Singapore is a beautiful melting pot of different cultures,” says Jennifer Eisenecker. “It’s extremely diverse.” A former banker, Eisenecker is a regional cultural expert on Asia and runs her own consultancy firm, JIA Advisors. She is embedded in the life and culture of Singapore eschews the description of “expat”, describing herself as “a local”.
“People here are very open-minded,” Eisenecker says. “It’s a very international environment, and this is what makes it so interesting. Singapore has done a great job in terms of being both open to different cultures and being open to businesses.”
Fascination with languages and cultures
Eisenecker is German but has spent much of her adult life in Asia, an area of the world that fascinates her. Born near Stuttgart in 1981, she recalls how languages and cultures caught her attention as a child. Every week for a year or two, she travelled across Stuttgart to attend Japanese classes while still at school. “I just thought this is an opportunity to learn another language that I have to take.” She also got her school friends of Turkish origin to teach her some Turkish. “Thanks to my parents, we travelled within Europe quite a lot when I was young,” she explains. “But I’ve always had this real curiosity just to get out there and explore different places, to broaden my horizons.”
From 2001, she studied international business communication in Asia/China at the Konstanz University of Applied Sciences, where Germany borders Switzerland. Her course allowed her to study overseas and, in 2003, she headed to Shanghai, China, with the singular aim of becoming fluent in Chinese. “I did nothing else for a year. I got up in the morning, studied between 9 and 12 in my class. And after that, I studied until I went to bed. That was my life in China for one year.” It paid off and, by the end of the year, she was top of her class.
By this point, Eisenecker did not want to go back to Germany. She persuaded her university that she could prepare for her lessons herself, and she returned only for exams. She got an internship in Hong Kong at Clearstream Banking (part of the German stock exchange) and ended up writing her thesis there about the differences in economic success and leadership styles between India and China. She then started her banking career, working as an assistant for a small German bank, and later for BNP Paribas in Singapore as a manager. She’s been in Singapore ever since, where she decided to set up her own business in 2013.
A leading business location
“I chose to set up my consultancy firm in Singapore for two reasons,” Eisenecker explains. “Firstly, I was already here. Secondly, because Singapore had for many years been considered one of the world’s leading locations to set up a business.” In 2019, the World Bank rated Singapore as the second-best place in the world to do business, just behind New Zealand, and ahead of Hong Kong. The best-placed European country is fourth-placed Denmark.
“Singapore takes away many of the roadblocks that you might have in other countries when setting up a business,” Eisenecker says. “In addition, everything is in English, and this makes it attractive from a business perspective.” Eisenecker also mentions the low level of corruption in Singapore: Transparency International placed Singapore third best in its latest Corruption Perceptions Index — alongside Finland, Switzerland and Sweden, and behind New Zealand and Denmark.
Singapore is an island city-state and home to a highly modern, dynamic economy. Banking and financial services are its mainstays. Major international companies such as the Singaporean-Swiss Trafigura (commodities and trade) and Singaporean-US Flex (electronics) are partly headquartered there.
Eisenecker set up on a somewhat more modest scale when she founded JIA Advisors. “You can quickly and easily set up a business yourself,” she says, although she commissioned a German law firm to do everything for her, leaving her just needing to sign a few documents. “This is what most people do — get a law firm from your own country. You get the best legal advice and the best accounting advice, and they have the experience to make sure everything is correct. You then know you won’t have problems later.”
One of her specialities at JIA Advisors is “intuitive interviewing” for firms wanting to hire the right person for any given job. She says that checking an applicant’s “hard skills” is the easy part, but would a particular person excel in a particular environment? “By inviting the right people into your team or business, you save money, create a positive cycle for better team performance, have less stress, improved productivity and a better work-life balance. This leads to higher customer, employee and investor satisfaction.”
Lifestyle in Singapore
Eisenecker’s experience of living and working in Singapore for many years means she knows a lot about how to make a success of living in this part of the world. A starting point is to learn a local language. As well as German and English, Eisenecker is fluent in Mandarin and speaks some Malay, as well as French, Spanish and Italian.
She says people should also consider the relatively high cost of living in Singapore, but adds that, while “it is not a cheap place to live”, if you adopt a more modest lifestyle, it is possible to live well there. “It depends on your lifestyle, but you don’t need a big income. Do you want your coffee from an international chain or from a local coffee shop, which costs a fraction of the price? Instead of a supermarket, I shop at the local market, where they sell banana leaves and fresh vegetables. Then there is the ‘spice guy’ who mixes everything I want, again, at a fraction of the supermarket cost. The beauty here is that you have the choice.”
Eisenecker describes Singapore as being a lot faster than Europe, which seems more static to her. “We don’t rest much, and it can be stressful, and people are very ambitious,” she says of Singaporeans. This, though, can lead to health issues, something that motivated Eisenecker to train in naturopathy and set up her own business, Panakaya. Medical experts have criticized some elements of naturopathy, but Eisenecker doesn’t use the discredited practice of homeopathy. She stresses that, for her, it’s about a “getting-back-to-basics” approach to issues such as stress and tiredness. Her website says she follows an “evidence-based approach”, and that the help and advice provided “is not a substitute for proper medical care and advice. For any medical condition, please seek professional medical care.”
Born of her experience and understanding that working in high-pressure jobs can leave people with reduced energy and little time, Eisenecker says it’s about providing a “holistic service” rather than simply “throwing a supplement at someone” who isn’t sleeping or eating well. She examines the lifestyle, sleep, diet and levels of stress of clients, and she has created a line of natural remedies.
Jennifer Eisenecker has been in Singapore since 2008, and her transition from working at the heart of the banking sector to consultancy work is now complete. “In private banking, it’s all about the customer. That was my approach. But banking didn’t make me happy. I was good at my job, but it didn’t feed my soul.” Now, as an expert and insider working from the outside, she is a lot more content and feels, as she says, like “a local”.