Imagine a credit card with no preset spending limit that allows you to buy a car, a yacht or even an estate. You can probably get one provided you earn NT$3 million a year and are willing to fork over a NT$20,000 annual fee.
Taishin International Bank's (台新銀行) new Visa Infinite card (無限卡) "will be by invitation only," said Eric Wu (吳東亮), chairman of Taishin Financial Holding Co (台新金控), at a launching ceremony for the card yesterday afternoon.
Wu said that the first targeted pool of potential cardholders will be from the bank's wealth management clients, who have an annual income of over NT$3 million.
Four Infinite cards were given to yesterday's honorary guests including Rosemary Ho (
Visa Infinite cardholders will enjoy benefits such as travel insurance coverage as high as NT$50 million, free parking in some 50 parking lots, free entry to some cultural activities and 24-hour concierge services that can help to arrange parties and banquets free of charge, Daniel Tsai (蔡孟峰), general manager of the holding company's retail banking group, said at the same ceremony.
The bank charges an annual fee of NT$20,000 for the card, Tsai said.
The cards are a prestige issue, giving users big face as only 20,000 Infinite cards have been issued globally. Taishin is the first bank in Asia to issue the cards.
Visa International's Clark said that the Infinite card caters to the needs of the top 1 percent of the highest spending consumers worldwide. The bank estimates the number of potential cardholders in Taiwan at around 100,000.
Visa International's research showed that the typical Infinite cardholder is a professional or entrepreneur between the ages of 35 and 54, earning at least US$100,000 a year.
William Fong (
"The card will help boost the bank's transaction income," Fong said.
"Even though other banks provide similar wealth-management products, there's still a lot of room for growth," he said.
The card launch coincides with Taishin opening its newly renovated flagship wealth-management center in Taipei.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS