Standard Chartered Bank (Taiwan) Ltd (渣打國際商銀) opened its 89th branch yesterday, in Taipei City’s Dazhi (大直) area, and said it planned to launch the 90th branch by the end of this year as it continues expansion in wealth management business.
This made it the first foreign bank to open a branch in the emerging commercial area aimed at providing premium financing services to affluent customers in the region, Cindy Liao (廖玲瑩), manager of the Dazhi branch, said on the sidelines of a press conference.
“[To attract more customers], we will organize art exhibitions on holidays for our exclusive clients on a regular basis,” Liao said, adding that its 9am to 3:30pm operating hours might be extended to meet demand.
The opening was in line with the bank’s pledge last month to double its client base by 2013 by providing more premium service packages after the number of the company’s affluent customers rose 50 percent at the end of June compared with last December.
The bank, into its 25th year in Taiwan, told the Taipei Times that it was on track to open its 90th branch on Fuxing N Road in Taipei City next month or in November, but declined to reveal its expansion plan for next year.
“We are still undergoing an evaluation,” the bank said.
Standard Chartered has injected an accumulated capital of US$2 billion via three acquisitions in Taiwan, outperforming other foreign banks operating in the nation, because it values the financially significant role in the Greater China area, the bank said.
Asked whether the new Basel III rules would impact the bank’s operations, Standard Chartered said it remained “strongly capitalized” with a highly liquid and diversified balance sheet, saying its core tier-one ratio was higher than the 6 percent required by the new rules.
“Standard Chartered’s HY [first half-year] 2010 tier-one capital ratio is 11.2 percent and core tier-one is 9 percent, respectively. Both ratios are comfortably in excess of Basel III requirements,” the company said in a statement.
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
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