[SINGAPORE] At Singapore’s universities, undergraduates are fighting for the golden ticket they believe will get them a coveted banking job years later: membership in a campus finance club.
Lengthy interview rounds and days of working on PowerPoint slides have become de rigueur as a gloomier job market in the banking and trading hub raises the stakes for students seeking a career in finance.
“It’s low-key crazy – it’s quite absurd how competitive it is,” said Maya, a social sciences graduate from the National University of Singapore (NUS) who now works at a global payments firm and says the pressure was worth it.
“Without it, I wouldn’t be able to ‘sell myself’ to the recruiters who have thousands of business students they can choose from,” said the 24-year-old, who declined to give her last name.
Her angst come as financial institutions in Singapore added fewer people in recent years. Students now view the clubs as a crucial line on their resumes, adding to a hyper-competitive cauldron for students in Singapore alongside tuition and so-called internship-stacking.
As hiring gets tighter, the number of graduates from popular business and administration courses has climbed for most of the past decade. It topped more than 3,500 in 2023, according to government statistics. And while 84 per cent of business graduates found jobs last year, that’s a decline from the previous two years.
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Trade wars and market turmoil may worsen the outlook for young bankers around the world who are also grappling with the rise of artificial intelligence. Those threats are magnified in Singapore, where finance looms large in a city-state of about six million people and is seen by many as the clearest path to success.
Global and Singapore banks including Citigroup surveyed by Bloomberg News say they use a broad set of criteria to evaluate entry-level applicants.
OCBC, for instance, said while such club participation is not a pre-requisite for applications, it can serve as a “meaningful indicator” of skills, leadership and commitment, said Ernest Phang, the bank’s managing director of group human resources.
Rachel Ng, now a prime broker in an investment bank, applied to consulting and investment groups while in college because of the “anxiety” that she wouldn’t be able to secure internships in her freshman year.
“People in my batch were starting to secure internships at highly desirable banks because of their participation in case competitions and networks from clubs,” Ng, 23, said. “I decided that I needed to be in the room where it happens too, if I wanted to be like them.”
Joining these finance clubs is the first hurdle. There are so-called “super days” with multiple rounds of interviews stretching for hours with a student panel, mimicking bulge-bracket banks that use this tactic to whittle down to final offers.
Matthew Quek, a former vice-president of Singapore Management University’s (SMU) student-managed investment fund, gave potential entrants to his club two weeks to pitch a stock and present a financial case study to an executive committee.
Once the idea was approved by a panel of senior students, the final round was a mandatory coffee chat to get a “vibe check,” said Quek, 25, who’s had three internships in as many years in college.
The fund receives around 200 applications every year and accepts just over 20, he said. At other finance clubs across the country, the acceptance rate is also about 10 per cent on average.
Pitch decks
The work gets more intense once club membership is secured.
The SMU fund hosts meetings every Saturday that run from three to eight hours long. There, members learn to build financial models and create pitch decks from senior students and alumni.
The group seeks to model international counterparts who emulate real-life funds, such as Harvard University’s Black Diamond Capital Investors, which touts itself as among the most successful student-run hedge funds in the US.
This year, members of the SMU fund will get an extra boost. The club’s alumni donated S$130,000 to invest in the best ideas that will be handpicked by a board comprising professors and former members working in the finance industry.
Dylan Liew, 30, formed his club at NUS in 2018 after studying in the US. He built a team that has since grown to over 60 student consultants pitching their services to businesses like a hospital ship focused on making a social impact.
“It was always a good story to tell recruiters and interviewers” when it came time for him to find a job, said Liew, who worked in consulting after graduating. “They could see that I built this, I can tackle things.”
‘Sliding’ days
Still, taking on the job of an investment banker or management consultant, on top of about 40 to 60 hours of college classwork a week, can quickly wear students down.
For Maya, the payments associate who was in a consulting club, so-called “sliding” days before check-ins with clients were common, where members stay in a Zoom room for what can be 12 hours to edit slides together. Her semester abroad in Europe was marred by club work, as she often had to stay up past midnight to call clients in a timezone seven hours ahead of hers.
“I think there was fear that I was not going to be employed, so even though I was supposed to have fun on exchange, every week I was kind of suffering,” she said.
Many don’t see demand to join these clubs cooling down, despite the stress.
“Sadly, so many people have a really strong GPA and a really good school, so there needs to be something to differentiate you,” said Bethan Howell, a Hong Kong-based director of recruitment firm Selby Jennings. “If being in a club gives you confidence or makes you feel more sure in the interview, then sure.” BLOOMBERG
