Why Thailand’s Banks and Insurers Are Struggling to Hire Digital and Transformation Talent
Thailand’s financial services sector is hiring against three deadlines at once, and the talent market has not caught up with any of them.
Three virtual bank consortia are building their operations from nothing. The Office of Insurance Commission is moving the regulatory floor under every insurer in the country. And the incumbent banks, most of which have had a digital strategy for years, are still working to close the gap between that strategy and what has actually shipped.
Each of those pressures creates demand for the same narrow group of people. That is the real problem, and it is why the roles that matter most are taking longest to fill.
The competition is now four-sided, not two-sided
In April 2025 the Bank of Thailand finalised its selection of three virtual bank consortia: Krungthai Bank with Gulf, AIS and PTT Oil and Retail; SCB X with KakaoBank and WeBank; and Ascend Money, backed by Ant International. Under the Bank of Thailand’s framework each licensee must hold paid-up capital of 5 billion baht, rising to at least 10 billion baht after the initial period, and must begin operations within a year of approval.
A virtual bank does not inherit a workforce. It builds one. Core banking engineering, cloud infrastructure, data platform, fraud and financial crime, product management, and a full second and third line of defence, all assembled inside a compressed window and all recruited from the same Bangkok market the incumbents recruit from.
For hiring managers at established banks and insurers, this changes the arithmetic. You are no longer competing with the bank across the road for a senior data engineer. You are competing with a well funded new entrant that can move faster on approvals, carries no legacy constraints, and can offer a candidate the one thing that is hardest for an incumbent to promise: the chance to build something from nothing.
Strategy is not the bottleneck. Execution capability is.
PwC Thailand’s 2024 research put the problem plainly. It found that 58% of Thai CEOs say they must upskill their employees before they can implement generative AI, and identified the shortage of AI-ready workers as the primary barrier to adoption. Thailand also sits behind Singapore, Japan and China on AI readiness. PwC singled out financial services as a sector with real momentum, with banks applying AI to chatbots, investment advisory and loan approvals, while noting that most organisations are still limiting AI to routine tasks rather than complex functions such as finance, compliance and legal.
That is a workforce problem wearing a technology costume. Buying a cloud platform takes a procurement cycle. Hiring the twenty people who can migrate a core system onto it without breaking regulatory reporting takes considerably longer, and there is no vendor you can buy them from.
It is the pattern we see repeatedly in briefs from financial services clients. The programme is funded. The roadmap exists. The board has approved it. And it is running six months late because three roles in the middle of the delivery structure are still open.
Insurance has a regulatory clock, and it points at a very small talent pool
The insurance side of the market has its own deadlines, and they are more specific than anything happening in banking.
IFRS 17 took effect for Thai insurers on 1 January 2025, and companies are still in the observation phase, producing regular reconciliation analyses while the OIC works out how the standard sits alongside the risk-based capital framework. Phase 3 of that RBC framework is under consideration, with a recalibration of risk charges, the introduction of catastrophe and group risk, a move to an Ultimate Forward Rate valuation method, and a reopened discussion about raising the confidence level from the 95th to the 99.5th percentile.
Separately, the revision of the Life Insurance Act, still pending government approval, is expected to split the actuarial function into two defined roles: a Certifying Actuary, with a possible pathway for non-Fellows, and an Appointed Actuary, for which Fellowship will be mandatory.
Read that last point as a hiring forecast. A change in the law is about to create statutory demand for Fellowship-qualified actuaries at exactly the moment every insurer in the country is absorbing IFRS 17 and preparing for a tougher capital regime. Thailand does not have a deep bench of Fellows. The insurers that start those conversations early will fill the roles. The ones that wait for the Act to pass will be recruiting from an empty pool against a legal deadline.
There is a detail here that surprises people. The roles we are asked for most often in insurance right now are not actuarial at all. The volume sits in solution architects and business analysts: the people who translate a regulatory requirement into a system change, and then make sure the change actually lands. IFRS 17 and RBC do not only create demand for the actuaries who define the numbers, they create demand for everyone who has to implement what the actuaries specify. If you are workforce planning around this, plan for both.
The same squeeze extends outward from the actuarial function into pricing, valuation, insurance data science, claims transformation and underwriting modernisation, because all of those roles now sit downstream of the same regulatory change.
Why these searches take longer than employers expect
Four things consistently slow financial services hiring in Thailand, and none of them is salary.
The candidates are not looking
The strongest people in regulated financial services are employed, well paid, and midway through a programme they do not want to abandon. They will not be found on a job board. Reaching them is outbound work, done by someone who can hold a credible conversation about IFRS 17 or a core banking migration rather than reciting a job description.
The specification is often two jobs
A brief that asks for deep legacy platform knowledge and modern cloud-native delivery experience and financial services regulatory exposure describes a person who exists, but perhaps a dozen times in the country. Splitting the role, or deciding which of the three is genuinely non-negotiable, usually unlocks the search within a fortnight.
Notice periods are long and counteroffers are real
Senior financial services professionals in Thailand routinely serve one to three months, and the counteroffer culture at the large banks is strong. A process that runs slowly through its middle stages tends to lose its best candidate at the end.
Adjacent-sector candidates get screened out too early
Fintech, telecom, consulting and large-scale e-commerce all produce engineers, product leaders and data specialists who transfer well into banking and insurance. What does not transfer automatically is regulatory instinct, and for the right person that is a coachable gap. Employers who hold an absolute financial services requirement on every hire narrow their pool for reasons that often do not survive scrutiny.
What actually shortens the search
Decide early which requirements are legal or regulatory and which are preferences. Compress the middle of the interview process, because that is where good candidates are lost. Be specific about the mandate, since senior people in this sector are evaluating the problem as much as the package. And start the conversation before the deadline is visible, particularly on the actuarial and regulatory roles, where the pool is smallest and the clock is set by legislation rather than by your programme plan.
Evantis Talent Solutions recruits permanent and outsourced technology, transformation, risk and specialist talent for banking and insurance clients in Thailand. We have been recruiting in this market for 15 years, we deliver a first shortlist within 3 days, and 88% of our clients hire with us again. For leadership mandates we also run executive search, and for programme-shaped work we build outsourced delivery teams.
If you are hiring into a financial services transformation programme, or you want a view of what a role like yours is realistically attracting in the current market, we are happy to have that conversation.
