English might be the lingua franca in the wealth management and banking hubs of Singapore and Hong Kong - but that doesn’t mean that much of what gets talked and written about is ever really understood. 

Anyone forced to sit through a presentation by an overseas senior private banking executive on their twice-yearly, much-dreaded jaunt through the region knows the takeaways will be few and the misunderstandings plenty.

Even though said speaker usually interprets the dumbfounded silence and dearth of questions during the perfunctory Q&A as a sign of unmitigated success, a small set of non-natives employed locally know otherwise.

No Firmer Purpose

They too sit through the word-for-word rereading of unending PowerPoint slides sprinkled with practically illegible, yet neatly formatted, text bullets whose only job is to make sure that no one leaves the room with a shred of strategic clarity, heightened motivation, or a better sense of purpose.

Still, beyond the purely anecdotal or conjectural, not one of those non-natives could ever prove the emptiness of that kind of exercise – until now. 

The Data is Here

That is because, somewhat surprisingly, Preply, an online language learning platform, has come up with some indirect data that backs up those initial hunches.

In Singapore, for example, more than half of the around 1,500 people surveyed use subtitles more often than they used to when trying to learn a new language or going to the cinema.

Austrian Hero

But that per se is not necessarily the smoking gun we are after. It gets far more interesting when it comes to the accent they have the most difficulty understanding.

At the top of the list comes Arnold Schwarzenegger, the internationally renowned action celebrity basking in a somewhat recent Netflix documentary makeover. His fluent, conversant, albeit heavily stressed English, seems to be very hard to decipher for 11 percent of Singaporeans surveyed.

Shot Across the Bow

That alone should be interpreted as a shot across the bow for all Swiss German-based wealth managers and private banks with booking centers in the city-state. Although most Helvetians might not believe they sound Austrian when speaking English – the truth is you would be hard put in Asia to find someone who can detect a discernible difference. 

So, for anyone with any kind of Alemannic dialect in your heritage – don’t assume that Asian bank employees can understand what you are saying just because you have a TOEFL certificate or something like it to show for it.

Practically Identical

But it gets more interesting than that. The second on the list is Jackie Chan. Whatever you can say about the outset of his career, he currently speaks (YouTube, 2022) English very passably, and in a way that is identical to that practiced by most local bank employees in Hong Kong.

That seems to change the argument. Maybe residents in the city-state are choosing to not understand other accents, something that not only hints at years of fractured Zoom calls but also a long-term fragmented procedural understanding between the two cities.

Understanding Nobody

The inflection hinted at above, however, becomes very clear when looking at the fourth person on the list - JJ Lin, the Singaporean-born Mandopop star.

He speaks (YouTube, 2018) what appears to be perfect Singlish, English, and Mandarin and if Singaporeans don’t understand him without using subtitles, then the question arises as to who they do understand.

Offshore Muddled

When it comes to female actors, the situation is not much better. Although they are generally better understood than male celebrities, Sofia Vergara and Priyanka Chopra top the list.

If that is the case, that seems to suggest a near-constant state of bewildered confusion for the locally based employees of large institutions with major offshoring centers in places like Latin America and India.

Using Subtitles

At the end of the day, that means that for any senior manager planning next year’s foray into Asia with their team, an idea this time might be to mix the slides with subtitled videos in their PowerPoints, at least for the really important messages. It might help cut down on all those pesky compliance breaches.