The future financial sector regulator staff is an AI engineer, a data scientist, a blockchain expert, or some other type of expert typically unseen in the couloirs of central banks and financial authorities. That was, at least, a takeaway from the literature review CGAP recently completed for a project analyzing the future of financial sector regulation. The picture that emerged was clear – financial markets have changed dramatically due to new technology and innovation. From cloud computing to blockchain to artificial intelligence, technology has changed financial services beyond recognition. And despite their best efforts to keep up, regulators, with their traditional background in economics and law, paper-based processes, and onsite examinations, may fall behind.
If that is the case and there is indeed a pressing need for regulatory authorities to update their skillset (a big ‘IF’), are they hiring staff with new skills more apt to the environment of modern-day finance? To answer this question, we worked with Chmura Economics & Analytics to review recent job posts by financial sector regulators in five markets widely recognized as leaders in innovation: Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. Looking at almost five years of data across these jurisdictions, a consistent picture emerged, pointing to two areas where regulators have clearly recognized the need for new skills and actively engaged in hiring people with that skillset.
First, a note on the research method
Before we discuss those areas, however, it’s important we look at the initial hypothesis and method of analysis. Broadly, our research sought to understand how regulators reinvent themselves to better deal with innovation. To that end, we scanned through hundreds of documents analyzing how financial markets change and might look in the future, and highlighting skills that will be necessary for both providers and regulators to remain relevant. We analyzed everything from policy documents to research papers, blog posts, and news articles. This work provided a solid base for our hypothesis that regulatory agencies that lead in the innovation space (such as the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK or the Monetary Authority of Singapore) are likely hiring people with skills related to some or all of the key words in the graphic below.
Looking at online job posts only, we counted posts between August 2021 and May 2025 that included any of the key words listed above. It’s important to note that there are many caveats to this approach. First, we could not tell if the job was filled or not. Second, we could not tell if the job post was reposted repeatedly. Third, we do not know if some of the hiring was triggered by events besides the strategic need for re-skilling, such as a hiring cycle, an external shock (e.g., cyber-attack), a budgetary cycle, or political influence. Most importantly, we counted all job posts that included the keyword, so if an agency had a standard language referring to cryptocurrency, even when hiring a maintenance staff (e.g., ‘a leading cryptocurrency regulator expanding its cleaning team’), we would count it in, though we took this into account when narrowing down the keywords.
Despite these caveats, we decided to go ahead with the analysis as it still provides a quantitative perspective on the hiring practices on the ground – an analysis that regulators sorely need, but hadn’t been produced (to our knowledge).
So, what did we find?
Across the five countries, agencies, and time period in question, we found that regulators consistently sought to hire in the field of data and cybersecurity. Regarding data, we divided the field into four categories: data analysis, modeling, science, and warehousing. Data warehousing, along with data analytics, trended far ahead of data modeling and data science. These findings, unsurprising as they are, suggest that regulators are aware of the need for cyber-resilience and actively work towards strengthening their preparedness in this area. Importantly, the findings also confirm that regulators recognize the importance of data in their work – be it for evidence-based regulation, data-driven risk-based supervision, or something else. They also suggest that good data analytics require a robust data infrastructure with clean, well-structured data distributed across data warehouses connected through reliable data pipes. The findings also suggest that data warehousing and analytics are core functions better hosted in-house than provided by a third-party.
Did we expect to see more blockchain specialists, AI experts, and regulatory sandbox managers hired? Maybe, though we recognize that despite the space topics such as cryptocurrencies and regulatory sandboxes take up in public discourse, they still represent a minor part of regulators’ daily operations. As such, these niche skills appeared in our findings, but only in small numbers. For example, cryptocurrency-related jobs only accounted for 8.64% of total jobs posted by Monetary Authority of Singapore, and this was the highest percentage for this skill group across all five countries.
These findings, unsurprising as they are, suggest that regulators are aware of the need for cyber-resilience and are actively working towards strengthening their preparedness in this area.
Our findings from the job posts analysis are consistent with the views we heard from stakeholders during hundreds of interviews. While the literature review might have led us to think that the consensus was on shifting skillsets, the interviewees had a different, more nuanced message. While they recognized the importance of data-related skills, they also argued that the core skillset remained relevant. After all, many would say, the risks in the financial system remain the same at their core – stability, integrity, and conduct risks – and regulatory authorities still need experts who understand these traditional risks well. They just need to be a bit more agile and quick to learn and adopt new technologies, given how fast the world evolves.
