Stanley faces challenges in running Singapore's DBS

By Saeed Azhar

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - For Richard Stanley, Singapore's attraction goes far beyond the realm of his Citibank career in the city-state. He found love on the island, a former Miss Singapore who became his wife.

The romance with the country has lured the 47-year-old American banker to return to work in Singapore for the third time, to run Southeast Asia's biggest lender, DBS Group Holdings (DBSM.SI: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz).

But expanding DBS beyond Singapore and Hong Kong, its two key markets where it earns about 90 percent of its profits, and weathering global credit turmoil will not be easy.

"DBS is not a broken bank," said Matthew Wilson, an analyst at Morgan Stanley. "It is just a Singaporean bank and hence has structurally low growth, low returns, and limited distinctive capability to succeed regionally."

DBS cannot offer the global scale and breadth that the likes of Standard Chartered (STAN.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Citigroup (C.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) could offer to regional banks, he said.

"Richard Stanley has no easy levers to pull to improve performance."

DBS is likely to report on Wednesday quarterly profit fell 8.3 percent from a year earlier to S$566 million ($416 million), according to a Reuters poll. Analysts expect it to report lower fees and fresh provisions on its exposure to complex credit derivatives.

But the writedowns would be much lower than last year when it wrote down S$270 million on structured instruments, including debt exposed to the collapsing U.S. subprime mortgage market.