Daily Briefing: Manpower minister says minimum wage ‘not yet practical'; One in four bank job openings are for tech-related roles

And SPH co-leads $4.14m funding for US marketing intelligence platform.

From Yahoo! News Singapore:

The implementation of the minimum wage across Singapore could force employers to pay more than the market rate for some types of labour resulting to having the same effect on employment tax which could hit the lowest-waged workers with the highest ‘tax’, manpower minister Josephine Teo said.

“Not all employers would want to employ workers at this rate, which could lead to lower levels of employment,” she argued. “To secure a job, some workers may even choose to work illegally below the minimum wage, which makes them even more vulnerable.”

Teo said that the Singapore government chooses to supplement incomes through the Workfare Income Supplement Scheme (WIS), which is “a permanent feature of our social security system”. The scheme encourages low-wage workers to work regularly by providing support to the bottom 20% of workers.

Read more here.

From e-financial Careers:

Careers websites of Singapore’s big three banks showed that 27% of vacancies are in tech-related roles including digital banking and data jobs as well as those that require coding skills.

DBS – which, perhaps a little optimistically, now calls itself a ‘23,000-person start-up’ – leads the pack when it comes to tech recruitment. Almost 40% of its openings are in this function.

All three banks are hiring programmers, designers, project managers and other candidates as they launch new digital platforms and upgrade others. In August, OCBC rolled out its algorithm-based investment service, RoboInvest, to retail customers, while earlier this year UOB released a new forex app, Mighty FX. DBS and OCBC are also moving more development roles in-house instead of using technology vendors.

Read more here.

From Deal Street Asia:

SPH Ventures which is the corporate venture arm of Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) co-led a $4.14m (US$3m) strategic investment in US-based marketing intelligence platform Pathmatics.

Pathmatics said the funds raised from this round, which was co-led by consumer and market intelligence firm Mintel Group, will be used to fuel its growth as it unveiled a new brand identity.

The company also launched a new offering, Ad Graph, which provides interconnected insights to query, explore, and understand relationships and connections in digital advertising data.

Read more here.