Standard Chartered is shedding 15,000 jobs and many of its Asian employees are looking for an exit now to avoid the cut.
But Stan Chart has been dogged by disappointing results and falling share prices since last year – so people have been leaving the bank over the past 18 months, not just since the redundancy plans were revealed in November.
If you’ve been laid off by Stan Chart or are looking to make you own move, here are some profiles of people who’ve recently left the firm and are now forging successful careers elsewhere. Let them be your inspiration.
1. Swee Siong Lee, head of cash management, OCBC
The three Singaporean banks, DBS, OCBC and UOB, have been prime poachers of senior Standard Chartered professionals, especially in corporate banking and the middle office, say recruiters. Veteran transaction banker Swee Siong Lee is a case in point. After stints at ABN AMRO and HSBC, he enjoyed a seven-year career at Stan Chart, rising to become head of global corporate products. Lee was hired by OCBC last year and is now its product head of cash management.
2. Russell Graham, rice farming in Thailand and consulting
Russell Graham was Stan Chart’s Singapore-based global head of service and solution delivery between 2011 and June this year. He’s now opted out of life in a big financial centre – he moved to Thailand to work on a rice farm for four months and is now working for a consultancy in the country that helps banks build their transaction banking businesses.
3. Aman Narain, fintech entrepreneur
Meet another Stan Chart global head now going it alone. Aman Narain was the boss of digital banking, responsible for the firm’s online, mobile and all direct-to-consumer channels. He left last year to set up CodeBlu, a Singaporean consultancy that advises companies on the “digital transformation” of their industry.
4. Emily Lee, moving to Goldman Sachs
Opportunities for Stan Chart investment bankers to move to US bulge bracket banks may be thin on the ground, but in other divisions it’s more realistic. Emily Lee was a senior associate director at Stan Chart’s funds and portfolio solutions group in Hong Kong with oversight of mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity funds, and discretionary portfolios. But in 2014 she secured a move to Goldman Sachs and a step up in rank in the process, becoming an executive director, third party distribution sales, at GS Asset Management.
5. Kevin Lim, mentoring start-ups
Stan Chart investment bankers reviewing their career options could take inspiration from Kevin Lim. An experienced financial institutions (FIG) banker, Lim worked at J.P. Morgan, Macquarie and finally Stan Chart before leaving banking for fintech last year. He co-founded a peer-to-peer lending business and since January has been the managing partner of 1823 Ventures, a company that provides business mentoring to early-stage start-ups.
6. Marcus Ng, premier banking at OCBC
Singaporean banks are also taking on Stan Chart talent lower down the ranks. Marcus Ng was at the firm between 2009 and 2014, working as a relationship manager in mass-affluent wealth management (clients with at least S$200k in assets) – a sector suffering from a big skill shortage in Singapore. OCBC hired him for its premier banking division to cover the offshore Malaysian and Indonesian markets.
7. Lawrence Ng, trading at ANZ
They’re both Western-headquartered banks with a strong Asia focus – so shifting between Stan Chart and ANZ should be easy enough, especially in the same job function. Lawrence Ng has already made this move. He worked as a FX options trader at Stan Chart for six years, specialising in G10 vanillas and exotics, and he now does the same role at ANZ.
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