How much money do UAE bankers make and how do you compare?

The financial services industry has continued its steady rise throughout the UAE and more companies in the industry are looking to hire candidates on better pay packages.

A report by recruitment firm, Robert Half International, shows that many large international banks have realigned their business structures, focusing their headcount investment into their most profitable product lines.

Institutions in the country are hiring despite job cuts being announced in other parts of the world and that too, on slightly better pay scales than seen in 2013.

Salary figures released earlier this year by Robert Half show that professionals in financial services got a pay hike of up to six per cent.

The latest Monster Middle East employment index also shows that banking, financial services and insurance was the top annual gainer among all industry sectors even this month as it charted its fourth successive double-digit annual growth.

The sector was up 37 per cent between January 2013 and January 2014, adding the maximum number of jobs.

The findings are based on figures collated from the Middle Eastern countries that the index tracks.

In Dubai, the demand for professionals seems to have gone up considerably.

The website efinancialcareers states that there are now 15,600 people working in the Dubai International Financial Centre, an increase of 11 per cent on the number in 2012. One thousand and six hundred jobs have been created over the past 12 months, despite announcements of job cuts within most of the international institutions in the region, as over 1,000 new companies have flocked to Dubai.

Within the category, corporate banking, investment management and insurance are seeing the most demand for professionals.

Robert Half’s findings show that redundancies are rare in the country, with multinationals either moving staff into focus areas or specialists choosing to move to regional banks.

“The latter has increased hiring, particularly on the front end of the year, to capitalise on additional hiring budgets and to support business strategy,” says the report.

Even though the hiring climate has improved, most hiring experts in the country maintain skilled financial services professionals remain in short supply in the country and companies have to look at other countries to fill the roles.

“Institutions continue to look internationally, particularly to the UK, to recruit for hard-to-fill roles,” the Robert Half study mentions.

On the compensation front, this is what you can expect if you are a professional in the industry.

The salaries for 2014 show a slight improvement, ranging from 1.5 to 6 per cent depending on the roles.
 

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