Olivier Crespin

Olivier Crespin is a Portfolio Mentor at the Golden Equator Group. He is a digital professional with decades of varied business and operational positions in the financial industry across Europe, Latin America, Asia and North America.

Mr. Crespin is the recently appointed CEO of a new fully digital universal bank being established in the UAE by a strong group of shareholders.

From 2014 to mid-2017, Mr. Crespin was the Group Head of Digital Bank at DBS, where he set the strategy for and implemented DBS’s digital banking program. During his tenure in the role, DBS was awarded the World’s Best Digital Bank by finance magazine Euromoney at its annual awards for excellence – this was the first time an Asian Bank won a global award in any of the Euromoney existing categories.

In April 2016, under Mr. Crespin’s leadership, DBS launched Digibank in India, which has since grown its customer base from zero to over 2 million in less than two years.

In the years immediately prior to taking on the Group Head of Digital Bank role at DBS, Mr. Crespin was the Bank’s Chief Data Officer and COO for the Retail and Wealth businesses at DBS, while taking charge of the organisation as Group Head, he also managed the launch of DBS’s Singapore retail and wealth digital platforms.

Mr. Crespin is also the outgoing Chief Fintech Officer at CIMB Bank, which he joined in June 2017, reporting to the CEO, with the remit to build CIMB’s digital banking strategy and capabilities, as well as lead the bank’s fintech engagement and partnerships.

Outside of Mr. Crespin’s day jobs, he has also partnered in a number of entrepreneurial endeavours, including launching in his own capacity of a financial education site (asia.finance), which reached over 30,000 daily viewers within days after its launch.

Prior to joining DBS, Mr. Crespin was Citigroup’s Global Head of Operations for Private Banking. Concurrently, in that global role, he was International Head of Smith Barney’s Operations. During his career, Mr. Crespin has held different business and operational positions across Europe, Latin America, Asia and North America with Citigroup.

Mr. Crespin is well versed in English, French and Spanish and has wide international exposure. He was appointed a Fellow of the Institute of Banking and Finance (IBF) in 2016. Mr. Crespin is also on the list of Asian Banker Leading Practitioners.

Mr. Crespin has a Master’s Degree in Law from University of Metz (France).