Hong Kong vs Singapore: Which is best for front-office banking jobs?

Hong Kong and Singapore are long-time rivals as global financial centres, but Hong Kong is by far the place to be based if you want a front-office job.

We’ve trawled through our jobs database for current openings in Singapore and Hong Kong in eight key front-office functions. We’ve then converted each function into a percentage of the total jobs available on our database in each city.

The chart below shows how Singapore (in green) compares to Hong Kong (in blue) for jobs with a predominantly front-office focus – the higher the percentage, the more vacancies there are in that field.

Hong Kong is overwhelmingly the location to work in if you’re after a buy-side job in Asia. More than 10% of all Hong Kong finance jobs are in asset management, compared with 6.1% in Singapore. Hong Kong has almost double Singapore’s percentage of hedge fund jobs, paralleling its market dominance in the sector – in 2014 hedge fund assets under management in Hong Kong totalled US$61bn, compared with US$29bn in Singapore.

Despite suffering its share of first-quarter job cuts (think: Macquarie, CIMB and Standard Chartered), hiring in capital markets (5%) and M&A (5.4%) in Hong Kong remains robust compared with Singapore. While Chinese corporates are increasingly moving advisory services in-house, the mainland still has an M&A market roughly twice the size of Southeast Asia’s. There is no Singaporean equivalent of Hong Kong investment banks’ strong appetite for recruiting research analysts and other Mandarin-speaking staff.

The continued boom in corporate banking jobs (relationship managers are particularly sought after) is shared evenly – the cities are tied on 11.2%. More surprisingly, Singapore and Hong Kong are neck and neck when it comes to trading jobs. The recent resurgence in equity trading recruitment generated by Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect appears not to have given Hong Kong an edge over Singapore, which enjoys a steady flow of FX and commodities trading vacancies.

Private banking is the one sector in the chart above where Singapore (11.3%) thumps Hong Kong (6.3%) for job vacancies. Wealth management is an expanding industry in both cities, but as banks such as UBS and Credit Suisse pivot their Asian operations towards private banking, most of their hiring is focused on Singapore – which is generally seen as a more international Swiss-style hub.

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