Asia's talent shortage in the private banking industry leads to regular complaints. Now, in Singapore, a training and development organisation is drawing on international expertise to help fix this.

A regular complaint one comes across in Asia-Pacific private banking is that there is a shortage of top-notch talent, leading to a constant poaching war. To fix this situation requires sustained talent management.

To highlight the issue, a few weeks ago, Carlton Senior Appointments, an executive search firm, said in a note: “The talent pool is shrinking and the massive gap in demand and supply is ever increasing. There appears to be a shortage of high-quality bankers, and with the shift in the balance of weight in terms of the influx of cash into the East, this could be a hindrance in the coming future.”

The Carlton warning needs to be heeded, as this is not an isolated comment. How to fix this problem? It turns out that one issue is that there is, apparently, a gap in the middle between costly post-graduate courses and MBA programmes on the one side and relatively cheap, e-learning courses, on the other. (To see an example of courses for wealth management, click here.)

This is the view of a newly launched training organisation, Temaswiss, based in Singapore. This publication recently spoke to Dr Ranjan Chakravarty, chief executive, and Suvendu Ganguli, chief operating officer, at Temaswiss, about their vision and why they set up the body in the first place. (A third figure among the leadership is Shanmuga Retnam, the chief business officer.) Temaswiss Wealth Singapore, to give the full name, is located in the Bestway Building Compass, across the way from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. (The MAS has lauded the launch of this organisation.)

“The idea behind [Temaswiss] is to recognise that Singapore becomes a long-term, sustainable pool of talent to provide services for this part of the world. There needs to be a serious amount of bench-strength,” said Dr Chakravarty. “Ad hoc training won’t achieve that….We provide functional expertise….we go into the real world,” he said.

“For banks, they are a big winner from this because they don’t have to build all of this training in-house,” he said.

As described on its website, Temaswiss sees its mission to be “a lighthouse organisation served by experienced bankers, for the private bankers”. It also sees itself as to “drive wealth management domain expertise and be at the forefront of industry developments”.

One issue that WealthBriefingAsia wanted to clear up was the issue of the name. It turns out that the “Tema” part of the name is taken from Temasek (“Sea Town” in Old Javanese), which was the name of an early city on the site of modern Singapore. The “Swiss” component is designed, the founders of the organisation say, to reflect its private banking focus – something for which Switzerland is renowned – and the fact that its co-founder Suvendu Ganguli, is a Swiss-national veteran banker who was trained in and worked for a major part of his career in his home country.

The nitty-gritty
Temaswiss has three full-time faculty with a colleague expected to join at the end of August. The model is based on an outreach programme of guest experts (not to be confused with its industry speakers), currently at 12. The faculty delivers the core insight and expertise elements supplemented at maximum 30 per cent (in any one course) by the outreach experts. These outreach experts, all of whom have at least 16 years of functional expertise, are based in Singapore, Indonesia, India, Thailand, UK and Switzerland. These experts will cover areas such as cross-border private banking; operational risk; anti money-laundering risks; audit, human resources and business re-engineering.  

The programmes cater for individual self-financed attendees but most of the courses are delivered as “smart-sourced” programmes for the financial institutions directly with their private banking units, risk functions or their HR learning academies. This applies particularly to Temaswiss’s Continuous Professional Development (CPD) regulatory programme. At the moment, the organisation has a “firm commitment”, it says, from six institutional customers across Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. On average these institutions will source 20-30 attendees on a quarterly basis.

The average individual course cost is S$1,200 for a two-day four-hour course. The component courses of our Mercator 360o Private Banker Certification (CPD Programme) are typically not delivered as individually priced course – the certification “rack rate” isS$3,000. Qualifying institutions and individuals under various Singapore government schemes are eligible for grants and defrayments of training costs in instances up to 70 per cent of the course fee. A typical course lasts four hours over two days.

Lessons from the mountains
Suvendu Ganguli explained a bit more about how his Swiss background and experience has played a part in forming Temaswiss. (Among other roles, he has worked at JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank; more recently in Asia, he has been the functional COO for Standard Chartered’s corporate SME banking segment in Southeast Asia.)

“The model [in Switzerland] of going through a private banking apprenticeship doesn’t take place here in Singapore,” he said. Most private bankers in Singapore get their start by working in the retail side of a bank, then moving into premier-level banking, then to the private banking side, he said. “That model doesn’t necessarily ensure that a private banker becomes anything more than a polished product salesperson,” Ganguli said. As a result of that experience, he wanted to bring a bit of the Swiss model into the Asia region.

Training tends to be either at the e-learning end of the spectrum, or at a high-end, high-cost model as through university Master’s degree courses, he said. What is missing is something that falls between these two extremes to enable career development. “We are developing programmes that develop a private banker as a relationship manager. We use real-life examples in the course and we deal with issues such as anti-money laundering,” he said. Courses also touch on operational risk issues, outsourcing and cross-border issues.

The CEO’s resumé is equally international and also informs his outlook. Dr Chakravarty, was, until recently, the chief risk officer of the Singapore Mercantile Exchange and Clearing Corporation; he has also been research fellow, Centre for Asset Management Research Investments (CAMRI) as the National University of Singapore. He has also been a managing director at DBS In Singapore, and held management roles at a number of banks in the US and has taught in that country and around the world.

These are early days, but as far as the founders of Temaswiss are concerned, they look forward to hearing rather less about Asia’s talent dearth in the future.