Confronting the Asia Pacific banking skills shortage head-on, Standard Chartered has announced a second year of its successful Mobile Ventures Fellowship (MoVe) programme.

As reported in November, IDC Vice President, Sandra Ng, said “in Asia-Pacific, especially the Asia context, the skills shortage is the number one challenge for the majority of enterprises in our region.”

Standard Chartered is developing mobile banking technology talent in this environment in partnership with Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) by offering 10 traineeships to young technology-savvy Singaporeans to develop mobile banking technologies through the MoVe program.

Trainees will be embedded within specialist teams at Standard Chartered’s global internet and mobile banking unit, and the end result of their work will be applied to Standard Chartered’s banking throughout the world. A Standard Chartered spokesperson said “their training has been very rigorous and exposed them to many aspects of financial services technology, in particular Scrum and Agile development methodologies, mobile banking technology and software testing.”

Simon McNamara, Chief Information Officer, Consumer Banking, at Standard Chartered Bank said “the Mobile Ventures Fellowship programme has already been hugely successful with 10 MoVeRs due to complete their traineeships mid-year. We are pleased that with the support of the IDA, the Bank is able to be the launch pad for the careers of Singapore‘s emerging talent in mobile banking technology.”

The program is part of the IDA’s Company-Led Training Programme for Fresh Professionals (CLT) initiative, and Standard Chartered is the first bank to partner with the IDA in this way.