What is Crushing Banking Jobs in Singapore?

Why it matters?

1. Singapore is an important financial hub at least for its region if not beyond.

2. A land and resource scarce island city state, Singapore depends very much on the services sector, serving geographies beyond it's borders, particularly the financial sector, for gainful employment of it's people, directly or indirectly, if not for its economy as whole, in turn again, directly or indirectly.

So What is Happening?

1. India - Rapidly modernising, reinventing its cities as alternative hub locations and drawing big global corporations including banks to set up base with the promise of office space cost, utilities costs, wage bills and other miscellaneous business expenses being at a attractively small fraction of that incurred in places like Singapore, while also promising equivalent labour output qualities in areas such as IT, back-end processing, documentation and such.

2. China - It may be a bursting bubble because of the same myriad of reasons behind its previous advent and rise coming back to haunt it, but the country is not going down without a fight, swinging into action as of late by reinventing itself to attract business to itself in new ways and areas. For long the envy of India in the east, the country is now looking to learn from the Indian models of economic successes, and looking to replicate it, by doing what it is doing, by attracting companies to setup back-end or support offices to its shores, with the promise of much lower costs, just as India has been doing.

3. Its a Downturn - The moves towards China and India are to a degree driven by needs for cost cutting in general because, well, the whole world has gotten a whole lot wrong, which is why the next few years will be a downturn period, and the worst one in history at that, which in turn, well, better now than later.

4. Technology - You need less people to do more with the technologies that have been developing for a while now, and the banks are where the money always has been, so its no surprise, that the banks are at the forefront of embracing technology, even more so than the tech sector itself, as ironic as that may be. Heard of Fintech? Oh no no no, that isn't threatening or taking banking jobs at all. That is just a bubble of a test lab that the banking industry is collectively blowing up to fine tune the grand scheme of things, to do with processes and design, to shape the next generation of banking's existence. Dig just a little bit, and it is crystal clear, that the banks own Fintech. So technology is not taking the banking jobs now, it is rather starting to take them, before it takes many more, in the years ahead, without the banks actually being at risk of losses or damage. There is no revolution here, only evolution.

Why is Singapore Hit and Why Now?

1. Starting with technology - This is the most tech savvy and adaptive country in the world. Extremely nimble. It is the most forward thinking place on the planet. It is also the place where global corporations come to, together, to tinker. If anything starts these days, think in terms of evolution especially, it starts in Singapore.

2. It being the Hub - Its the nerve centre for the industry, so when changes come, Singapore is the epicentre so the effects are felt here first, and also, felt the most relatively to other places.

3. Size - 500 jobs gone in the US, a country of 300 million people, well, shows up on charts nowhere now really. In tiny Singapore, 50 jobs gone, make headlines. What if thousands are long across the industry? Ouch.

Still Quiet Though

The unemployment level in the country has not spiked yet despite the happenings in the banking sector for a simple reason - the foreigners have been going first mostly, so far, and for the locals, if they get out to go sell insurance on commission, technically, they are still employed, and so far, because of tightening of immigration against people not essentially needed by the economy from coming in to compete with the local workforce, the locals affected, have been able to quickly find alternative means of income, technically at least. So far, so go. What next though?

Facts Don't Change

Whether or not we know the truth, the truth does not change. Whether or not we believe the truth, the truth does not change. Banking jobs, in Singapore, are getting crushed right now. And in a 3 minute read, I just told you why and how. 

Harish Shah is Singapore's first local born Professional Futurist and a Management Strategy Consultant. He runs Stratserv Consultancy. His areas of consulting include Strategic Foresight, Systems Thinking, Scenario Planning and Organisational Future Proofing. Harish also has a background in HR Consulting, Executive Search, Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Executive Coaching, Career Coaching, Assessment & Development Centres and Vocational Programme Management for Employability Enhancement.