their compensation slashed by 21% from the previous year despite record profits.
In May, Singapore's central bank imposed additional capital requirements on DBS, following widespread outages in March last year and a subsequent disruption to its digital banking and ATM services two months later. The bank was further reprimanded in November following a data centre meltdown that hit online and payment services.
A six-month hiatus on non-essential IT services has also been imposed following an independent investigation into the March 2023 downtime which identified shortcomings in system resilience, incident management, change management and technology risk governance and oversight.
In 2022, Gupta received $15.4 million, comprising a salary of $1.5 million, a cash bonus of $5.77 million and deferred remuneration in cash and shares of $8.04 million. A non-cash component - comprising club, car and driver benefits - worth $80,529 was also part of his pay package.
The 30% cut to his package this year will amount to $4.14 million, the bank said in its earning report.
In a statement, the bank says it has committed SG$80 million to implementing its technology uplift and resilience roadmap. "These efforts will enable the bank to better pre-empt disruptions to its services, provide customers with alternate channels for payments and account enquiries during disruptions, and shorten incident recovery time. Going forward, the bank will continue with its investments to sustain efforts to provide reliable services to customers."