An innovative Standard Chartered team has hired a new director
It’s no secret that technologists are the new power players in the banking sector – at Goldman Sachs they account for about a quarter of staff globally, while tech vacancies at DBS make up nearly 40% of all openings.
Standard Chartered in Singapore, meanwhile, set up a new team in March, SC Ventures, to invest in startups, and promote rapid testing and implementation of new business models.
Working for Ventures means you’ll be spearheading tech projects across different divisions of the bank (including the eXellerator innovation lab) and using the most “disruptive technology”.
Moreover, Ventures is hiring. It’s just taken on Fernn Lim – who was previously head of culture and fintech acceleration at The Open Vault, OCBC’s fintech lab – as a director. Lim joined OCBC in January 2016 after a brief stint as an innovation strategist at Accenture’s fintech and innovation lab in London.
Lim’s recent moves reflect a new trend in the banking sector: lab hopping. So many innovation labs have sprung up in major financial centres (Singapore alone has about 28 of them, including ones from DBS, HSBC, and Deutsche Bank) that it’s now possible to build a career purely within the sector – and move from lab to lab in the process.
SC Ventures is led by Alex Manson, who joined Stan Chart in 2012 and was latterly global head of transaction banking. Other recent senior transferees into the new unit include Gautam Jain (formerly global head of digitisation and client access for transaction banking), Sachin Rajat Sharma (who led pricing and portfolio, group deposits), and Maxime de Guillebon (ex-head of digital platforms).
The unit continues to recruit. For example, it currently wants a head of analytics to apply big data tools for “data science processes and machine/deep learning development”, according to Stan Chart’s careers site.
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