Salaries for banks’ risk and compliance officers in Singapore and Hong Kong climbed at about twice the pace of pay for the same positions at New York and London companies amid a shortage of skilled staff members, a recruiter said. Pay excluding bonuses for people who changed jobs in the Asian cities bolstered as much as 20 percent this year, compared with 10 percent in the Western hubs, said Neil Owen, a director for Robert Half International Inc. in London. A senior official in Singapore is paid as much as S$250,000 ($201,000) annually, compared with Hong Kong’s HK$1.8 million ($232,000), London’s 175,750 pounds ($281,000) and New York’s $323,595, data compiled by the company show. Increased Regulation Banks and regulators have clashed over the severity of capital, indebtedness and liquidity rules that were set out in 2010 as part of an overhaul of the banking industry to avoid a repeat of the 2008 global financial crisis. The credit crunch that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. caused at least $2 trillion in losses globally. Financial Crime “We will look to increase this further in 2014 as we continue to build our financial crime and regulatory compliance capability globally,” he said in an e-mailed response to queries. The London-based firm has raised spending on compliance staff costs by 40 percent since September 2012. In Demand JPMorgan’s Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon told the lender’s more than 250,000 employees in a Sept. 17 e-mail to prepare for more legal woes while the bank undertakes an “unprecedented effort” to comply with regulations. The lender had assigned at least 5,000 people to compliance, he said. Marie Cheung, a Hong Kong-based spokeswoman at JPMorgan, said when contacted by phone today that the bank had no further comments beyond those made in Dimon’s e-mail. “In each financial-services hub globally, there’s absolutely a demand for risk and compliance candidates,” said Owen, whose firm conducts annual surveys of pay for the banking and financial services industries. Menlo Park, California-based Robert Half is a recruitment company with offices in 21 countries from Chile to Australia. ‘Regulatory Complexity’ Salaries in other financial-services jobs in Singapore and Hong Kong including client servicing, loans administration or mergers and acquisitions advisory haven’t changed in the last 12 months, data compiled by Robert Half show. Standard Chartered’s private banking unit in Asia has added 25 percent to 30 percent more risk-management professionals in recent years, Rajesh Malkani, the division’s head for Northeast and Southeast Asia, said in an interview in Singapore, without disclosing specific numbers. “Risk management, obviously with all the regulatory complexity, has become something that we’re all investing in,” Malkani said last month. Hiring risk management specialists has been the “biggest challenge,” he said. Bank of Singapore Ltd., the private banking arm of Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp., has also added more people in risk management and compliance than it has in sales or relationship management this year, Chief Executive Officer Renato de Guzman said at an Oct. 14 event in Singapore, without providing specifics. “All of a sudden you have new rules and new standards,” he said. “It’s a good profession to get into.”
