Mrs Josephine Teo, Minister for Manpower and Second Minister for Home Affairs,

Mr Ravi Menon, MD MAS and Chairman of IBF 

Members of the IBF Council, distinguished guests,

1. Good evening! A very warm welcome to the IBF Awards 2020.  

2. First, I would like to thank Minister Josephine Teo for taking the time to be with us today. 

3. I would like to congratulate all our award winners. Your contribution to the development of Singapore’s financial industry is even more commendable, when many of you have to deal with the myriad of pandemic-related impacts at work and home. 

4. As we have just been through an unprecedented 2020, I thought it is useful to reflect on the role and mission of IBF. Allow me to quote from a speech made by a past minister at an IBF event:

“We have obviously travelled quite a long way towards our objective of establishing ourselves as a major financial centre. However, notwithstanding the progress in the past, the end is not yet in sight. Banking is an ever-expanding business, with increasingly more complex financial transactions. Many of our banks have been extensively reorganised to adjust to the changing business environment. To keep pace with such expansion and, indeed, even to maintain our present position, we need also to have a continuing programme for manpower planning and development.” 

5. The context of the message certainly sounds recent,  but the speech was delivered by the late Mr Hon Sui Sen, when he was the Minister for Finance, at the inauguration of IBF in 1976, 45 years ago.  His message remains as relevant now, as it was then. Continuing manpower planning and development is crucial to the success of Singapore as an international financial centre. 

6. Over the past year, IBF and MAS have worked closely with our industry partners to navigate the challenges and to better prepare our workforce for the future. Allow me to highlight some notable achievements.

Supporting skills development during pandemic

7. In April 2020, IBF implemented the Enhanced Training Support package with up to 95% course subsidy to support workforce training. Since the launch, training participation has increased 35% to reach close to 90,000 in 2020, compared to 65,000 for the same period in 2019. 

8.  To match online training demand, IBF doubled the number of recognised on-line courses to close to 1,000. The courses that were most in-demand were digital and data-related as well as agile and design thinking, very consistent with our workforce’s need to be equipped with future-ready skills.

9. Along with this, we made a big push for practitioners to gain IBF Certifications, an industry endorsed mark professionalism. So we saw very good progress. Close to 75% of Operation Risks Management professinals,  60% of Compliance AML practitioners and 55% of Financial Advisors in our workforce now have IBF or equivalent industry certifications. Our aim is for most practitioners to have IBF certifications or its equivalent.

Curating more pathways for Singaporeans - TFIP and PCP

10. To augment the technology sector with much needed manpower, IBF successfully piloted the Technology in Finance Immersion Programme or TFIP. Our guests may recall Minister Teo launched TFIP in April 2019. TFIP helps mid-career professionals transit into technology roles in the financial services sector through structured training and attachment with financial institutions. We have seen very strong interest. 

11. Many FIs have also pressed-on with their efforts to reskill and redeploy their workers, under the Professional Conversion Programme (PCP). PCP in consumer banking saw the most progress, and FIs are now focussing on their efforts on other segments including Operations and Insurance.

Supporting jobseekers 

12. To reach out to more jobseekers who may be impacted by the pandemic, we started holding virtual career fairs last year, and we are glad to see close to 10,000 participants.  Since the opening of IBF Careers Connect in late 2018, we have assisted close to 1,600 inpiduals. They are mainly finance professionals seeking career advice or looking for new job opportunities. 

Gearing up for 2021 and beyond

13. What are some of IBF’s priorities for 2021? We all know that the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digitalisation and technology in the way we work and train. It is fortunate that IBF and our partner FIs started our workforce transformation joruney more than 5 years ago. We have laid the groundwork, made steady progress and are thus well-placed to take on the challenge.

14.   Many of you may already be aware that the National Jobs Council appointed IBF as the Jobs Development Partner (JDP) for the financial services industry in 2020. This is to better co-ordinate and facilitate Singaporeans to access jobs, training and traineeships opportunities. 

15. The high-tech segment is one where more local professionals are sorely needed. Here, we will continue to expand our range of training programmes under the Financial Training Scheme to include deep-technology courses and certifications. While there are many technology programmes in the industry, they need to be be contextualised for the financial sector.

16. IBF will expand TFIP to include other growth areas such as Digital Transformation, Technology Risk Management, Digital Marketing, and Project Management.

17. To accelerate the process of workforce transformation, IBF has been working with 13 leading financial institutions to develop the Future Skills Accelerator (FSA). FSA is a technology platform that aims to facilitate jobs and skills matching by leveraging artificial intelligence to identify adjacent job roles, automate the assessment of skills gaps and recommend relevant training programmes. When ready, it will greatly speed up re-skilling and re-deploying workers from old to new roles.

18. On the career advisory front, we have augmented our pool of career coaches with the support of adjunct coaches who are senior financial services practitioners. By tapping on the specialised knowledge and experience of our adjunct coaches, we will be able to provide more targeted assistance to jobseekers.

Final words

19. So let me conclude with another quote from the same speech by Mr Hon Sui Sen, he had said then: 

“My choice of the term "professionalism" is deliberate. In a profession, practitioners have not only to be proficient but also to maintain at all times high standards of ethics and integrity. A certificate of attendance at a training institution does not automatically make the trainee a banker.... Nor for that matter, does the possession of recognised degrees or diplomas. It is only when the trainee puts into practice what he has learned and, more important, when he has acquired the standards the profession calls for that he can call himself a banker.”

20.  By Mr Hon Sui Sen's definition, our IBF Fellows and Distinguished Fellows can truly call themselves "bankers" or in the current context "finance professionals". IBF looks forward to working with our new Fellows and Distinguished Fellows. 

21.  Thank you.