Quant drought hits banks and funds in Asia

Limited pool of talent hindering expansion of sophisticated strategies across buy and sell side

Asia’s quantitative finance talent pool lacks depth

From Singapore to Seoul, financial firms are hunting for an elusive breed of professional: the quant. As banks across Asia move to bolster their pricing and modelling teams, and passive management strategies in local buy-side firms proliferate, quantitative finance executives are in high demand.

The snag is there aren’t enough of them to go round.

“[In Asia] both the buy side and the sell side are facing the problem of a quant shortage,” says George Hong, head of Asia-Pacific quantitative