Singapore’s reputation as a global financial hub makes it a magnet for some of the biggest names in banking, a place where a ready availability of experienced and well-trained banking industry talent makes it the ideal test bed for new products aimed at multiple markets and regions.

Standard Chartered, one of the grandees of global banking, has been operating in Singapore for more than 150 years, opening its first branch in 1859.

Singapore is not just geographically positioned as the perfect location for Standard Chartered; it also has a pool of talent to support the bank’s global business units, many of which are based in Singapore.

Steve Bertamini, Standard Chartered’s Group Executive Director and CEO, Consumer Banking, explains: “Singapore has been a terrific global operations base for us. We get tremendous talent, a wide variety of nationalities, and the people are very well educated.”

Banking professionals in Singapore are spoilt for choice when it comes to education programmes. World-class universities, including INSEAD and The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, have their Asian campuses based in Singapore and more recently, the prestigious EDHEC-Risk Institute also set up operations in Singapore, making it an education hub for high finance.

EDHEC-Risk Institute is part of the EDHEC Business School established in France in 1906. Noël Amenc, Director of EDHEC-Risk, says: “The quality and professionalism of the talent pool in Singapore is a key draw factor for financial institutions and we hope to make it even more compelling with our research, outreach, and executive education activities targeted at the investment industry.”

The Singapore government, Bertamini says, has been very receptive to the needs of the bank in finding, training and fostering new talent.

“If we find a particular area of need where we can’t find the right talent, the government will work with us to develop new programmes,” he says. “Our Global Learning Centre is based here in Singapore and many of the training and development programmes that we use across the globe are developed here in Singapore before we roll them out.”

For Standard Chartered, it is not just the ready pool of local skilled manpower; many of its expatriate hires are made in Singapore, saving the cost of relocating foreign talent.

• Download video transcript

“You can also tap a global talent pool, so it’s not just people from Singapore but from all over the world that choose to be here. The government policies are very pro-business – the regulations are clear – it’s clean and safe and people are keen to live here,” says Mr Bertamini.

The cross-cultural talent base in Singapore provides invaluable skills to a bank with a global reach. “In Singapore, we have 5700 employees and 60 nationalities in place so it’s a very diverse workforce and it helps us to be competitive globally,” he adds. “Our business is in more than 45 countries and having our talent here from many different parts of the world is a way for us to get a window into these markets.”

Many global products have been developed and tested in Singapore, where the multicultural base makes it the ideal place for bringing new developments to multiple markets and regions.”

“We are now working on what we call a relationship manager certification programme,” says Bertamini. “We believe it’s an important response in the post-financial crisis world to the fact that people want to make sure the staff they are dealing with are very well qualified and very well trained.”

The programme that is being piloted in Singapore will then be implemented around the world.

• Download the full article