In an interview with Financial Times yesterday, Ray Ferguson said the new hires, which follow a staff increase of over 4,000 over the past three years in region, reflect the bank’s strong confidence in the region’s economic prospects amid a robust recovery from the global financial crisis.
The planned hires will include around 2,000 in Singapore, 1,000 in Malaysia, 500 in Indonesia and the rest spread between other countries in the region.
Ferguson also confirmed in the interview that the UK-based bank had no intention of making a large acquisition with the £3.3bn it raised in a rights issue earlier this year, but would rather grow the business organically.
“We have pretty much a strategy that is about organic build,” he is reported to have said. “We put the force behind building product and capabilities, particularly in wholesale, and we are now trying to deepen these new capabilities into clients.”
Ferguson also discussed recent speculation about Standard Chartered moving its domicile out of the UK and into Asia, confirming this decision would be kept “under review” and that there was “no intention to do anything right now”.
“We have had seven years of successive record profits in this group,” he said. “Moving the bank, moving its domicile, moving its head office, is an extremely complicated, painstakingly difficult task – one that we believe would cause an enormous amount of disruption.”
