Singapore’s big 4 digital banks: Who are they hiring?

Singapore’s fintech space has been growing at a steady pace in recent years. As international firms establish teams there and domestic unicorns like Grab continue to rise, the digital banking space’s growth has been an interesting one.

But will it still continue in 2023? One headhunter says no, and that “vacancies for developers are falling at these firms because the initial work to launch their platforms is done.”

These are the 4 big names in Singapore digital banking, their biggest names, and who they intend to hire in future.

Maribank

Founded by Shopee owners Sea Limited, Maribank was incorporated in 2021 and has since attracted a wide variety of tenured banking talent.

Its CFO Kevan Chow spent nearly 15 years in traditional banking, spending 13 years at Citi and the rest at Standard Chartered. He was brought in by Sea to be its head of finance before being appointed to Maribank last June.

He’s not the only experienced finance professional at the helm. Maribank’s head of operational risk management, Raymond Lye, was at Credit Suisse for a decade and its deputy head of IT spent over 5 years at BofA.

Maribank is hiring for 38 positions, of which only seven are engineering roles. An entry level career could see you earn up to $72k per year while an ‘Expert engineer’ listing of over 11 years experience could earn you a salary of $240k

Anext Bank

Anext might be comparatively smaller, but there are a few things that set it apart. For example its executive team is female dominant.

CEO Su Mei Toh is relatively inexperienced, having spent just over 3 years at DBS Bank before her current role. CFO Jaslyn Koh has more experience, having not only spent 15 years in banking at Citi and Barclays but also spent 9 months at rival digibank Green Link.

Anext are recruiting for just 11 positions at the moment. Roles with a technology element include an infrastructure and operations specialist and a risk analytics modelling specialist. 

Green Link Digital Bank (GLDK)

Green Link, despite being on the smaller side appears to have some of the most banking experience among its executive technologists. 

Its most experienced technologist is Eric Lin. After 5 years at Citi, he left for German universal bank Commerzbank, where he rose to COO of the China office. He also spent a year as Huawei’s CTO before moving to Green Link.

Other key technologists include head of engineering Andrew Xinjun Chen, who spent just under 6 years at Credit Suisse and just over 6 at Standard Chartered,

The main issue however is that just one of the 27 job listings by Green Link is an engineering role and that position is on a fixed term 12 month contract. 

GXS

The first of the four to receive a banking license, albeit only by a month, GXS is seemingly the biggest employer of the four. That doesn’t necessarily make it the biggest hirer right now, though.

Given that the bank is a joint venture between Grab and Singtel (hence the name), it appears to prefer hiring internally, particularly Grab for engineering talent. Its CEO and CTO are both from Grab; the former, Charles Wong, spent over two decades at Citi prior to becoming an MD at Grab and was their head of retail banking.

Its 2023 hiring indicates a slight shift, with more demand for senior engineers from outside the fintech. Recent recruits include senior data scientist Arif Nurhidayat who joined from Home Credit Indonesia and senior software engineer Vishnu Chandran who joined from OCBC Bank.

GXS has just 15 job listings, though they are almost entirely engineering roles. The most junior role, a backend engineer with one year of experience could earn a salary of $108k while their most senior role requiring 5 years of experience could earn a salary of  $204k.

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