What happened to Standard Chartered's bankers in Hong Kong and Singapore?

To say Asia is like a second home to London investment bank Standard Chartered is to understate matters. 60% of the bank's first quarter revenues, for example, came from the region, compared to less than 15% for the UK and US combined. Standard Chartered is a favourite place to work for bank employees in cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, but Dealogic data suggests it has quietly been losing its local edge.

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On Dealogic's investment banking scorecard, Standard Chartered does not rank in the top 10 for Asian M&A in the year-to-date 2025. Instead, Goldman Sachs has the highest valued book in the region. The most prominent European bank for M&A is UBS, which ranks fourth for 2025 so far but topped the list in 2024. Standard Chartered was also absent from last year's top ten.

Standard Chartered does rank highly for certain aspects of Asian debt capital markets though. Its high-yield bonds book is ranked fifth in the region, while its investment grade credit book is ranked third, and valued at $1bn more than it was this time last year. The overall DCM top ten is filled with Asia-native banks, predominantly Chinese ones, with CITIC Securities ranking first.

Less conspicuously, Standard Chartered is also absent from Dealogic's equity capital markets rankings in the region. This is unsurprising: the bank shuttered its Asia ECM operations in 2015.

If you don't work for Standard Chartered's investment bank in Asia, you might want to try the Middle East. Dealogic puts Standard Chartered in the top three banks for highest valued DCM books in the region, with a 35% increase in value over the last two years to $11.2bn. 

The Middle Eastern influence atop Standard Chartered's corporate and investment bank (CIB) was strengthened last year. Singapore-based Simon Cooper, who ran the CIB, left to be replaced by co-heads Roberto Hoornweg and Sunil Kaushal. Hoornweg relocated to Dubai for the role, while Kaushal, now based in Singapore, was previously the regional CEO for Africa and the Middle East. 

More obviously, you might want to work for Standard Chartered in the US, but it's a relatively small unit of the investment bank. In Standard Chartered's financial results presentation for Q1 of this year, the bank said that the region accounted for 7% of its 2024 CIB income.

Instead, the most impactful jobs at Standard Chartered in Asia seem to be in its wealth and retail banking division. In the risk profile of Standard Chartered's 2024 annual report, Singapore and Hong Kong accounted for 61.9% of total loans in that division, compared to just 36.6% in its corporate and investment bank. 

The allure of working at Standard Chartered doesn't seem to have changed for its employees. In our ideal employer report last year, Standard Chartered received 41% of its votes from people who had already worked there, joint top with BNP Paribas for major banks. Benefits like being able to spend as little as two days in the office presumably helped garner those votes, although that perk is presumably afforded more to middle and back-office staff (some of whom were recently cut in Singapore as the bank offshored roles to India).

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