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Bankers in Singapore don’t realise how tough it is to work in fintech, and start-ups should think twice before hiring them, says the boss of a local technology company.

“Unfortunately, fintech is incorrectly perceived as glamorous in Singapore, so a lot of bankers are attracted to the industry for the wrong reasons,” says Olivier Berthier, CEO at Moneythor, a firm which develops digital banking and analytics software.

“The reality is that you don’t travel business class, or have a PA, or have a stable specialist job function to perform every day. Fintech firms, like most small companies, are a stressful roller-coaster pretty much all the time,” adds Berthier, who held senior roles at software giant Misys Banking Systems before co-founding Moneythor in Singapore four years ago. “It’s not a good career choice for bored bankers seeking more excitement.”

Berthier instead likes to hire people with a software engineering background. “We’re in the enterprise software space. Even our business developers have Masters degrees in this area,” he says. “I want great engineers who can also look past the coding and understand the big picture of the customer experience we want to create.”

While Berthier worked for BNP Paribas as an IT project manager at the start of his career, he doesn’t think developers at fintech firms necessarily need banking experience.

“Technologists can get burnt out at banks. Despite many laudable initiatives in banks’ IT departments focusing on agile transformation, technologists are used to having 60 hours of meetings before they build a new feature and emailing dozens of people to get anything done,” says Berthier. “So they’re not used to being accountable for their decisions, like you have to be at a start-up.”

But if fintech firms in Singapore don’t poach from banks, where can they get their engineers from?

“It’s tough. The fintech industry faces a technical talent shortage here, although we’ve been fortunate because our business model means we haven’t needed to rapidly add lots of people,” says Berthier.

“NUS, SMU and NTU produce just a few hundred computer science grads a year. Some of the best ones go overseas, while most of the others join large companies in Singapore. Not many are interested in start-ups,” he says.

Although many fintech founders in Singapore are from overseas, it can be hard to secure employment passes for rank-and-file foreign staff, says Frenchman Berthier.

Moneythor employs about 12 people, in Singapore and in satellite offices in Paris and London.

“At the start we were just three guys who could code and who could sell to banks, so unlike a company founded by a front-office banker, we didn’t need any developers to implement our initial ideas,” says Berthier. “In six months we had something real and relatively polished to show banks.”

Berthier says this helped Moneythor start turning a profit quickly. The company is now partnering with financial services firms in Asia and Europe, including DBS.

“Success in our flavour of fintech means being a jack of all trades. You do more than one role and you often have to drop everything and focus on something more urgent,” says Berthier. “I’m the CEO and I still love to code, so I often jump in when there’s something which needs fixing or enhancing in the product, while doing sales, marketing and administrative tasks at the same time.”

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BNP Paribas needs to recruit about 120 relationship managers in Singapore and Hong Kong to achieve its new goal of being a top-five private bank in Asia by assets under management, say headhunters.

Vincent Lecomte, the French bank’s co-chief executive announced the objective last week, revealing a three to five-year timescale, but not AUM or hiring numbers.

Industry sources we spoke with, however, expect BNP Paribas to increase its recruitment this year and ultimately add about 120 new bankers in Asia.

Fourth and fifth places in the AUM league table for Asia are currently held by HSBC ($108bn in assets) and Julius Baer ($82.4bn) respectively, while BNP Paribas is in eighth spot ($74bn). UBS, Citi and Credit Suisse are significantly ahead of the competition.

By early next decade – when BNP Paribas expects to break into the elite group – the top-five threshold is likely to have risen to about $110bn. “The banks above BNP will be growing their assets too, so it needs to add at least $36bn to its AUM in the next few years,” says former Merrill Lynch private banker Rahul Sen, now head of wealth management at search firm The Omerta Group.

Ominously, the firm that BNP Paribas will most probably need to displace from the top-five, Julius Baer, increased its Asian assets by 9.7% between 2015 and 2016 and hired about 110 relationship managers last year.

While BNP Paribas will grow its AUM by extracting more money from existing clients and by deepening the relationship between wealth management and its corporate and institutional bank, it will also need to increase its headcount of Asian RMs, which currently stands at about 270.

How many will it need to hire? The average banker at BNP Paribas currently looks after $274.1m, but the firm will try to boost this per-head figure to about $300m in the near future, says Sen.

Getting another $36bn in assets on board would therefore require 120 new RMs, who would in time each have $300m on their books. That’s 24 RMs a year over five years, or 40 in three years.

This estimated headcount goal pales in comparison to the official objectives of UBS (hiring 100 RMs in Hong Kong over the next two years) and Credit Suisse (recruiting 180 across Asia by 2018), but still it represents a significant increase for BNP Paribas. In 2015 and 2016 combined the French bank added 34 private bankers in Asia.

HSBC private bankers will be among its main targets. “HSBC has a similarly conservative investment strategy. Wealthy clients in Asia look to both HSBC and BNP Paribas to park their ‘safe’ money, and they bank elsewhere when they want aggressive credit in their portfolios,” says Sen.

BNP Paribas will also target former Coutts International RMs, some of who are “dissatisfied with life at their new owner, Union Bancaire Privée”, says another headhunter we spoke with.

Despite its conservative reputation, BNP Paribas should prove attractive to some bankers. “You don’t need to sell a move to BNP to your clients as you would with some of the other firms that are hiring in Asia – LGT or Safra Sarasin, for example. It’s an easy name to sell because it’s a global brand,” says Sen.

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If you’re looking for a job at the cutting edge of quantitative risk management, you might want to look to UBS. The Swiss bank is creating a new team to validate and control its algorithmic trading models, and it’s looking for someone to lead it.

UBS is advertising for a head for a new team of model risk managers focused on algorithmic and electronic trading. The successful candidate will be expected to hire in a team of people focused on the validation of its algorithmic and electronic trading models, and to oversee the algo trading “model inventory.”

Banks already have model validation teams, but they’re not seen as particularly desirable places to work. Tasked with checking that derivative pricing and risk management models adhere to regulatory requirements, model validation is often seen as a career cul de sac. Jobs in the area are increasingly being off-shored to low cost centres in Eastern Europe.

UBS’s new team is exciting, both because it’s based in London and because it’s a break from the model validation norm. It marks an opportunity to become embedded in the process of developing the trading algorithms (and ultimately, possibly, the machine learning trading algorithms) which are the future. The latest role comes after UBS also advertised for a head of artificial intelligence in its equities business.

UBS says the head of its algo validation team needs a Master’s or PhD degree in statistics, financial mathematics, mathematics or physics. It also wants someone who has “extensive previous experience in relevant algo/e-trading models” – either as a trader or from a model validation perspective.

James Kennedy, director of the quantitative trading team at NJF Search, says UBS will find experienced algo model validators from other banks within model review departments, as well as high frequency algorithmic trading firms. This new class of model validator will likely be paid competitively with model validators working on derivatives pricing models, says Kennedy, who predicts more of this hiring in future as banks must adhere to Basel III and TRIM (targeted review of internal models) which was launched in late 2015 and is expected to be finalized in 2019.. “Banks need to validate all of their models and algorithmic trading strategies in order to comply with regulators,” he says. “These people are going to have to be paid decently – although they won’t get paid as much as the people that design the trading algorithms.”

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If you’re a junior investment banker looking for a move across to the buy-side, there’s a new player in town that continues to poach from bulge bracket firms in London.

PSP Investments, the private debt fund of Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board, is building out its London operation as it looks to grab a bigger slice of the European leveraged finance market.

Oliver Duff, the former head of capital financing at HSBC, signed up to PSP Investments as a managing director for principal debt and credit for its European operation in July last year. He’s proving to be something of a magnet for young leveraged finance professionals across the City.

The latest hire is Camillo Villani, an associate within the leveraged finance and high yield division of HSBC who joined PSP Investments as a manager in its principal debt and credit investments division. Meanwhile, Anita Das, an associate within Goldman Sachs’ merchant banking private credit group, has also joined PSP as a manager within its European private debt group.

PSP is offering junior investment bankers both a promotion and a coveted move to a fast-growing firm on the buy-side. At the time of Duff’s appointment, it was reported that he had the go-ahead to hire a team of London-based senior private debt investment professionals and had $4.3bn to deploy in private debt financing over the next three years. PSP’s European hub officially launched in May and now has 28 people working in its office in Victoria.

As we reported previously, PSP has been targeting people at large investment banks. David Witkin, a former executive director at Goldman Sachs, joined as a senior director in January, while juniors at J.P. Morgan and Perella Weinberg made the switch at the tail of last year. Marco Strizzi, a former J.P. Morgan analyst and associate who spent the last two years at private equity fund BC Partners, along with Paola Rastelli, an infrastructure investments specialist from Arcus Infrastructure also joined in April.

PSP’s success in recruiting junior bankers is reflective of the fact that the leveraged finance divisions of investment banks are being raided by a broader range of buy-side firms. The likes of Permira Debt Partners, Park Square Capital and Albacore Capital have all tapped investment banks’ leveraged finance divisions in recent months and this continues.

Uzair Chiragdin, an associate in leveraged finance at RBS, has just joined debt advisory firm Marlborough Partners, while Nicole Schoenauer, an associate in European leveraged finance at Deutsche Bank, has recently signed up to Stepstone Group. These moves are not restricted to smaller players, however. As we mentioned last week, KKR has been poaching from banks’ leveraged finance teams – most recently hiring in Risham Saif from J.P. Morgan.

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Remember Engadine Partners, the London-based hedge fund set up last year by Marcello Sallusti, the former deputy chief investment officer at Egerton Capital? It’s still hiring.

Engadine just recruited Sascha Safai, a former vice president in UK institutional equities at Man Group, as its director of business development.

Safai’s arrival suggests Engadine hasn’t finished with the build that started last November when it hired a researcher from Goldman Sachs and the former head of equities for Iberia at Cheuvreux as a senior analyst.

53 year-old Sallusti started Engadine with around $200m in assets under management. It’s not clear what Engadine’s AUM are right now, but Safai’s arrival suggests they’re expected to grow in future. Disgruntled equities professionals in banks may want to look the fund up: Sallusti’s previous outfit was known as a very generous payer.

Safai isn’t Engadine’s only recent hire. In April it recruited Chude Chidi-Ofong from Ledbury Capital Partners as chief operating officer. Chidi-Ofong replaced the former COO, Michelle Wood, who only stayed for seven months and has yet to move into a new role according to the FCA Register.

The fund’s expansion comes as equities professionals and equity researchers in particular face an uncertain future. Many are expected to lose their jobs before the introduction of MiFID II in January 2018 and are looking for more secure jobs on the buy-side. As we reported yesterday, Nomura’s ex-head of equity research unit has just taken a job at a tiny hedge fund.

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Deutsche Bank is slightly happier and more positive place to work. Two months ago, the German bank unrolled a program to encourage its employees to share the positive impact they were having upon clients and society to an internal web page created for that purpose. Coincidentally, it also installed a craft coffee trolley in its London foyer. Something seems to have gone right. Bloomberg reports today that Deutsche’s latest employee satisfaction survey reveals that around half the bank’s global staff are now proud to work there – a slight improvement upon last year, despite the absence of performance bonuses for 2016. Morale at the German bank is stabilizing for the first time in three years.

The warm feelings at DB might be the result of more than the artisanal coffee trolley and positive hashtagging. Deutsche insiders point out that the bank has also worked hard to improve its culture by swapping out senior people. Werner Steinmueller, head of the bank’s APAC business said yesterday that, “fixing culture is one of the most difficult things to achieve,” and noted that under the leadership of CEO John Cryan Deutsche has changed 18 of its senior management positions. “Except for two or three, [there] are new people or people who were not involved in senior positions before,” Steinmueller said.

Now a new Deutsche job ad helps explain why Deutsche’s promotions may have brought a waft of fresh air. The German bank is looking for a “workforce capability specialist” to join its leadership planning and development team and develop a pipeline of senior talent. Among other things, the individual in question needs to be familiar with Hogan psychometric tests – a suite of tools best known in the leadership development context for their ability to identify “dark side elements” of the personality which can come to the fore in times of strain.

Deutsche didn’t immediately respond to a request to comment on its use of the Hogan tests. However, the bank is no stranger to personality testing – it uses Koru, a machine learning-based test, to assess junior staff.

Hogan’s darkside questionnaire looks for 11 “derailers” which can prompt senior staff to come undone. They are categorized as follows:

Being skeptical: If you’re not skeptical at all, you’re trusting, forgiving and naïve. If you’re too skeptical, you’re suspicious, argumentative and shrewd. A subset of skeptical characteristics includes being cynical and holding grudges.

Being excitable: If you’re not at all excitable, you’ll be peaceful content and relaxed. If you’re “high risk” excitable, you’ll be volatile passionate and emotional. The subset of excitable characteristics include being easily disappointed (or not easily disappointed enough and therefore lacking “fire in the belly”) and lacking direction.

Being bold: Being bold is a bad thing when you’re so bold that you’re forceful, arrogant, and demanding. As subcategories of boldness, Hogan says you might also be entitled, over-confident and suffer from fantasies relating to your own talent.

Being mischievous: Having a few very slightly mischievous senior bankers might be a great thing, but Hogan screens for excessive mischief which it says can be, “limit testing, impulsive and manipulative.”

Being reserved: If you’re high risk reserved, you’ll be remote, aloof, and tough. You might also be highly introverted, argumentative and anti-social. Being super-social also isn’t great though: it can be a sign of being too conflict-avoidant.

Being dutiful: If you’re high risk dutiful, you’re loyal, respectful and conforming. If you’re not dutiful enough you’re challenging, independent and unconventional. Highly dutiful people may be too compliant and very ingratiating. Not very dutiful people may also be disloyal and rebellious, challenging and contentious.

Being leisurely: Hogan says a leisurely attitude becomes a risk when you become stubborn, procrastinating and uncoachable. You might also be horribly passive aggressive (defined as, “overtly pleasant and compliant but privately resentful and subversive regarding requests for improved performance; moody and easily upset.”)

Being imaginative: Having a bit of imagination is all very well, but not when you’re “strategic, unfocused, and expansive.” You might also be overly eccentric (expressing “unusual views that may be creative or strange”) or too creative (“bored and potentially overconfident in one’s problem-solving ability”).

Being diligent: Hogan screens for too much diligence, which makes people ” hard-working, scrupulous, and controlling.” It also screens for insufficient diligence, which can lead to people having low standards and being too forgiving.

Being colourful: The test looks out for people who are “high risk colourful” and therefore, “dramatic, flirtatious, and noisy.” It also looks for people who are drab and, “may seem socially inhibited and lacking in outward confidence.”

The implication is that Deutsche’s leaders are screened for and made aware of their darkside shortcomings. Hogan says business and finance people tend to suffer from being bold, colourful and dutiful. Technology and quantitative types tend to suffer from being cautious, reserved and diligent. Having darkside traits need not be the end of a bid for promotion: Hogan says it’s possible to “coach the darkside personality” and Deutsche specifies a coaching qualification alongside familiarity with Hogan tests in its job description.

Either way, it seems you shouldn’t find arrogant, ingratiating or overly demanding people at the top of DB any more.

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It’s not unusual to only spend a few years working for global banks – private equity or fintech often prove irresistible. But leaving within a matter of months is still a rarity.

There are exceptions. McKinsey & Co in Singapore has just rehired veteran financial services consultant Reet Chaudhuri from Standard Chartered. He was at Stan Chart for just 10 months and it was his first role at an international bank.

Chaudhuri has joined McKinsey as a ‘senior expert’, focused on serving corporate and investment banking clients across Southeast Asia.

While Chaudhuri worked briefly for Indian bank ICICI after he graduated in the late 1990s, he spent most of the next 16 years in consultancy, starting with KPMG and Arthur Andersen, according to his online profile.

By 2007, Chaudhuri had made it to Boston Consulting Group as a project lead. The following year he moved to McKinsey as a management consultant and stayed there for more than six years before doing a 19-month stint at Oliver Wyman in Singapore.

Chaudhuri then made his short foray into a global bank. He was at Stan Chart in Singapore between July 2016 and May 2017 as a director in the central strategy team, specialising in corporate and investment banking.

McKinsey has now lured him out of this in-house strategy job, about two and a half years after he last worked for the firm.

“People from consultancies, especially top-performing senior guys, often feel too constricted working in-house for just one bank,” says a Singapore-based headhunter. “Some of them miss the flexibility that comes with consulting for different banks.”

Chaudhuri is not the only strategy expert at a bank in Singapore to have joined a consultancy recently. Jatin Khanna left his job in ‘projects strategy and delivery’ at Goldman Sachs in November to join McKinsey as a management consultant, for example.

But it is still an uncommon move. “It’s rare to join a consultancy from a bank – it’s typically the other way around,” Benjamin Quinlan, who moved from the strategy team at UBS to join Oliver Wyman and now runs his own consultancy in Hong Kong, told us previously.

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In banking, time is always against us. Every minute counts, whether you’re an analyst working late preparing pitch books, or an MD under pressure to build a pipeline of deals.

I’m a former investment banking MD at UBS in Hong Kong, so I know what it’s like to be working against the clock. During my 23-year banking career in Asia I’ve developed some tools to save time, reduce decision making, and make my work more enjoyable.

Some of the tips below are fairly simple and not all of them are directly work focused. But they’ve all been very effective for me and have freed up time that I wouldn’t otherwise have. As bankers, we can all do with extra time.

1. I always take clients to the same restaurants

I go to the same few restaurants when entertaining clients. Because I’ve got to know the restaurants so well, I don’t look at the menu before ordering, or worry about the food quality or whether the bill will exceed my budget. I focus instead on talking to my clients about their business problems and discussing potential solutions. If I have another meeting before lunch which ends early, I don’t return to the office but go directly to the restaurant to save time. The restaurants’ bosses know me well and just leave me alone to work.

2. I stick to a rigid routine

President Obama once told Vanity Fair: “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” It’s the same if you’re a busy banker. Take exercise. Deciding whether to go to the gym can use up enormous amounts of effort if you’re in two minds about it. So I set exact times for exercise – Mondays at 11.30am, for example. Come Monday 11:25am, I always pick up my gym bag. There’s no should-I-go-or-should-I-stay decision to be made.

3. I only wear white shirts

I only wear white shirts to work, so I never waste time in the morning thinking about which shirt to choose (nor which tie, because they all match with white). It’s good to eliminate as many decisions as possible from your working day, even small ones. They can all add up.

4. I buy in bulk

I don’t like wasting time going to the shops or continually shopping online. For items that won’t expire quickly (batteries, printer cartridges, toiletries and socks, for example), I always buy in bulk, to last me six months or longer.

5. I label everything

The humble labeller is the most useful low-tech tool a banker can buy, especially when it comes to travel. As a banker and now as an educator, my work requires regular overseas business trips. So I keep neatly labelled clear packs for each city I visit, containing foreign currency and the cards of my favourite restaurants. The night before each trip, I just grab the right pack.

6. I auto delete emails

I receive hundreds of irrelevant emails every week, so I set rules in Microsoft Outlook to auto delete them by subject or sender. These rules take only a few minutes to set up but save me a lot of time in the long run and allow me to focus on the important messages.

7. I note down everything

CEOs have personal assistants to remind them of everything. Most bankers, even senior ones, don’t. But we don’t want to waste time trying to recall every appointment or task in our personal and professional lives either. So when anything new comes on my radar – be that a client meeting, must-read book, or school performance – I immediately put it into iPhone Notes or my calendar.

Eric Sim is a former Hong Kong-based UBS investment banking MD, and is currently a guest lecturer at Renmin University.

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Technology might be wiping out human traders and sales roles in investment banks are increasingly under threat, for the latest generation of financial services removing the need to entertain clients could spare a whole lot of heartache. 2,000 of the 400,000 people working in the City of London are functioning alcoholics, and it’s safe to say that this figure would have been far higher during the pre-crisis days of boozy lunches and expensive client entertainment.

Financial News has spoken to Lee Rolleston, a former Deutsche Bank trader, whose job in the City led to him becoming an alcoholic. Rolleston claims he was encouraged to “spend more” on client entertainment, which invariably involved drinking. “I was probably spending two to three times what I earned a month on expenses,” he says.

By the time he joined Deutsche Bank as a senior trader after years in the City, Rolleston said that he was a “functioning: alcoholic. “I was holding down a job, earning and spending good money. I had just got married and started a family. There was more pressure in that job than in my previous role. I felt out of my depth at times, and that led to me drinking more.”

But he was made redundant by Deutsche by 2004 and then returned to a Swiss brokerage with a renowned drinking culture. This is when his drinking really became a problem.

“The turning point came the day after a US national holiday,” he told Financial News. “We had been out all day and all evening – I always organised to go drinking when the US markets were closed. I woke up on Tuesday morning and could barely do my shirt up as I had such bad shakes and sweats. I was clearly still over the limit but got in the car. I was fortunate. The petrol light was on, so I drove to the garage and blacked out on the forecourt.”

Rolleston said that he considered suicide, but sought help at the right time by calling Alcoholics Anonymous. Part of the problem recovering, said Rolleston, was that his colleagues in the City were far from supportive – saying things like “we’ll soon get you drinking again” – largely because they drank as much, if not more, than him. The City of London has at least acknowledged the issue, and has set up a support group in partnership with WDP, a support group for substance misuse.

Separately, Frankfurt is emerging as the location of choice for banks shifting jobs out of London after Brexit, reviving its ambition to rival the City as the major financial centre in Europe. Except, Bloomberg suggest the whole thing may be overblown. Frankfurt is likely to get just 5,000 jobs because of Brexit, which will hardly make a dent, according to the Association of Foreign Banks in Germany. Frankfurt might receive a few hundred jobs from each bank, but it doesn’t have the depth necessary to rival London, with insurance, reinsurance, asset management, legal services, trade finance and the like, according to Michael Mainelli, co-founder of Z/Yen Group, the think tank that compiles the financial centres index.

Paris continues to tout its cultural heritage over the conservative credentials of Frankfurt, but Mainelli doesn’t think this will be an issue. “Frankfurt isn’t a bad place to live,” he said. “It’s a bit boring, a bit dull. But then, so are many bankers.”

Meanwhile:

Peter Hancock, a former J.P. Morgan banker and boss of American International Group, is in the frame to be the new HSBC CEO (Bloomberg)

He’s a “detail-oriented, organised and sometimes abstract” operator (Financial News)

Deutsche Bank employees don’t dislike working for the bank any more than they did last year (Bloomberg)

Henry Richotte, the former COO of Deutsche Bank, has invested £500k of his own money in a mortgage robo-adviser (Finextra)

PwC has been bumping up its partner numbers (London Loves Business)

Hedge fund Saba Capital, which has three employees in London, is closing its UK office (Reuters)

“Just as eBay revolutionised retail purchasing by bringing buyers and sellers together directly, we aim to do the same for the physical commodity producers.” (Financial Times)

“My message [to middle-sized banks] would be very clear: speed up. Make up your mind and contact us early so that we can have a discussion about your plans, about the expectations on both sides. (Financial Times)

Paris is set to pitch to banks in the UK within the “next few days” (Telegraph)

Banker exodus could crash the London property market (Business Insider)

Win a £1m London apartment for a fiver (Mirror)

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Rothschild is not like other banks. While most banks pay and promote people at the start of each year, Rothschild pays and promotes on July 1st (changing to April 1st as of next year).

Rothschild’s bonuses and titles have therefore only just been allocated. Analysts have become associates, associates have become VPs, lucky VPs have become directors, and the luckiest directors have become managing directors (MDs). This was also a biannual “partner year” at the bank: since 2014, Rothschild’s most senior people have been promoted to partner and given increased pay, although no voting rights.

Who was promoted? Despite claims from London recruiters that Rothschild is “top heavy” and has made very comparatively few promotions (albeit more than Lazard which promoted no MDs at all in London for three years between 2012 and 2015) this year’s U.K. promotions were reportedly on a par with the past.

This doesn’t mean they were plentiful. The bank is understood to have promoted only a handful of new MDs in London, including Niall McBride, a former director in the bank’s debt capital markets (DCM) business, and William Marshall, a former director in equity capital markets (ECM). It’s not clear who was promoted in the U.S., but Rothschild’s recent habit of hiring in MDs from elsewhere (eg. Paul Klepetko and Michael Speller from Credit Suisse and Aashis Mehta from Lazard) may have stymied the potential for internal advancement across the Atlantic.

Becoming an MD or partner at Rothschild is a big deal. You’ll get access to the company butlers. You’ll also benefit from exceptional job security. While the average tenures of MD and partners at Goldman Sachs are thought to be 11 years and eight years respectively, MDs at Rothschild are more likely to go on and on (and on). Akeel Sachak, for example, has been global head of Rothschild’s consumer investment banking business for at least 12 years and has worked there for nearly 32 since leaving Christchurch College at Oxford University. Recruiters say that MDs who reach the top at Rothschild rarely leave (arguably making it difficult for those below them to get a look-in). If you make it, you’re set for life and remunerated generously. Even 10 years ago, Sachak already had a family home in Surrey, a flat in Kensington, and an Aston Martin to drive to work in.

And if you don’t make it? You’ll have to wait. Most are happy to do so – there have been fewer resignations at Rothschild this year than in the past. Recruiters, however, say they’re finding Rothschild juniors and mid-rankers disgruntled by the recent pay round knocking on their doors: “People at Rothschild don’t feel like they’ve been paid well for the work they’ve done,” claims one. “It’s can be hard to progress there and there’s some frustration.”

The most recently available annual report for N.M. Rothschild in the UK, ending March 2016, shows the bank paying its 706 staff an average of £332k ($429k). This includes pay for 256 support staff, and is likely to have been higher for the 422 advisory bankers and 28 asset managers.

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Are you looking for a banking job in Australia now that the new financial year has begun? Or are you wanting to move down under and break into the local finance sector?

We asked several finance recruiters in Australia to tell us the key trends that job seekers like you need to know about. Here’s what they said.

1. Junior bankers are in demand and boutiques are hiring

“The majority of 2017 corporate advisory and capital markets vacancies in Australian investment banking are at senior analyst and associate level,” says Jacob Smith, director of recruitment agency JS Careers. “Boutique investment banks and corporate advisory firms are recruiting more actively. Bulge bracket banks are currently trying to maximise resources internally – by using alternative coverage teams or offshore offices – before they hire.”

2. Compliance recruitment is still blazing

The boom in compliance recruitment may be quietening down elsewhere, but not in Australia. JS Careers experienced a 33% increase in compliance vacancies in the 2016/2017 financial year compared with the previous one. “It’s been particularly busy within financial crime as financial services firms continue to grow their AML/FCC teams to address increasing local and global financial crime risk and regulation,” says Smith.

3. The Big Four banks want credit staff, not corporate bankers

“In corporate banking, there’s been a big push for junior and mid-level credit staff at the expense of more relationship managers and sales people,” says John Meehan, associate director of financial services at recruiters Robert Walters. “The Big Four Australian banks are leading this trend and building their credit teams to perform more analytical and data-rich functions. Credit roles are no longer seen just as a support mechanism for relationship and sales managers.”

4. Portfolio managers are tough to move

It’s not easy recruiting portfolio managers in the funds management sector. “Employers are increasing expectations when hiring and looking for broader experience across a number of asset classes. But quality candidates are hard to find,” says Ryan Lewis, regional director of recruiters Michael Page. “Good portfolio managers are still in the driver’s seat as their skills remain scarce. They’re also typically risk adverse when about moving, unless it makes sense from a financial, brand, career, and training perspective.”

5. Salaries are up in business development

Business development professionals are particularly sought after within Australian funds management, says Meredith Jordan, a partner at search firm Platinum Pacific Partners. “Many funds, boutique and large, are seeking to appoint investments-focused business development professionals. This demand has seen salaries increase for new appointments and a boost in compensation for existing staff for retention purposes.”

6. Banks are hiring project managers into their finance teams

Project finance managers, who provide analysis to help banks’ strategic decisions, are in demand as more foreign banks – such as Singapore’s DBS – set up in operations in Australia. “But this is a niche area of finance, so the turnover rate is very low,” says Andrew Morris, director of recruitment company Robert Half. “PMs need strong incentives to change jobs – a highly competitive salary and a job title upgrade.”

7. There’s a new hot area within risk management

“Conduct risk teams are expanding across both Australian and global banks because ASIC has further defined its guidelines for banks to have clear conduct policies and procedures,” says Smith from JS Careers. “Candidates have transitioned into this new discipline from a range of backgrounds, including financial markets, control room and financial crime compliance.”

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““

The recent wave of redundancies at global banks in Singapore had one common characteristic – it was aimed largely at expensive senior staff. While job hunting at the top of the banking tree has always between more difficult than at the bottom, the difference is now even more extreme.

But in which particular parts of Singapore banking is it toughest (and easiest) for experienced staff to get work?

To find out, we looked at our database across 15 key finance job functions and compared the number of Singapore-based vacancies demanding at least 10 years’ experience with the number of local CVs at that level.

In the sectors towards the top of the table below, older candidates are currently enjoying comparatively straightforward job searches.

While Singapore recruiters say openings for senior compliance professionals aren’t as abundant as last year, the table shows that these candidates are still more sought after than their contemporaries in other job functions. There are just 16 resumes on our database for every senior compliance vacancy.

Accountants and auditors with 10 years’ or more experience are also perpetually in demand in Singapore, largely thanks to high staff turnover as banks poach finance professionals from each other.

Surprisingly, given that the buy-side often recruits analysts and associates from investment banks, experienced hedge fund and private equity professionals face comparatively little competition for jobs. However, this is down to a small talent pool in Singapore rather than an abundance of vacancies, says a buy-side recruiter.

If you’re in a job at the bottom of the table, your search for work could be tough. The figures for capital markets (106 CVs per vacancy) and M&A (123) suggest that senior investment banking hiring is still affected by ‘juniorisation’ – directors and MDs being laid off as bankers ranked below them are promoted.

The lack of jobs in equities also reflects recent events. In May, Credit Suisse reportedly culled about 35 positions from its Asian equities operations after a slump in revenues. Standard Chartered, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, CLSA, Nomura, CIMB and Jefferies have also cut jobs over the past 18 months.

Operations professionals face the bleakest search for work. Years of back-office offshoring from Singapore to lower-cost markets like India have created a glut of candidates.

Private bankers are still in high demand and short supply in Singapore – firms from UBS to LGT want them. But they appear low down our table because the figure for wealth management includes mass-affluent bankers, of whom there are many on the job market.

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““

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Quantitative trading based on complex algorithms devised by the mathematical elite is supposed to be the future. So, why did Man GLG just close its Oxford-based “quantitative incubating unit,” and make five of the fund managers working there redundant?

Man itself is saying nothing. Bloomberg notes that like most hedge funds, Man has been cutting costs. It’s done away with the role of chief risk officer, for example. It’s also appointed a new head of machine learning who might be seen as making the quant incubator surplus to requirement.

Not everyone’s leaving. The managers of the Oxford quant incubator – Francois Moreau and Jaco Vermaak – are staying. Vermaak is a dyed-in-the-wool quant who holds a PhD in engineering from Cambridge and joined from Winton Capital Management in August 2010. Moreau was Man’s former head of business strategy and a one-time trader at Barclays. The two men had been allocating money to mathematical models devised by the five fund managers in their incubation hothouse since February 2016. The implication is that they weren’t making much money.

Maybe this was inevitable? Man’s quant incubator seems to have hired proven quant traders like Sanatan Rai from BlueCrest, but the strike rate on democratised quant sites like Quantopian is just 0.02%. On this basis, Man would have needed to get very lucky with just five traders. Quantopian invites anyone, anywhere to devise algorithmic trading models and only pays them if they’re successful. Maybe the best quant incubation units aren’t five quant traders sitting in the rarefied environment of Oxford, but hundreds of thousands of printer repairmen and actuaries devising quant trading strategies for free after work?

Separately, top M&A bankers earn a lot of money – but not compared to the money they earn for banks. Bernard Mourad, a former M&A “dealmaker” at Morgan Stanley in Paris, says he earned $100m in fees for Morgan Stanley in 2015. For that, he was allocated a deferred bonus of $1.5m which was withheld (Mourad says unfairly) when he left to work for a client. It’s not clear what Mourad’s cash bonus was – but assuming it was double his deferral, Mourad would have eaten just 3% of what he killed. This is why senior M&A bankers leave for boutiques.

Meanwhile:

Deutsche Bank is, ‘preparing to move large parts of the trading and investment-banking assets it currently books in London to its hometown of Frankfurt .’ (Bloomberg)

Deutsche’s booking centre change would not have any impact on where traders are based but could require the relocation of a small number of back office jobs. (Financial Times)

JPMorgan is expected to announce plans to create 500 jobs in Dublin this week. (Businesspost)

John Cryan has no plans to step down at Deutsche. (Reuters)

Deutsche hired a global head of tech services from Citi. (Business Insider)

Susa Fund Management, a hedge fund founded in 2009 by former Citadel star Reza Amiri is closing. (Financial News)

Andrew Bailey, chief executive of the UK Financial Conduct Authority, earned £449k last year. His predecessor, Tracy McDermott, was paid £570k. (Financial News)

“We worked hard, we paid our taxes…I ask myself why should I make an effort for this country which I don’t belong to and which treats me like a second-class citizen.” (Financial Times)

Jefferies CEO tells staff to stop fixating on Putin and Kim Jong-Un. (Jefferies)

Man feels bad for collecting full time pay despite automating his job six months’ ago. (Quartz)

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

““

There’s an old mantra that you never really retire from investment banking, you just work equally as hard on something else outside of finance. Chris Fleming, the former head of global markets EMEA sales at Nomura, retired from the Japanese bank in August last year to launch a new mentoring website. Now, though, he’s back at his old employer in a major new role.

Fleming is now vice-chairman of wholesale banking for Europe at Nomura, a job that he took up officially earlier this month. He will report directly into Yasuo Kashiwagi, Nomura’s senior managing director and executive chairman for EMEA, who briefly held the role of interim European CEO until the appointment of Jonathan Lewis in January 2015.

“I have some good, deep relationships with some of Nomura’s biggest clients, so I’ll be helping the bank make the most of these,” Fleming tells us. “I’ll be looking for synergies, where compliant, among the wholesale and private sides of the business and also seeking to bridge the gap between East and West. There are a number of clients in the UK who want to connect with Japan, so I’ll be able to help with this.”

Fleming spent six years at Nomura, having joined from Royal Bank of Scotland in 2010 where he was European head of interest rates sales. He joined Nomura as global head of rates sales, before moving to a similar role across the macro business and finally heading up the entire sales function for the Japanese bank’s EMEA operation.

However, in August last year he was given a send off by Nomura and retired from the City to start a website called Mentor Xchange, which aims to connect young professionals with senior managers who can help provide career guidance. The aim was initially to focus on financial services, where Fleming has connections, before expanding out to other industries. Fleming says he’s still trying to get the business off the ground, so the role at Nomura is currently only three days per week.

“I’ve worked on the trading floor for over 30 years and that means I’ve witnessed a rising interest rate environment. There are senior people within the markets functions who haven’t seen this, so it helps to have some wise old heads around,” he says.

Fleming is expected to work closely with Steve Ashley, Nomura’s head of global markets to help grow revenues within its UK sales and trading operation. Ashley and Fleming worked together at RBS and both men joined Nomura from the Scottish bank in 2010, and Fleming says they’ve known one another for over 21 years.

“Vice-chairman sounds like a big role, and I want to to be one where I can really add value,” says Fleming. “Nomura wanted me back to help grow their UK business through the deep relationships I have with clients. I don’t want it to be a sedentary role – I want to make a real difference.”

After the swift and brutal closure of its European cash equities desk last year, which eliminated 500 jobs in London, Nomura’s UK operation has been revived, and it says that it’s back in expansion mode in both Europe and the U.S.

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Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

Image: Getty Images

““

Remember Maxime Kahn? He’s the star ex-SocGen trader who unwound Jerome Kerviel’s €70bn of trades in 2008. He’s also the ex-head of equity flow trading for Europe. And he’s the man who left SocGen last November with the promise of setting up a new hedge fund. That hedge fund has just surfaced. It’s called One Eleven Capital and is based in Paris’s 2nd arrondissement.

Kahn’s delay can be attributed to SocGen’s punitive notice periods, which mandate that anyone leaving has to spend five months out of the market. The French bank can be flexible on this, but in Kahn’s case it seems to have enforced the full term. One Eleven’s only other current employee – chief technical officer Bruno Belmondo, also from SocGen, seems to have been subject to the same conditions after leaving the bank (where he was technical leader of the equity finance trading system) in December.

One Eleven describes itself as a, “a quantitative hedge fund start-up,” launched, “by very experienced people gathering their skills to deliver strong performance with low volatility. ” It says it will invest in equities and listed derivatives, and promises, “pure alpha creation with no market exposure.”

There’s no sign of additional hiring at One Eleven, but it’s almost certainly happening. Last November Kahn told Bloomberg that he intended to launch the fund in the third quarter of this year with 10 staff and €400m of assets under management He added that he will combine quant strategies with fundamental analysis and that his recruits will come from, “a lot of different horizons.”

SocGen seems Kahn’s most obvious hunting ground. He spent twenty years at the bank, trading equities and derivatives, and knows the equities business inside out. There’s a strong chance that any senior equities people who’ve quit SocGen in the past six months will turn up in the 2nd arrondissement soon. Equities traders and researchers from elsewhere might want to preemptively get in touch.

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

“”

Photo credit: Paris, Quartier Latin by Luc Mercelis is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Bill DeMis had been exploring the oil fields of Texas for nearly 30 years by the time Goldman Sachs came knocking. A random call from a headhunter early last year informed him that the U.S. investment bank was seeking a chief geologist for its natural resources group in Houston, and – despite never having stepped foot on Wall Street – that he would be an obvious choice.

“I’d never harboured much ambition to work for an investment bank, but even if you work outside of the industry, the name Goldman Sachs gets your attention,” he tells us. “It seemed pretty cool, so I thought ‘why not?’”

Investment banks are desperately seeking technical specialists to enable them to take advantage of the surge in oil and gas deals over the past 12 months in the U.S. In particular, ‘Permania’ – a term coined to explain the rush of deal-making in the Permian Basin in Western Texas and New Mexico – has driven a renewed demand for geologists to support investment bankers based in the region.

Teaming up sharp-suited investment bankers with geologists more at home in cargo shorts might not seem like a marriage made in heaven, but DeMis insists that this expertise is increasingly needed in a region where acquisitions and divestitures are reaching fever pitch. Bankers, engineers and geologists all work together to ensure IPOs, asset sales and M&A deals get over the line.

“Dealmakers are great at the classic side of banking and valuation, but most of their analysis is above ground,” says DeMis, who joined Goldman as chief geologist in July last year. “Actually, there’s a whole complex system of layers, different rock formations and other factors that can affect the drilling capacity of a particular plot of land. Without this analysis, valuations can be way off.”

Last year, there were $147.5bn worth of M&A deals in the U.S. oil and gas sector, according to data from Dealogic, up from $104bn in 2015. So far in 2017, there have already been $95.2bn worth of deals.

The Permian basin is big business. In February, for example, Parsley Energy spent $2.8bn to acquire Midland Basin Assets from Double Eagle Energy Permian LLC. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil paid $6.6bn to buy companies with drilling rights for around 250,000 acres in the Permian basin in January. The size of the deals is reflective of a swell in the value of land in the region. Prices have gone from $1,000 an acre in 2012 to a maximum of $50,000 for the same patch in 2016 within the Permian basin, according to figures from research company Wood Mackenzie.

Insiders suggest that Jefferies has one of the biggest teams of geologists and technical specialists within the Houston region, with a team of 20-30 people. There are close to seven people working in these roles at J.P. Morgan within its 60-strong North American oil and gas team in the U.S. Barclays, Perella Weinberg and Scotiabank have all been involved in some big transactions this year.

The oil and gas industry isn’t exactly shy at handing out six-figure packages to its specialist employees, so investment banks have had to compete. If you’re a junior geologist at an investment bank in the U.S., salaries come in at around $100k, while senior people can expect $250k. Banks are still willing to pay bonuses, which come in at 10-100% of salary, depending on how generous your employer is feeling. Right now, bonuses are big.

But investment banks don’t just hire anyone. Usually, geologists landing at bulge brackets come armed with 10 years of experience, are experts on geophysics and petroleum geology, as well as data analysis, digital mapping and computer modelling and Geographical Information Systems. They support the deal process, but geologists are also expected to be thought-leaders, creating insights into how the industry is developing for banks’ clients.

“Investment banks only want the best of the best,” says DeMis. “I’ve been in the business for a long time, and won various AAPG [American Association of Petroleum Geologists] awards. It’s an interesting job, but not as exciting as other geology roles because it’s entirely desk-based.”

Right now, J.P. Morgan and RBC Capital Markets are recruiting geologists in Texas, and DeMis says the job market remains healthy, despite his decision to leave Goldman Sachs in April to set up his own consultancy.

Maybe now’s the time to capitalise on the boom while it lasts. The latest frenzy of activity in the Permian basin, spurred by relatively cheap production costs and estimates of up to 200 billion barrels of oil available across 75,000 square miles, is viewed by some as a bubble that will inevitably burst.

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Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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““

What will happen to trading jobs in London when Brexit is finalised in March 2019? Today’s contrasting reports on Deutsche Bank’s plans offer two very different perspectives on the potential outcome.

On one hand, the Financial Times says it’s spoken to “executives” at Deutsche Bank who are proposing to relocate the process of booking Deutsche’s trades to Frankfurt, whilst keeping the actual trading process in London. Under this version of events, only a “small number of back office jobs'”, will move to Germany. The traders themselves will stay in the UK.

On the other hand, however, Bloomberg says it’s spoken to, “people who requested anonymity,” and who say that Deutsche is proposing to move, “several hundred traders and as many as 20,000 client accounts,” out of London and into Frankfurt in the next 18 months.

Which is true?

Deutsche Bank isn’t officially commenting on the issue. Nor are the regulatory lawyers advising banks on the need to move traders out of London (or not) post-Brexit.

Off the record, however, lawyers say traders’ likely location remains a source of confusion. As Deutsche Bank’s parallel realities show, there are two versions of the future post-March 2019, and they do not correlate.

Why trading jobs won’t move out of London (or not)…

In the first (FT) version of traders’ future, banks will conduct, ““back-to-back trades,” that enable their traders to stay in London. These are trades in which products are sold by an entity in the EU (eg. the Frankfurt office) and the risk is then transferred to the UK via an internal trade between the London and Frankfurt operations of the bank. Fees for the trade are booked in Frankfurt; the trade itself takes place in London. Traders can therefore stay located in the City, although they may also be subject to “dual hatting” whereby they have a dual employment contract with Frankfurt and London.

Lawyers arguing for this version of events say it will come about because of London’s preeminence as a trading centre. “The traders are in London. The liquidity and the markets are in London. The buzz is in London,” says a partner at one leading law firm. “The whole market is here and it operates on gossip and trust and people knowing who they’re dealing with. You can’t just move that to Frankfurt,” he adds.

What of the claims by German central bankers that trading in London and booking trades in Frankfurt will not be tolerated post-Brexit? “Just sabre rattling,” says the lawyer, dismissively. “- The German government trying to create some momentum.”

What of the fact that 50% of European (equities) trading is already conducted electronically and that relationships already count for less than they used to? “Computers can be based anywhere,” the lawyer admits.

Why trading jobs will move out of London (or not)….

In the second (Bloomberg) version of the future, trading jobs will move out of London because when German regulators say they won’t tolerate back to back trades and double hatting, they mean it.

“On a very strict interpretation of the law, it’s going to be difficult to have traders in London while you book the trades in another country,” says a partner at a rival law firm. “You would effectively be triggering two regulated activities in different countries and it’s hard to see how that would function in the absence of today’s passporting arrangements,” he adds. “Ultimately, I would expect Bloomberg’s anticipation of events at Deutsche Bank to be right.”

This doesn’t mean that London traders should pack their bags though. As with everything relating to Brexit, this partner notes that much remains unclear. Moreover, he says that if the FT’s right, Deutsche wouldn’t be the only German bank planning to simply book its trades in the EU: “I know of another German bank intending to do this too.”

Similarly, he says that unless the EU issues central guidance on the issue of traders’ locations and the possibility for back-to-back trades [which it surely will], there’s the potential for regulatory arbitrage. For example, the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), which regulates banks in France, has allegedly indicated that it will be happy to tolerate back-to-back trades post Brexit, as a means of encouraging banks to relocate to Paris.

Unfortunately, the lawyer says that politics make the whole thing horribly opaque: “I’ve spoken to a lot of politicians in the last nine months and they all make the point that strict legal analysis doesn’t necessary apply in situations like this. If it’s politically expedient, the rules will be changed.”

For the moment, therefore, Deutsche’s traders are like Schrödinger’s cat. They’re both moving to Frankfurt and not. We’ll only know discover the reality as the Brexit box opens over the next 20 months.

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

“”

Rather than just putting your head down, working hard and letting the results speak for themselves, often you can’t get ahead in your career unless you assert yourself in the workplace. It’s an insight that some young professional women learn the hard way, if at all.

The pool of senior employees is still more than at Big Four firms are largely 80% male, so my selection as a young minority female was immensely gratifying. The professions of management consulting, accounting, auditing and finance continue to be exceptionally male-dominated, but women are making steady inroads.

My experience at Big Four firms taught me these lessons, which have continued to do so in subsequent stages of my career path.

Speak up as much as you can

The reason we were selected at such a reputable firm was not to be glorified note-takers in meetings, but rather to showcase our unique perspectives to contribute to the strategic discussions about technology implementations, or tactics for balancing the books at a high-profile client.

For women who aspire to a career in professional services, please do not make the mistake of scaling back your ambitions in the workplace and downplaying your strategic vision and intelligence. Instead, ensure that you let out your inner go-getter, because you absolutely must step into your power as an intellectual strategic leader to succeed in a Big Four internship or as a full-time professional working at one of these firms. There are no points awarded for taking notes and never contributing any fresh or innovative perspectives among senior consultants, senior managers and senior partners, so make sure that they hear your voice.

Embracing your innate femininity – don’t feel like you have to behave like a man to succeed

As women, we are uniquely gifted with quintessential female intuition, a keen sense of emotional intelligence and the ability to build consensus among a seemingly disparate group of voices in a meeting. This combination of traits enables us to achieve extraordinary success in business, and contrary to popular opinion, no, we do not have to behave like men to succeed in business. In fact, the amount of success I have achieved in my career so far has been a direct result of fully embracing my femininity in the workplace, as well as in my personal life.

I would highly recommend that you do the same, by loving your uniquely female personality and tapping into your innate femininity in the workplace.

I am a big believer in projecting a great deal of uplifting, empowering energy in my vocal tone when I chat on calls with my male clients, which they cherish because most men cannot bring that same vibrant tenor to the workplace. That vibrancy is uniquely feminine. Expressing my unique personality in a professional setting has also transformed my business relationships and established even greater credibility for myself as a business leader by showing clients that I am devoted to making a positive impact on their behalf.

Be confident in your abilities, talents and skills

You absolutely cannot wait for another individual in the workplace to give you permission to embrace your power and project your leadership qualities because, let’s be honest, if you don’t take the initiative, then your time may never come. Instead, advocate for yourself at every opportunity, walk with self-assured poise and radiate confidence in your interactions with peers and managers in the workplace.

You deserve the greatest career possible. It is your duty to obtain the greatest career for yourself. Putting yourself on a great career path helps you to build confidence in yourself and your abilities. Never be a woman who is too shy to come into her own in the workplace. Rather, you must embody the fully poised, fully confident woman who will win the game of business with her sheer intellect, willpower, resilience and femininity.

Now that you know what I wish I had known as a female intern at a Big Four firm, I hope you are as excited to build your career with grit, femininity, confidence, chutzpah, passion, intellect, resilience and, above all, a serious go-getter attitude.

Shinjini Das is the founder and CEO of The Das Media Group and a former business technology analyst at Deloitte and a technology advisory associate at PwC.

““

It’s no secret that financial services firms on both the sell-side and buy-side are automating as many roles as they can. Artificial intelligence, data science and other technology roles may be on the rise, but others could see a significant decrease.

Are you in the firing line over the next three years? A recent report from technology firm FIS on financial services organisations ever-elusive search for growth, breaks out exactly where the 1,000 or so executives they interviewed believe automation will occur.

On the buy side, FIS charted the projected growth of automation in trade execution, portfolio management, derivatives lifecycle management, collateral management, exception management/workflow, fund accounting and reconciliation.

buy side, asset management, mutual funds, hedge funds, fund firms, funds, asset managers, automation

Source: FIS

On the sell side, FIS charted survey respondents’ projections for the growth of automation in trading, collateral management and post-trade processing.

sell side, banks, banking, bankers, automation, Wall Street

Source: FIS

The new operating model for growth will be ineffective unless the financial services workforce is reevaluated, according to FIS. In particular, this means putting new skills such as digital transformation, digital distribution/delivery, software programming/development, algorithmic/automated trading and data science specialists in place, enabling them to work in close collaboration with the front office to drive more value and better outcomes for customers, per the report.

“Talent that is an area that people recognize that they need to respond to as technology evolves to be ready for it,” says Tony Warren, an executive vice president and the head of strategy and solutions management at FIS Global, which he joined after it acquired SunGard Financial Systems. “Financial services managers look at the talent pool in the organization, see that the workforce is made up of many millennials, who have a different mindset, where everything they need has to be there.

“We’re such a dynamic era of change – the digital revolution has only just begun, and the speed of computing, storage costs and bandwidth are not mature yet,” he says. “The level of technology innovation is going to continue to push across all areas, not just fintech, which will create a shift in the talent mix that’s required.”

digital, digital talent, talent gaps, digital change, digital transformation, big data, data science, algorithmic trading, automated trading, digital distribution, digital delivery, automation

Source: FIS

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Photo credit: baona/GettyImages
““

GIC has hired a Standard Chartered director as it starts to expand its innovation lab in Singapore.

Brian Lim is now vice president at GIC Labs and is responsible for “experimentation and evaluation of emerging technologies relevant to GIC”, according to his online profile.

GIC Labs is an in-house innovation centre which uses new technology to help increase productivity across the organisation, and collaborates with partners such as fintech start-ups, academics and other innovation labs.

Lim spent two years and seven months at Stan Chart. As a director in payments innovation, he oversaw the evaluation, integration and commercialisation of new financial technologies into cash management products.

Lim, who graduated in 2008 with a Master’s in Computations for Design and Optimisation from MIT, began his career with a two-year stint in the Ministry of Finance, where he “spearheaded” the adoption of financial analytics across the Singapore government.

He moved to the banking sector in 2011, joining Citi in Singapore as a cross-franchise management associate, according to his public profile.

GIC is not the only firm to be opening and staffing innovation centres in the Republic – 23 financial institutions showcased their labs at Singapore’s FinTech Festival in November.

Last year DBS and OCBC launched Asia X and The Open Vault respectively, which provide space for the banks to work with fintech start-ups. Several foreign firms, including Standard Chartered, Citi and Aviva, also have labs in Singapore.

Still, full-time jobs like Lim’s at innovation labs remain rare and highly sought after, says a Singapore technology recruiter. Many of the people working at labs are from early-stage fintech firms or are bank employees drafted in short-term to work on projects.

For the handful of full-time lab jobs on offer, financial institutions like to hire technologists who have experience of working with front-office departments and therefore have strong collaborative skills, says the recruiter.

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Image credit: JK1991, Getty

““

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