Bank SinoPac (永豐銀行), the banking arm of SinoPac Financial Holding Co (永豐金控), yesterday launched mobile debit and credit card services, making it the first lender in Taiwan to tap the emerging mobile payment market.
The new service, currently limited to 1,000 customers, allows them to pay for goods and services via their smartphones and tablets as mobile devices gain popularity.
“Bank SinoPac is pleased to lead peers in offering the service” that is already in use in the US, Canada, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Japan, Australia and South Korea, Bank Sinopac’s president Tina Chiang (江威娜) told a media briefing.
The new business may not be a key earnings driver at this point due to regulatory constraints, among other things, but is a trend that no financial institute can afford to ignore, Chiang said.
Global mobile business transactions are expected to jump by a compound rate of 35 percent every year to 2017, suggesting ample payment opportunity for lenders, Chiang said.
At present, the Financial Supervisory Commission caps credit card consumption over mobile devices at NT$50,000 (US$1,665) and payments over mobile debit cards at NT$10,000. The regulator also imposes a quota of 1,000 customers for banks interested in offering mobile payment services.
A survey by Bank SinoPac shows 62 percent of its customers are willing to use the new services on expectations of better speed and convenience.
Yet, 38 percent expressed concerns over transaction safety and 32 percent over complicated procedures, the survey showed.
Other banks including Chinatrust Commercial Bank (中國信託銀行), Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行), Taishin International Bank (台新銀行), Taipei Fubon Commercial Bank (台北富邦銀行), EnTie Commercial Bank (安泰銀行) and Union Bank of Taiwan (聯邦銀行) are expected to unveil their mobile payment services soon.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
RSS