Hiring and pay at Grab: Singapore's $19bn fintech
Since cutting 1,000 staff in mid-2023, headcount at Singaporean Superapp fintech Grab has been quietly rising. Compensation has not been rising with it.
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According to a SEC 20-F form filed by the $19bn publicly traded fintech earlier this month, Grab ended 2024 with 11,267 full-time employees. This is higher than the 10.6k it ended the year before with, but lower than its headcount before the cuts.
The hiring has been driven by its general and administrative function which now has more employees than it did in 2022; Grab says this function consists of the executive team as well as "finance and accounting, human resources, policy and communications, legal, facility and general administration employees." Grab's research and development function, home to its "engineering, design, product development and data analytics employees," has had the slowest growth, and is still almost 12% smaller than it was in 2022.
The lack of expensive technical hiring appears to have driven a large decrease in average staff costs. While changes in staff costs were negligible from 2022 to 2023, they fell by over $13k per head (12.9%) in 2024. Share based payment expenses per head for employees have fallen by almost a third in the space of two years. The form states that research and development expenditure fell 3% year-on-year "primarily due to a $11 million decrease in staff compensation costs."
Grab is still growing tentatively, with 265 open roles. As the fintech industry at large gets a little less gloomy, Grab also looks to prioritizing tech hiring again; 114 of open roles are in its research and development function. Top tech roles in Singapore include a head of cybersecurity and multiple machine learning engineering roles. Grab is also building a new product go-to-market team in Singapore.
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