With financial support and other encouragement from the city-state government and central bank, Singapore has established itself as a hub of financial-technology innovation rivaling those of the U.K. and U.S. Even before the fintech boom of the last several years — at least since David Gledhill became head of group technology and operations in 2008 — DBS Bank was investing aggressively in automation to serve a highly mobile and tech-literate customer base across 18 markets, six of them considered priorities: China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, and the home base of Singapore. Today the bank, with 482 billion Singapore dollars ($354 billion) in assets, calls itself "digital to the core" and aspires to be, as stated in its most recent annual report, "a 22,000-person startup" (that being its total number of employees). Out of 7 million consumer banking and wealth management customers, more than 3 million are banking on the Internet and 2.2 million using mobile devices. Gledhill, 55, a Briton and former JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive who is now DBS's group chief information officer, oversees 10,000 professionals (about 85 percent are on staff; the rest are vendors and contractors). In February the group announced plans to recruit 100 developers skilled in big data, machine learning, and other disruptive technologies in a hackathon competition dubbed Hack2Hire. The bank also nurtures young talent through the UNI.CORN internship program, which, now in its second year, fielded more than 1,000 applications for 24 spots.
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