Daily Briefing: OUE Commercial REIT in merger talks with OUE Hospitality Trust; National Archives of Singapore reopens after 18-month revamp

And here’s how much banks are willing to pay to lure data scientists.

From Reuters:

OUE Commercial Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) and OUE Hospitality Trust are in talks to merge in a cash and stock deal.

OUE Commercial will offer to buy OUE Hospitality to create a single entity that will remain listed on the Singapore stock exchange and hold assets totalling $6.7b (US$4.95b) the report added, citing sources.

The deal comes amongst a wave of mergers in the real estate investment funds sector. In May, Singapore-listed ESR-REIT bought rival Viva Industrial Trust in a deal valued at $936.7m (US$691.50 m), marking the first consolidation among Singapore’s crowded mid-cap real estate investment trusts.

Read more here.

From Channel News Asia:

The National Archives of Singapore (NAS) building officially reopened after 18 months of upgrading works.

The building now has new facilities, such as the 134-seater Oldham Theatre, three oral history recording studios, new microfilm readers at the Archives Reading Room and expanded conservation labs.

NAS will also launch a new e-Request system to improve its online services and make it easier for members of the public to retrieve records themselves.

The system, which replaces the manual request forms previously used in the Archives Reading Room, aims to minimise the waiting time for retrieval of records and "allow Singaporeans to have their own piece of history", said the National Library Board in a media release.

Read more here.

From eFinancial Careers:

Recruiters expect salaries in the automation, blockchain, cloud and data (ABCD) fields to rise more rapidly over the next two years as banks in Singapore pitch themselves up against large technology firms for IT talent.

Whilst at the director level there is little difference in average pay between the functions (sitting mostly in the $240,000 to $250,000 range), junior and mid-level professionals are typically earning more money by specialising in emerging technologies, such as cloud engineering, DevOps, data science, and artificial intelligence.

“All banks in Singapore are hiring cloud engineers. The race is on to migrate their data away from expensive and dated IT systems, and onto modern scalable platforms that are more efficient and cost effective,” says Simon Ranahan, associate director of technology at recruiters Pure Search.

Banks such as DBS, Standard Chartered, Citi and OCBC are also increasingly hiring data scientists. “Data scientists are highly sought after as banks harness massive amounts of consumer and internal business data, helping to predict the behaviour of their consumers, partners and investors, and helping to develop new products,” says Paolo Hiceta, manager of technology at recruiters Hudson. “We see demand for people with Java, Spark, Hadoop, and Python automation and data-unification skills rising in the next two years.”

Read more here.