Bank of East Asia is one of just five firms deemed so systemically important to Hong Kong’s financial system that it holds more capital in reserve than other banks. It’s also hiring in Hong Kong and currently has 59 vacancies on its careers site (click here for a summary of which departments these jobs are in).
Where should you study if you want to work for BEA?
We looked at online profiles of BEA employees to find out how many of them attended leading universities in Hong Kong, China and globally. We then ranked the 20 most popular of these universities among BEA’s Hong Kong workforce (and gave each one a percentage based on the total for all 20 institutions).
The results, displayed in the table below, show that City University of Hong Kong graduates make up the largest alumni group at BEA in Hong Kong (16.8% of those who attended one of the top-20 colleges went to CityU, according to online profiles). The university’s Department of Economics and Finance runs a BBA Finance degree which has traditionally supplied graduates to both banks and the Big Four.
Hong Kong-based universities take all of the top-five positions in our table, but the extent of their dominance is still surprising: more than 70% of BEA employees studied at one of the seven local colleges.
This stands in dramatic contrast to the staff composition of global banks in Hong Kong. As we previously reported, only 20% of their workforces studied locally on average. Even at HSBC and Standard Chartered – two of the most Asia-focused foreign banks – the proportions were 28% and 25% respectively.
However, a significant minority (just under 30%) of BEA’s Hong Kong employees attended a university outside the city.
Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University are the two most popular non-Hong Kong institutions – a sign that BEA is hiring Mandarin-speaking staff into its headquarters to help with its mainland expansion drive. BEA has the second largest Chinese branch network of any foreign lender and received regulatory approval for a new Chinese securities joint venture in June.
Almost 5% of BEA staff got their degrees in Singapore (at NUS and NTU), but comparatively few attended Western universities.
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