With one eye on his BlackBerry and the other on his wristwatch Kevin Faulkner, a senior executive in Deutsche Bank’s IT team, enjoys a quiet lunchtime pint at The Bank, a popular bar on Singapore’s Raffles Quay.
“Even if it’s tough and times are not as good as they have been, people would rather be here in Asia than anywhere else,” he says.
The allure of the east appears to be growing in London as lower revenues and new regulations force banks to trim trading desks and cut mergers and acquisitions advisory staff.
Singapore, with its low taxes and hot climate – an antidote to the onset of another dreary British winter – is much talked about in the bars of the City of London.
So much so that Astbury Marsden, a recruitment company, found in a survey that a third of London bankers would rather be working in Singapore .
Yet there is scant evidence of a flight eastwards. The survey appears to reflect wishful thinking rather than a shift in banking jobs to the Asian financial hub.
“I’m sure they’d love to be in Singapore but the reality is that the environment is pretty tough here and, at the end of the day, everything is relative,” says Simon Roberts, head of Asia-Pacific at Sheffield Haworth, a recruitment company. “The market is over-bid and over-broked.”
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