It is heartening that 44% of the 6,500 newly created jobs are open to mid careerists with adjacent or no-experience. Financial institutions are willing to train mid-careerists for these new jobs Mid-career jobseekers should avail themselves of the opportunity to be trained into these new roles. There is strong demand for non-tech roles, with close to 4,800 hiring opportunities. These include roles in relationship management, product sales, compliance and risk management. Relationship managers alone account for 1,300 or 28% of the hiring opportunities in non-tech roles. This is underpinned by the strong growth in wealth management activities in Singapore. Citibank recently opened its world’s largest wealth advisory hub at Orchard Road. Clients will be able to have in-depth conversations with relationship managers and product specialists at a single location. Citi plans to hire 1,500 more employees by 2025, including 300 relationship managers. DBS Bank is ramping up its capabilities and solutions to help all its customers improve their financial well-being, regardless of their income level or life stage. DBS aims to double the recruitment of financial planning advisers by hiring more than 650 wealth planning managers and insurance consultants this year. The demand for financial planners and relationship managers is likely to be sustained. Singaporeans are becoming increasingly conscious of the need for proper financial planning, such as insuring against health risks and saving and investing for retirement. Financial planning and relationship management is not an easy job, but it is meaningful. Relationship managers need to be knowledgeable about a range of financial products and solutions.
As I have said this is an international effort, with different jurisdictions making the transition at different times and some have already gone live. The ECB is due to transition their system this November. In the UK from next spring CHAPS users will be able to send payments containing richer data[3], such as a purpose code which describes the type of payment being made, a Legal Entity Identifier for the financial institutions in the payment chain and structured remittance data relevant to the both the debtor and creditor in any particular payment. I will flag just three of the potential benefits: improved “straight through processing” with less need for manual intervention in our payments systems; a more sophisticated approach to compliance and regulatory requirements; and the promise of wider systemic resilience through increased interoperability between systems. Given the focus on real-time in today’s session let me give one example of how the ISO 20022 message standard could transform how we approach fraud and financial crime. The harm to UK consumers and businesses and to the UK financial sector of just one type of fraud - Authorised Push Payment (APP) scams – is very considerable – losses due to APP scams were £ in 2021[4]. The introduction of a purpose code to the relevant payments message should make it possible to identify these frauds much faster[5]. Many cross-border payments lag domestic payments in terms of cost, speed, access and transparency so the benefits from enhancing payments data are clear.