Job seekers with anti-money laundering experience to be highly sought after

Hays said investment, retail, and private banking firms will need them.

Acccording to Hays Quarterly Report, on the commercial and corporate banking front, vacancies are already increasing in line with the usual movement around the bonus payout period. In particular, Hays is expecting a large number of front office replacement roles to come to market.

Within operational risk management/business risk, firms are increasingly embedding their risk function within the business instead of looking outside. This has led to an increase in business risk hiring and we expect this to continue over the quarter.

Across the risk sector, employers want candidates to meet the necessary technical requirements but also to possess strong stakeholder management skills. Many candidates have the right technical skill set but to stand out from the pack, a great candidate needs high-level soft skills and business engagement skills.

Here's more from Hays:

This quarter we also expect increased demand for candidates with complaint handling experience to join customer experience teams. Increasing regulations means more processes and thus more customer complaints and questions.

Relationship managers across commercial and corporate banking are also in demand to drive revenue as restructuring programs are taking place.

We also expect talent with AML expertise to be highly sought after this quarter to fill roles across investment, retail, corporate and private banking.

Meanwhile, banks continue to offshore their middle office roles to low cost countries and as a result, continue to hire temporary workers in Hong Kong to deal with any immediate workload and urgent migration projects.

On the talent side, when evaluating a role senior candidates are interested in base salary but also fringe benefits such as house/mortgage allowances, annual leave and spouse insurance. Career prospects remain the top priority for junior candidates.

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There have been an increasing number of candidates studying FRMs, which will give them an advantage when seeking the relatively low number of risk management jobs coming to market.