Singapore Fintech Festival 2025: The FinTech Talent Blueprint: Navigating the New Era of FinTech Workforce Transformation,

Greetings from day two of Singapore Fintech Festival 2025. I have managed to navigate my way to Hall 3 (each is the size of a football field) at the right time (my calendar is on Sydney time). I am here to look at skills gaps, so this session on "FinTech Talent Blueprint: Navigating the New Era of FinTech Workforce Transformation" looks relevant. However, no one on the panel seems to be from training, education or human resources. The panel did not start with comments like "anything you learned in school is out of date ... Cutting edges work only happens in industry"m one comment I did agree with was the value of long internships, although the suggested year seems a bit long to me. 

Another panelist said they were willing to pay for top talent and train them. They also said every manager also has to be hands on with a project. That doesn't make sense to me: do senior people really have to be working at a technical level? At the Australian Defence Force HQ I worked for a senior air force officer. They were still qualified to fly a F-18, but would it make sense to sack them when they coul no longer fly (or now drones are making pilots obsolete). As I tell my students, the languages I trained on went out of use before they were born, but human nature doesn't change that fast, so project management is much the same l. As it happens, another panelist is speaking in the value of soft skills, including empathy. 

Overall, the panel was not very informative. Also, there was no time for questions, which is my favourite bit of any panel. Perhaps there is something good in the mentioned "Singapore FinTech Talent Report 2025".

 

EDUtech Asia and Singapore FinTech Festival in November

Happy to meet up with people around EDUtech Asia and Singapore FinTech Festival, over the next two weeks. On this visit to Singapore I have no presentations planned, but have volunteered to fill in, if needed chairing or speaking at the events. Also happy to speak elsewhere if there is interest. 

Singapore Fintech Festival 2025

At Singapore FinTech Festival 2022

The Singapore Fintech Festival is now accepting free registrations from academics. This is a very big event filling much of the Singapore Expo center. In 2022 I never actually got to any of the presentations and just wandered around talking to be on standards (including mayy Australians) and at the drinks in the evening. To help get me to the  I have volunteered to fill in if the scheduled chair doesn't turn up for a session.

Back to the Conference Face to Face

I’m planning to attend to EDUtech Asia in Singapore, 8 to 10 November. This will be my first big conference face to face since the pandemic started in early 2022. I will be going early for the Singapore Fintech Festival, 2 to 4 November, and the Predict22 Singapore Summit, 1 to 2 November.  I have decided to not to volunteer to present on the large stages at conferences, but happy to speak at a university, or professional meeting (let me know if you would like a talk). So far I have one uni talk booked on work integrated learning, and a small talk on Innovation for sustainabile computing in the EduTech show-and-tell.