Banking more on foreigners BY BERTHA HENSON ON 17 JUNE 2013 AT 9:40 AM On Saturday, several bankers bemoaned the lack of top Singaporean bankers at the top ranks of banks here. Seems the problem is more widespread, so widespread that a polytechnic student who had interned at a bank here raised it at a dialogue with Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam yesterday. She said she noticed there were more foreigners than Singaporeans in the lift in the bank and wondered about her own future in the financial sector. Mr Tharman said that the Monetary Authority of Singapore had been holding discussions with some financial institutions on this issue for over a year. Both he and Acting Manpower Minister Tan Chuan-Jin have also been talking directly to banks’ CEOs. It was not a numbers game, he stressed, but opportunities must be given to the Singapore core to move up the ladder. He added: “There are differences between the banks – some of them have Singaporeans much better represented in the range of functions, some others have Singaporeans pretty much in the middle and back office. So it depends on the bank. But the local banks do a better job clearly.’’ What’s interesting is how ST and Today reported the former bank intern. ST did not name the bank she worked at, but TODAY reported her saying it was DBS Bank. Hmm. This is too odd. Why the need to protect the identity of the bank when it was mentioned at a public forum? It’s big enough to defend itself, surely. In any case, Mr Tharman seemed to disagree with the intern’s perception. TODAY quoted him saying: “In some institutions – not DBS by the way, which has a very large proportion of Singaporeans overwhelmingly – there’s a larger proportion of foreigners’’. Now if only we knew which…
Posted on: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:24:01 +0000
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