The Financial Supervisory Commission yesterday said it would cut red tape for typhoon-hit policyholders to accelerate their insurance claims — a move agreed upon by the Life Insurance Association (壽險公會) and binding for its members.
Once prosecutors issue death certificates for casualties of Typhoon Morakot, domestic insurers should make payments on death benefits to their beneficiaries within 15 days, Joanne Tzeng (曾玉瓊), deputy director-general of the commission’s Insurance Bureau, told a media briefing yesterday.
Beneficiaries of policyholders who are confirmed missing by local police, township leaders or other authorities, will be allowed to collect the death benefits immediately, Tzeng said.
Normally, beneficiaries can apply for a missing family member’s death benefits only after the policyholder has been gone for more than one year.
For policyholders who have problems proving their identity or providing personal documents that were lost in floods and landslides, insurers should look for alternative ways to verify their claims and should under no circumstances hold up the process by using missing documents as an excuse, the commission said.
The commission also said three to six-month rollovers would be granted on mortgages and other loans.
The commission’s statistics showed that, as of Monday, insurers had paid NT$1.29 billion (US$391 million) to policyholders excluding life insurance claims.
Meanwhile, Lin Tung-liang (林棟樑), deputy director of the commission’s banking bureau, yesterday said the local banking sector may suffer more than NT$3 billion in mortgage losses because of Morakot.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts