To foster local capabilities, Singapore’s government promotes equipping its citizens with tech skills for future jobs and is driving local talent quotas to reduce reliance on foreign talent. With only 6,500 STEM graduates annually, industry demand far exceeds supply, creating tight competition for tech companies.

The bank engaged FDM to integrate 100% local graduates, with software development capabilities from our Skills Lab, into their teams, complementing their own recruitment programme.

FDM is a trusted partner thanks to our quality consultants, and proven ability to help them scale quickly and flexibly.

Working collaboratively with the client, we identified requirements, framework, and timeline, ensuring our skills coaching supported the bank’s technology and team culture needs, placing strong emphasis on attitude and aptitude.

The client needed to build a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team to:

• Enhance their internal applications and systems.
• Create dashboards for system visibility and troubleshooting.
• Increase resilience of apps.
• Optimise operational reliability.
• Automate alerts and system auto-recovery.
• Automate data pipelines.

Based on the scale of the project and urgent needs of the new ITSS team, the client selected seven FDM Consultants from the IT Operations Practice, specialising in DevOps, to be onboarded together. To prepare them for SRE roles, the consultants underwent an intensive 10-week training programme which covered SQL, Unix, Agile, Python, OOD using Java, and DevOps tools (GitLab, Jenkins, Docker, Selenium, and more).

Through the FDM Skill Lab’s Agile training methodology, the consultants spent an additional week upskilling in Elasticsearch, which enables rapid data search and analysis.

The consultants joined the client’s team as Junior SREs, working on key technology operations and digital transformations. They delivered on various assignments around applications and systems enhancement, achieving:

• Automated ETL process: Created system to extract, transform and load data for capacity management visualisation.
• Automated checks: Developed scripts that perform in under 10 seconds.
• Automated alert dashboards: Pull and store daily alerts in search engine.
• Streamlined Monitoring: Data pipeline automation.
• Automated reporting: Wrote scripts to download, normalise, and store data, feeding into dashboards for key metric monitoring.
• Near real-time monitoring: Eliminating manual report downloading and graph creation.
• Time and cost savings: Saved the bank tens of thousands of hours annually on manual tasks and reduced service costs.
• Future customisation clarity: Provided clear internal logic and user-specific enhancements.

Wide ranging impacts:

• Critical business resources: During COVID-19, FDM team members were considered essential workers and allowed by the Singaporean Government to work on-site, providing ongoing support. The bank was named “Best Bank in the World” by Global Finance for its crisis response and digital capabilities.
• Rapid efficiency boost: The FDM Consultants’ automation pipeline dramatically reduced manual tasks, heightening productivity, and improving reliability within six months.
• Future talent pipeline: FDM Consultants, a guaranteed 24-month resource, exceeded expectations with all seven converting to permanent roles, enabling knowledge retention and long-term planning.
• Ongoing relationship: FDM now has 70 consultants across multiple business lines, including Investment Trading, Middle Office, Consumer Banking, Institutional Banking, and Enterprise Architecture Site Reliability Engineering.

“FDM has been our trusted partner to find passionate individuals that are capable of rapidly adapting to new technology. As SRE is a relatively new role in Singapore, it has been a great experience to work with our FDM Account Manager to identify capable individuals that we can develop into strong SREs. The FDM Consultants have helped to accelerate our plan to create a toil-less and reliable environment.”

Senior Vice President – Group T&O
Enterprise Architecture & SR