Singapore’s OCBC Strongest Bank as Canadians Dominate

Ask David Conner, chief executive officer of Singapore’s Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp., what makes a world-class bank and he smiles and tells the story of how he was hired. It was April 2002, and Singapore’s banks faced a struggling economy, poor demand for credit and rising competition from foreign lenders that had just won greater access to the Singaporean market.

Conner, then 53, had taken charge of OCBC after 25 years as an executive at Citigroup Inc. divisions in Singapore, India and Japan. When Conner -- who grew up in St. Louis -- sat down with OCBC’s top directors, they told him they wanted him to make the lender a world-class bank, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its June issue.