The best regional team isn't the one with everything in one market. It's the one that puts each capability where it can perform best.
Southeast Asia's talent hubs are becoming more capable and specialised. Singapore remains important for commercial leadership, senior relationships and market development, while Manila and Kuala Lumpur are supporting increasingly substantial regional work. The question for 2027 isn't which country should “own” each job title. It's how to place the capabilities your business actually needs.
For years, regional team design often started with geography.
Which roles sit in Singapore?
What can move offshore?
Where is the cheapest place to build an operations team?
That framing is becoming less useful.
The more interesting question for 2027 is:
What capability does the business need — and where can that capability perform best?
That sounds like a small distinction.
It changes the entire workforce conversation.
Because a programmatic trader in one company may be almost entirely executional.
In another, they may advise account teams, diagnose performance problems and make decisions across multiple markets.
An account manager might need to be in front of Singapore agencies every week.
Another might manage clients across JAPAC almost entirely through regional calls.
The title alone doesn't tell you where the role belongs.
The work does.
The regional talent map is getting more interesting
Singapore remains a significant centre for regional AdTech leadership.
Current hiring includes commercial directors, regional sales positions and APAC advertiser-solutions roles built around senior relationships, revenue ownership, partnerships and regional market development.
At the same time, Manila's current market includes programmatic traders, trading managers and digital account managers supporting work across JAPAC. MiQ's Manila account-management brief, for example, includes responsibility for account health, client satisfaction, revenue protection and growth — not simply campaign administration.
Kuala Lumpur is developing in its own direction. Havas' new Malaysia studio is designed as a regional production and adaptation capability serving Southeast Asia and wider APAC, bringing together production, localisation, specialist talent and AI-enabled workflows. Current KL hiring also includes end-to-end programmatic operations roles.
None of that means:
commercial = Singapore
trading = Manila
production = KL
That would simply replace one rigid model with another.
What it shows is that the talent map is broad enough for businesses to be more deliberate.
There is no single correct regional model anymore.
But there is a better way to design one.
Start with capability, not country
Before deciding where a role should sit, separate the job title from the work inside it.
Take a Regional Account Manager.
The title tells us very little.
Does the person need to spend three days a week with Singapore agency teams?
Are they primarily managing existing accounts across six countries?
Do they own renewal and growth?
Are they interpreting campaign performance?
Are they expected to troubleshoot technical issues?
Do they have local revenue accountability?
Those responsibilities have very different location requirements.
So rather than asking:
“Where should we hire the Regional Account Manager?”
Ask:
“What capabilities are we trying to buy?”
Then test those capabilities against five things.
1. Proximity: what actually needs to be close to the market?
Some work benefits enormously from physical and cultural proximity.
Senior agency relationships.
New-business development.
Complex commercial negotiations.
Local partnerships.
Roles where informal networks and regular face-to-face contact materially affect the result.
For those responsibilities, Singapore may still be the obvious choice for many regional businesses.
But “client-facing” isn't enough on its own to settle the question.
A person managing regional clients largely through Teams or Zoom may need excellent communication, market understanding and time-zone alignment more than a Singapore postcode.
Ask:
How often does being physically close to the client materially improve the outcome?
Be specific.
If the answer is “occasionally”, proximity probably shouldn't outweigh every other factor.
2. Judgement: where are the important decisions being made?
Not all execution is junior.
And not all strategy needs to happen in headquarters.
Look at the decisions inside the role.
Does this person decide where budget moves?
Do they challenge automated recommendations?
Can they change campaign strategy?
Are they responsible for client advice?
Do they make commercial trade-offs?
Do they need to know when to escalate something — and when not to?
The more judgement a role contains, the more important seniority, context and management become.
But that still doesn't automatically dictate geography.
Current Manila hiring already includes trading-management and account-management positions with regional responsibilities, demonstrating that meaningful ownership can sit outside the traditional headquarters market when the structure around it is strong.
The question isn't:
“Is this too senior to sit outside Singapore?”
It's:
“Can we find the judgement we need there, and have we designed the role so that person can actually exercise it?”
3. Expertise: where does the capability actually exist?
This is the part businesses sometimes reverse.
They choose the market.
Then try to force the talent requirement into it.
Instead, look at the capability first.
If you need strong programmatic trading depth, where can you find it?
If you need multilingual localisation, where is that capability strongest?
If you need a senior commercial network across Singapore agencies, the answer may be different.
If you need campaign operations at scale, it may be different again.
Havas' decision to establish its regional production and adaptation hub in Malaysia is a useful example. The company specifically pointed to Malaysia's multicultural environment, multilingual workforce, creative talent base, connectivity and cost efficiencies as reasons for building there.
That's capability-led location planning.
Not simply labour arbitrage.
4. Ownership: who is accountable when the work is distributed?
This may be the most important part of the framework.
Distributed teams fail quickly when work moves but accountability doesn't.
Imagine:
The Singapore account lead owns the client.
A Manila trader owns delivery.
Analytics sits somewhere else.
A regional director approves strategy.
Who owns the result?
If campaign performance falls, who decides what changes?
If the client is unhappy, who fixes it?
If two teams disagree, who makes the call?
If those answers require five Slack messages and three escalations, the organisational design is doing too much work.
Before distributing a capability, define the decision rights around it.
Who owns the outcome?
Who can make which decisions?
What needs approval?
What doesn't?
Where does escalation go?
You can distribute execution.
You can distribute strategy.
You can even distribute account ownership.
What you can't distribute successfully is unclear accountability.
5. Progression: can someone build a career inside the model?
This is the factor that gets missed most often.
A regional operating model can look excellent on a spreadsheet and still create a weak talent pipeline.
Imagine Manila owns execution.
Singapore owns strategy.
Always.
What happens to the excellent Manila trader after three years?
If the answer is:
“They keep getting better at execution.”
you may eventually lose them.
The same applies in any hub.
Capability centres become stronger when people can move from delivery into judgement, leadership, client ownership and commercial responsibility.
MiQ's current Manila structure is interesting here because its hiring spans associate trading, trading, trading management and account management, rather than showing only a single execution layer.
Whether or not another business copies that structure, the principle matters.
Don't design a regional team that gives one market all the career paths and another market all the tasks.
Your operating model is also a development model.
Put the five questions together
Before choosing a location for any capability, work through:
- Proximity: Does the work genuinely require regular access to local clients, partners or market networks?
- Judgement: What decisions will this person own, and what level of context and seniority do those decisions require?
- Expertise: Where can you actually find strong talent for this capability?
- Ownership: Who remains accountable for the outcome when responsibilities are distributed?
- Progression: Can someone in this role develop into greater responsibility without having to leave the structure?
Only then choose the market.
That order matters.
Don't move whole job descriptions if you can redesign the work
There is another useful consequence of this approach.
You may discover that the answer isn't:
“Hire the role in Singapore.”
Or:
“Move the role to Manila.”
The better answer might be to split the capability differently.
Take a regional programmatic account role.
Perhaps senior commercial ownership and key client relationships stay in Singapore.
Campaign strategy and account-health ownership are shared regionally.
Trading sits with a specialist Manila team.
Analytics is centralised.
Technical support sits wherever the strongest platform expertise exists.
That's not necessarily more complicated.
It can actually be clearer — provided ownership is explicit.
The mistake is moving pieces of work around without redesigning the relationships between them.
Don't let cost lead the exercise
Cost matters.
Any responsible workforce plan considers it.
But cost should be an output of the capability exercise, not its starting assumption.
Otherwise the conversation becomes:
“Where can we hire this job more cheaply?”
Instead of:
“What is the smartest way to build this capability?”
Those questions can produce very different teams.
Sometimes the right answer will still be Singapore.
Sometimes another market will offer the same or stronger capability with a different cost structure.
Sometimes the role should be divided.
Sometimes it shouldn't exist in its current form at all.
The framework helps you reach that decision for the right reason.
A regional hub still needs a reason to be a hub
There is a tendency to call any concentrated group of people a “hub.”
A real capability hub should create something that would be weaker if every person worked independently in separate markets.
That could be:
deep specialist knowledge;
shared training;
consistent processes;
better management;
career progression;
stronger QA;
faster knowledge transfer;
or enough scale to develop genuine expertise.
If all you've done is move tasks to another country, you've created a location.
Not necessarily a capability.
That distinction will matter more in 2027 as businesses become more comfortable distributing increasingly sophisticated work.
There is no perfect regional org chart
And there probably shouldn't be.
A global platform entering Southeast Asia needs a different model from a Singapore agency.
A mature AdTech business needs a different structure from a scale-up entering APAC.
A company with large local clients will make different choices from one serving global accounts remotely.
The goal isn't to copy someone else's hub strategy.
It's to understand the work well enough to build your own.
Start with the capabilities.
Test proximity.
Understand the judgement required.
Find the expertise.
Protect accountability.
Build progression into the structure.
Then put the pin on the map.
Planning your 2027 team?
UGP can help you map the capabilities you need, decide where they can perform best and turn that structure into briefs people actually understand.
