The rate of bank branch closures in Taiwan has increased as banks around the world continue to move their financial services online, Financial Supervisory Commission data released yesterday showed.
Bank branch closures last year reached 23, up from 11 in 2014, setting a new record for bank closures in the past five years, commission data showed.
Last year, state-run Taiwan Cooperative Bank (合作金庫銀行) closed 11 branches, HSBC Bank (Taiwan) Ltd (匯豐台灣商銀) cut four branches, Standard Chartered Bank (Taiwan) Ltd (渣打台灣銀行) slashed six branches, while ANZ Bank (Taiwan) Ltd (澳盛台灣商業銀行) shuttered two branches, the commission said.
At the same time, applications to open new branches are expected to continue declining, with the commission saying it is only expecting to review five applications this year when an annual registration begins next month.
Between 2007 and 2011, applications for new bank branches averaged at about 10 each year. However, the figure fell to one in 2013, five in 2014 and four last year, commission data showed.
The commission’s Banking Bureau said that many banks are no longer able to justify the cost of branches as more and more consumers adopt Web-based services.
While interest in opening new branches is waning among major domestic banks, the exceptions are industrial banks and credit unions in the midst of transitioning into commercial banks, smaller-scaled banks, and banks looking to aggressively step up their presence in consumer and retail financing operations, the bureau said.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS