Two Chinese lenders will soon join Taiwan’s overcrowded banking market after the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday approved their plans to provide corporate financial services here.
The commission granted the Bank of China (中國銀行) and the Bank of Communications (交通銀行) permission to provide savings and loans, remittance, currency conversion, bills finance and other commercial banking services to corporate customers in Taiwan.
The two Chinese lenders set up representative offices here in September 2010 and were told by the commission to prepare to upgrade the offices into branches in December last year.
While it is up to the Chinese banks to decide when they would begin their local operations, Banking Bureau Director-General Kuei Hsien-nung (桂先農) said he expected the two banks to begin operations next month at the earliest.
Nevertheless, the two Chinese banks' entry is likely to intensify already sharp competition among existing local and foreign peers.
Meanwhile, DBS Taiwan (星展銀行) on Tuesday launched a signature business card aimed at affluent Taiwanese customers — those with investable assets in excess of NT$2 million (US$66,876).
Jerry Chen (陳亮丞), general manager of the Singaporean lender’s local unit, said DBS Taiwan remains on track to grow its consumer banking business by between 25 percent and 30 percent this year, unaffected by a turnaround in market sentiment this quarter.
The lender is also upbeat about increasing loans to corporate customers at a similar pace this year, Chen said.
“We do not see the need to revise down our growth target based on our performance thus far,” Chen said.
DBS Taiwan has more than 20,000 credit cards in circulation and aims to push the figure up to 50,000 within three years, DBS' head of consumer banking Kevin Tang (唐正峰) said.
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained