‘Most of the good ones aren’t looking’: Singapore fintechs flag challenge of finding talent with both finance and tech skills

[SINGAPORE] As Singapore moves to strengthen its fintech talent pipeline, market players and observers have flagged a persistent challenge: a lack of experienced professionals with expertise in both technology and finance.

The need for multidisciplinary individuals who can bridge the two fields is becoming more pressing, with artificial intelligence now more widely adopted in the highly regulated financial services industry, they added.

Lim Chai Leng, general manager at Randstad Singapore, said: “The biggest gap right now is that the market has plenty of developers, as well as talent with financial and regulatory expertise. However, there is a shortage of ‘hybrid’ or ‘bilingual’ professionals.”

AI literacy has become a baseline skill in the workforce, noted Hassan Ahmed, Singapore country director at Coinbase.

“As fintech companies become all-in-one platforms, we need talent that can work in technology, finance and regulation, and increasingly, at the intersection of all three,” he said.

The talent challenge was again in the spotlight on Monday (Aug 31), with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announcing the latest tranche of investments for the Financial Sector Technology and Innovation (FSTI) scheme, including measures to support talent development and attraction for Singapore’s fintech ecosystem.

Among them is a new manpower track that will co-fund internship stipends to build a pipeline of young talent.

Industry players said that the focus on internships could address a longer-term challenge by giving young workers an entry point into fintech early in their careers.

Holly Fang, president of the Singapore Fintech Association (SFA), said: “Fintech companies often say they need experienced people, but if the industry does not create enough entry points today, we will continue facing the same shortage of experienced fintech professionals five or 10 years from now.”

There is also an opportunity now because younger talent is entering the workforce with relatively high levels of familiarity with AI, said Fang, who is also chief business officer at treasury management and payments platform Finmo.

She added that fintech companies find practical experience the most effective, and internships give young talents the exposure to real business problems, customers and regulated financial environments.

Frank Ip, who looks after go-to-market and strategy at AI investment research platform LinqAlpha, similarly noted that many students have had greater freedom to experiment with AI tools, compared with employees, who might have been constrained by compliance requirements.

Subsidising internships could help fintechs tap that familiarity at scale, while younger employees can also help companies expand their teams once frameworks are in place, he said.

Support for mid-career transitions

But building the pipeline does not solve the immediate shortage of talent. Most fintech players who spoke to The Business Times said the gap is mainly in experienced hires with knowledge in both the finance and tech spaces.

Such professionals are harder to find because few people have had the opportunity to build that experience in a sector this new, said Sng Khai Lin, co-founder and chief strategy officer at alternative asset investment platform Alta Exchange.

Some experienced hires may also be less willing to trade the compensation packages, stability and structure of tech giants or bigger banks to transit into fintech startups, for example, said Randstad’s Lim.

LinqAlpha’s Ip added: “Most of the good ones aren’t looking; they’re employed, well-paid and have to be persuaded rather than recruited.”

Fintech players therefore see scope for similar support to help mid-career professionals make that transition into fintech.

Sng expects that there could be more structured pathways for experienced professionals moving into fintech from banking, technology or other sectors to broaden their existing expertise, and to meet the industry’s multidisciplinary needs.

Ip sees another challenge: giving experienced financial-sector professionals the right access and training to AI tools.

Based on candidates he has interviewed, he said many of those coming out of banks used AI as a faster search engine or chatbot, rather than to build tools or applications.

This is largely because frontier tools are restricted or outright prohibited at their firms, usually for client-data reasons, he said.

“If institutions can’t let staff use frontier tools on client data, someone has to provide a sandbox where they can (do so) – real tools, realistic data, no compliance exposure,” he said.

“Otherwise, the sector keeps running adoption programmes for people who have never been permitted to build.”

This may involve bringing together the manpower and adoption tracks of the FSTI.

Ip welcomes the AI Pathfinder track – which supports the scaling and adoption of market-ready AI fintech solutions – but warned that companies could struggle to move beyond pilots without in-house talent capable of building and deploying the technology.

For now, Singapore is “getting ahead of a real risk”, Alta Exchange’s Sng said.

It is cheaper for companies to equip a senior hire with AI tools than to hire and train a fresh graduate to do that same work, she said.

Sng cautioned, however, that if every company were to make “that same rational, short-term call, the industry ends up without a fresh pool of talent who’ve actually learned, hands-on, how things should be done”.

“That experience is exactly what’s hard to replace once today’s experienced people eventually move on.”