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Standard Chartered’s first half results have been hailed as a sign of the bank’s revival. Statutory profit before tax of $2.4bn at the Asia-focused lender exceeded analysts’ estimates, while chief executive Bill Winters said Stan Chart has made “good progress” in its turnaround efforts. Stan Chart has also been boosted by a $1bn stock buyback initiative, of which about $740m is complete.
There are still clouds on the horizon, however. Stan Chart is closely monitoring “geopolitical pressures” that could affect investor sentiment, such as the US-China trade dispute and the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. The firm announced in February that it wants to slash spending by $700m over the next three years. If you work for Stan Chart in its hubs of Singapore and Hong Kong (or if you’re looking for a job there), you’ll want to be in a unit that’s growing, not shrinking. Stan Chart’s H1 results provide some clues about its best performing teams.

Read more: https://bit.ly/2yrXYAv
I’m a mass-affluent banker working for ICICI in Mumbai, but in just eight weeks I’m relocating to Singapore. In theory, I’m lucky to be moving to a larger and more mature financial centre, but there’s a catch: I’m going because my husband’s tech company has transferred him there. I don’t have any calls with recruiters lined up, and the weeks are counting down.

I pushed my husband to take the transfer partly because I thought it would be fairly straightforward for me to get one or two initial interviews underway, or at least start talking with a few recruiters in my field. While I knew I was unlikely to land a job all the way from India, I thought I could get the wheels in motion.

Read more: https://bit.ly/2Zyixaf
In tightly-knit financial centres like Hong Kong and Singapore it’s common enough for recruiters to meet candidates for causal chats over coffee, even if they can’t offer any suitable vacancies right away.

But beware – even though you’re not interviewing for a specific job, you should still prepare well for these cafe meetings. Recruiters will be assessing whether they should put you on their books and prioritise you when their banking clients next come knocking. Here’s how to pitch yourself as a candidate over coffee.

Take an interest in them
“Remember to ask about the recruiter’s own career and background – most of us will be pleasantly surprised when you actually take an interest in us,” says Angela Kuek, director of search firm Meyer Consulting Group in Singapore.

Read more: https://bit.ly/2KolGDc
As recently as six or seven years ago, I was still enjoying the golden period of my career in Asian private banking. Most of my working hours were spent doing the things that might spring to mind when you think ‘private banking’: talking to clients and structuring deals for them.

These days, however, I’m still technically a relationship manager at the same US bank in Hong Kong, but I often consider myself more a compliance officer than a banker. The other day I spent around 70% of my time dealing with client compliance issues. Admittedly, this is at the extreme end – but you see my point.

Read more: https://bit.ly/2Zy5q9b
I’ve now made it to the middle ranks at one of the largest foreign banks in Singapore – and I didn’t even start my career in banking. My first job was as a Big Four auditor. But despite having forged a successful banking career, I’m now thinking of rejoining the Big Four firm I was once so desperate to leave. Here’s why.

In my graduate job in the Big Four I was auditing financial institutions in Singapore, but I soon craved even more exposure to financial services. Even after doing a lot of audits on finance firms, I never felt I could make much of an impact on the sector as an auditor – I needed industry experience to do that.

Meanwhile, by my third year of auditing I was worn out by the drudgery and sick of all the late nights I was putting put in. I could also see the crazy hours that the senior guys were doing and I couldn’t see myself progressing to their level. It didn’t seem worth the effort.

A job at a bank seemed to be the best solution at the time (this was about four years ago) and I was lucky enough to get an offer from one of the major global players in Singapore. The job was in product control – a role which was in demand back then and provided the most sure-fire way for auditors in Asia to break into banking.

Read more: https://bit.ly/2M4rMvO
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HSBC is swinging its axe globally. About 2% of its workforce – or about 4,000 people – are set to depart this year as HSBC seeks to reduce costs. Expensive senior staff in the Global Banking and Markets division are expected to bear the brunt of the  cuts. Meanwhile in Asia, where HSBC made 79% of its pre-tax profits in the first half of 2019, the bank is closely monitoring the potential impact of US-China trade tensions and civil unrest in Hong Kong, according to its H2 financial report.

But there was some good news in Asia in the first half – regional revenue was up 9% year-on-year, “driven by strong performance in Hong Kong, the Pearl River Delta and Singapore”. If you work for HSBC in Hong Kong or Singapore, you’ll want to take advantage of this growth and avoid the upcoming redundancies. Where are the safest HSBC jobs in Asia? The bank’s results provide some clues.

Read more: https://bit.ly/2Ts6kS4
JP Morgan is expanding its equities-focused technology team in Hong Kong. The new hiring is part of wider moves by banks in the city to further automate their trading systems. More than half of the US firm’s current Hong Kong-based technology and quantitative research vacancies have an equities focus.

For example, JP Morgan wants developers to help re-engineer its ‘Pyramid’ platform for processing and risk managing of equity derivatives. If you want to work on Pyramid, there’s a Python-specialist equity derivatives software engineering job on offer, and there’s a similar equities role with a Java focus. Both also demand “very good knowledge of one or several scripting languages” (Python, JavaScript, Ruby etc), according to the JPM careers site.

Read more: https://bit.ly/2YOEHsp
Wai Lam Sham, the man who led corporate strategy for APAC asset management at Deutsche, has joined DBS to help drive its digital transformation. Sham is now an executive director, digital value capture, at the Singaporean bank, having previously worked as a director, corporate strategy and transformation, for Deutsche since 2015, according to his public profile.

Deutsche may well have wanted to retain Sham’s strategic expertise. Under a sweeping new strategy announced last month, the firm plans to expand DWS, its asset management arm, in Asia, even as it scales back other businesses and makes about 18,000 job cuts globally. As a senior Deutsche asset management strategist, Singapore-based Sham would have presumably been at the forefront of mapping out this regional growth.


Read more: https://bit.ly/2z8nlHL
I’m an investment banking headhunter in Singapore and I have a big gripe about the way many global banks (i.e. my clients) here are behaving this year when hiring junior to mid-level front-office candidates. While candidates may be in control of the job market in other parts of the Singapore finance sector (private banking and technology, for example, suffer from skill shortages), it’s still an employer-led market in IBD.

Investment banks, however, are abusing (and overestimating) their power in the job market – and this is detrimental to both them and the people they’re trying to hire. Since the post-Chinese New Year hiring season kicked off in February, I’ve noticed that banks in Singapore have been interviewing more people for each role than they have in the past (I've been recruiting for around 10 years).

Read more: https://bit.ly/30kA6eh
Leaving Asian banking to start your own company sounds like a good idea in principle – no more stifling company bureaucracy to deal with, no more 11pm calls with head office. But is it in reality?

If you’re contemplating quitting banking for business in Hong Kong or Singapore, we’ve asked ex-bankers who've made a successful move to highlight some of the potentials pitfalls.

Trying to replicate your banking job in your business
“Your area of specialisation in your bank is not the only thing you can found your business on,” says Sharma. “If you did KYC in the bank, that doesn’t mean you start a KYC software company, for example, because that area is already crowded. You should instead use your general banking knowledge to see what customers want and build something on that basis.”

Read more: https://bit.ly/2Nnkxz0
Unless you’re working in technology or have a unique set of skills, finding a banking job in Singapore or Hong Kong isn’t entirely straightforward these days. With this in mind, you’d think candidates would be doing all they can to cut back on mistakes at job interviews. Think again.

Recruiters in Asia have been left flummoxed recently by job seekers who’ve seemingly gone out of their way to flunk interviews at banks. Here’s a selection of the worst mistakes.

Are you single?
“I know of a case where a male candidate in Hong Kong asked the interviewer if she was single,” says Vince Natteri, director of search firm Pinpoint Asia. “That ended his chances of getting the job.”

Read more: https://bit.ly/2Zg7y9y
If you’re looking for a banking job in Asia this quarter, you may well be applying via recruitment consultants.

But in the competitive job markets of Singapore and Hong Kong, how do you know that recruiters are actually experts in your sector? While the vast majority will be up to scratch, there are still a few cowboy recruiters out there. Here’s how to weed them out so you only work with the best.

Ask them about “team dynamics”
“A good recruiter can fill you in on the ‘dynamics’ of the role, over and above the job description. For example, team dynamics, company culture, and personalities and big egos within the team,” says Angela Kuek, director of search firm Meyer Consulting Group in Singapore. “Then you can go for interviews better prepped. Bad recruiters just tell you to refer to the JD.”

Read more: https://bit.ly/2ZtNawD
Singapore’s three local banks – DBS, OCBC and UOB – are all among the most aggressive recruiters in the city state. In the year to end-June 2019 they collectively added 3,449 staff, according to their financial results.

If you’re considering going local having so far spent your career within global firms, what do you need to know before you interview with a Singaporean bank? We spoke with several recruiters to find out.

Don’t assume you know their strategy
Given the extensive – and largely positive – media coverage these banks receive in Singapore, some candidates come into interviews wrongly assuming they already know enough about their strengths and weaknesses. “Do more homework. The local banks are dominant and highly visible here, but how much do you know about their strategies and nuanced differences?” says a banker-turned bank HR professional in Singapore.

Read more: https://bit.ly/2KYynpS
In which jobs will you earn the highest base salaries in the Singapore finance sector? And how much will you actually get paid when you reach the senior ranks in these roles?

To find out, we averaged out director (i.e. people with about 10 years’ experience or more) base-salary figures across pay surveys from three recruitment agencies in Singapore. We then eliminated jobs with an annual salary of less than S$350k to produce the table below. We used the maximum figures from each firm’s director-level pay range, so the salaries listed are for top performers.

Read more: https://bit.ly/32bUEpS
JP Morgan’s announcement that it is to build a foreign exchange trading and pricing engine in Singapore means there are now four large banks (the others are Citi, Standard Chartered and UBS) launching FX hubs locally within the space of just 12 months. JPM’s move will further stretch the already-limited supply of developers with the skills to work on these complicated new platforms, which are designed to reduce the costly millisecond delays currently caused by routing FX trades from Singapore clients via cities like Tokyo or London.

The JP Morgan engine will launch early next year (as will Stan Chart’s) and will cover a full range of spot FX and precious metals. The Monetary Authority of Singapore is trying to encourage (partly via grants and tax incentives) more big players in the FX sector to build trading systems and data centres in the city state. UBS launched its Singapore engine in April, while Citi plans to go live with its one at the end of this year.

Read more: https://bit.ly/2lQjR9n
You meet a recruiter about a banking job in Asia, but you instead spend much of the appointment being grilled about your colleagues and your current bank – that scenario is becoming increasingly common. In competitive job markets like those in Singapore and Hong Kong, some recruiters want to eke out any advantage they can.

How should you react when recruiters try to probe into what your current employer is up to? Here’s some expert advice.

Don’t give the whole game away
“Be as honest as possible without sharing any sensitive or confidential information,” advises Adrian Choo, CEO of Career Agility in Singapore. If asked about your team’s portfolio size, for example, you could say “between $100m and $150m”, or “last year’s growth rate was above market expectations”.

Read more: https://bit.ly/2kh6aQG
You’re looking to start an accounting qualification that will get you a job or advance your career in the Singapore financial services sector. Which one should you choose?

We searched through our CV database to find Singapore-based professionals who work in accounting jobs and who have a mainstream accounting designation (ACA, ACCA, CA, CPA, CIMA) – and we calculated the proportion of people holding each qualification. The chart below shows which qualifications are most popular in Singapore among people in the banking and finance industry.

At 36%, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) qualification is the most common in Singapore. The city state is an international hub for accounting talent and ACCA is among the more globally recognised accounting qualifications. ACCA in Singapore works with about 210 “approved employers” that support its qualification, including the Big Four and banks such as Credit Suisse, DBS, HSBC and UOB, says Reuter Chua, head of ACCA Singapore.

Read more: https://bit.ly/2kz5ypz
Offshoring may not be as bad as it was three or four years ago, but global banks are continuing to shift back-office jobs from Singapore and Hong Kong to India, the Philippines and other low-cost markets elsewhere in Asia. 

Operations staff still based in Singapore and Hong Kong are understandably nervous, but they do still have job options in their local finance sectors. Here’s how to beat offshoring and keep your career alive.

Become a change manager
Top-performing operations employees in Hong Kong and Singapore can actually benefit from offshoring by becoming change managers, overseeing offshoring and other back-office projects. Some of these roles are on a contract basis, however. “Many banks have and will continue to require change management skill sets,” says Lai.

Read more: https://bit.ly/2lMSvkp
How much do investment bankers earn in Hong Kong?
Analysts at investment banks in Hong Kong take home HK$675k on average, according to our analysis of pay surveys. Analysts’ salaries are rising at the fastest rate of all the five seniority levels, says Molly Gordon, an investment banking consultant at recruiters Selby Jennings in Hong Kong, adding that top-performing third-year analysts can earn up to HK$865k in 2019. Investment banks in Hong Kong are still attempting to ‘juniorise’ their workforces – beefing up their less-costly execution ranks while trimming directors and MDs.

By contrast, although directors and MDs remain well paid in Hong Kong investment banking, they have not enjoyed significant salary rises over the past 12 months. “The experienced people are now facing the toughest pay squeeze,” says a Hong Kong investment banking headhunter. “Those above VP are facing a tough time as younger, hungrier and cheaper alternatives are available in greater quantity,” he adds

Read more: https://bit.ly/2lISVZg