While banks struggle to fill their vacancies for cloud roles and technology jobs, DBS' latest hire from Silicon Valley is a coup, and might indicate a bid to attract younger tech talent.
DBS Bank has appointed Charlie Cheng as a managing director of fintech, cloud engineering and operations, poaching the tech specialist straight from Google's headquarters, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Cheng's hire could be signs of a trend by local banks that they are serious about retaining top tech talents in their innovations lab, which has of late defected to tech giants. It could also be a move to attract younger talents as the bank tries to fill its vacancies, 40 percent of which are tech-related.
Cheng was previously the director of cloud infrastructure at Google Compute Engine at the tech giant's Mountain View headquarters. Prior to joining Google in 2012, he worked for Microsoft as a senior project manager, and held roles at telecommunications companies like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
War for Tech Talent
His appointment follows the hire of Yuliya Sergina as head of conversational artificial intelligence for consumer banking at DBS in November 2018. She was previously the APAC digital transformation programme director for industries and digital leadership at German enterprise software leader SAP.
Their appointments run counter to industry-wide trends, which have seen banks struggle to retain their tech talent (see related story here) due to a clash of cultures and the relatively slower rate of implementation at banks. Many banks are looking to hire technologists as the continue to digitalise, but are losing out to tech companies due to their slow hiring process and lack of defined roles in such positions, according to «efinancialcareers».
Indeed, the publication noted the departures of several senior cloud professionals in banking to tech, including DBS' APAC head of cloud engineering, Carl Bachman Kharazmi, who left for Google in late 2017, Guillaume Van de Vyver from Standard Chartered, and Keshi Tan from JP Morgan.
