To OP:

Go with your initial hunch. A career in any role in banking, even ops and support, is more stable and pays better than an average designer. I can think of two reasons:

- Singapore is a very well-established banking and financial centre. While designer roles are needed in all industries, there is nothing in Singapore that particularly makes designer roles special here (in short, we are not Italy).

- People still have the idea, whether rightly or wrongly, that design tasks can easily be outsourced to other countries. For example, it is a common practice for startups to outsource screen designs of their apps to countries like Philippines, where talented freelance designers charge almost 10x lower than local ones. You should know. I bet you had classmates or even lecturers who outsourced their work. As such, the value of design work here is unfairly depressed compared with other types of work. (Programming used to suffer from this as well, but due to the Smart Nation push recently, it is enjoying some form of renaissance. Not sure when designers will get lucky.)