Market Update Q2 2019 - Pinpoint Asia

Hiring at Investment Banks was quite strong to begin with but seemed to lose some steam later on due to the uncertain economic climate. We are noticing approvals taking longer than usual to obtain even though hiring continues to happen. Having said that hiring at buy-side firms has remained strong.
We saw an increase in hiring in the automated trading systems development space (C++ / Java) within Cash Equities and Options Market Making.
Blockchain & Crypto Trading firms continued to actively look for strong infrastructure engineers and software developers (C++/Java/Full Stack).
Continuing on from last quarter, we saw more requests for strong Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) and DevOps candidates. We also did a podcast on it. Many of the banks are looking to establish Platform Reliability / Site Reliability teams and this has been a priority for them. The main tech skill-set for these roles are Python / Go-Lang and some Java.

Last quarter also saw 8 new Virtual Banks being awarded licenses in Hong Kong including home-grown WeLab. We expect these firms to further increase their hiring within the technology space soon, especially in the areas of Product Management, Security and Data Engineering.
The traditional banks are also preparing for the wave of Virtual Banks to come. We noticed that some of the banks were setting up their own R&D labs in HK to further enhance their technology innovation ability. We are noticing an increasing demand in the Mobile, Microservices / API, and DevOps space among the retail banking sector.

Insurance companies have been going through a series of transformations for the past couple of years. Some of these companies have been experiencing bottlenecks in this process of digital transformation due to their existing legacy systems. These bottlenecks have typically been in the areas of architecture, data engineering, infrastructure capacity ad, legacy source code.
To tackle the bottleneck in these areas, we saw insurance companies increasingly building up new functions across their Architecture Office, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, API/Microservices, Cloud, DevOps, and IT Governance.

Amazon hosted its biggest AWS Summit in Hong Kong on June 26 in HKCEC. More than 3000 IT Professionals participated in the event. This Summit featured the DeepRacer AI Race which allowed developers to do trials on their AI/ML Car Race simulator. AWS also officially launched 3 Zones in Hong Kong to support the local Cloud abilities.
RISE Conference will be held next week from July 8 – 11 in HKCEC. Manulife is sponsoring their PITCH competition for Alpha phase startups. Our Managing Consultant Danny Kwan and I will be at the event. If you are also attending the event, please do connect with us and we hope to meet you there!

Hope you found this information useful. Please do contact us should you need more information.

We look forward to helping you.