Daily Briefing: TTG clinches $10.8m investment from UK-based Librae; Banking tech pay surge to nearly $100,000 annually amidst talent crunch

And SFA is actively promoting the fintech online platform APIX.

From DealStreetAsia:

Librae Holdings Limited (LH), a UK-based trust owned by real estate magnate Vincent Tchenguiz, has entered into a placement share agreement with Singapore Exchange (SGX) Catalist-listed The Trendlines Group (TTG) for an investment of $10.88m.

Vincent Tchenguiz’ trust has diversified its investments into biotech and green technologies, and has built a $350m technology venture capital portfolio.

The trust invests in incubators, venture funds and medical companies in Israel, Europe, and the US. The placement shares are issued at $0.1050 apiece.

The issue has been approved by TTG shareholders by way of an ordinary resolution at the AGM on 29 April 2019.

Read more here.

From eFinancialCareers:

A recruiter pay survey across 14 key banking tech jobs found that you can earn as much as $240,000-$250,000 as a director-level banking tech specialist. Meanwhile, junior and mid-level professionals typically earn more money by specialising in emerging technologies such as cloud engineering, DevOps, data science, and artificial intelligence, with annual salaries between $64,000-$150,000 annually depending on the position.

In rare cases, banks will offer 50% salary increases to poach top-performing technologists in the most sought-after fields.

Banks such as DBS, Standard Chartered, Citi and OCBC are reportedly increasingly hiring data scientists. “Data scientists are highly sought after as banks harness massive amounts of consumer and internal business data, helping to predict the behaviour of their consumers, partners and investors, and helping to develop new products,” says Paolo Hiceta, manager of technology at recruiters Hudson. “We see demand for people with Java, Spark, Hadoop, and Python automation and data-unification skills rising in the next two years.”

Read more here.

From e27:

Singapore FinTech Association (SFA) has signed a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) with ASEAN Financial Innovation Network (AFIN) to collaborate and promote the APIX platform to the fintech community, with an aim to further develop the industry.

Launched by India’s prime minister Narendra Modi and Singapore’s deputy prime minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam at Singapore Fintech Festival 2018, APIX is an online marketplace for financial institutions to discover and connect with multiple innovative fintech solutions. It also enables financial institutions and fintech companies to collaborate and experiment to design unique solutions using a sandbox environment.

The ultimate goal of the platform is to connect financial technology service providers to financial institutions globally and to promote inclusive finance to the two billion people without bank accounts worldwide.

Read more here.