Holders of automated teller machine (ATM) cards issued by select Taiwanese banks can now withdraw cash in Hong Kong and Macau, two of the most popular destinations for Taiwanese tourists, government-sponsored Financial Information Service Co (FISC, 財金資訊) said yesterday.
FISC said the service was launched on Tuesday in collaboration with 15 Taiwanese banks.
ATM cardholders can also check their deposit balances, FISC said.
By the end of next month, more than 300 ATMs in the two territories will provide cash withdrawal and deposit balance checking services to Taiwanese tourists.
Each transaction will initially incur a charge of NT$100, but that will be cut in half by the end of next month, FISC said.
The exchange rate adopted for the service will be 0.1 percentage points lower than the rate quoted by the Bank of Taiwan (臺灣銀行) the previous day, it said.
The 15 banks participating in the program are: Land Bank of Taiwan (土地銀行), Taiwan Cooperative Bank (合庫銀行), First Commercial Bank (第一銀行), Hua Nan Commercial Bank (華南銀行), Chang Hwa Commercial Bank (彰化銀行), Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank (上海商業儲蓄銀行), Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行), Bank of Kaohsiung (高雄銀行), Taiwan Business Bank (台灣企銀), Shin Kong Commercial Bank (新光銀行), Sunny Bank (陽信銀行), The Second Credit Cooperative of Hualien (花蓮二信), Union Bank of Taiwan (聯邦銀行), Yuanta Commercial Bank (元大銀行) and E. Sun Commercial Bank (玉山銀行).
Bank of Taiwan will join the service on March 1, while Taichung Commercial Bank (台中商銀), Hwatai Commercial Bank (華泰銀行), Cota Commercial Bank (三信銀行), Far Eastern International Bank (遠東銀行) and Jih Sun International Commercial Bank (日盛銀行) are expected to sign up later this year, FISC 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
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
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],”
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