The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) on Friday said it aims to send a high-level official to a private-sector meeting in China next month where financial supervisory issues will be discussed, in a bid to maintain relations even as political ties have chilled.
FSC Chairman Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said that the commission will send an official of “deputy bureau chief or higher” to the meeting, which he said would be organized by the private sector.
The last time Chinese and Taiwanese financial regulators publicly met was in 2015 at an annual cross-strait meeting.
Photo: Brenda Goh, Reuters
Those meetings, which began in 2011, have not been held since President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office in May last year.
Koo declined to give further details about next month’s meeting or comment when asked if there had been meetings with Chinese officials in the past two years.
“There definitely remains a need for information exchange; this can not be broken,” he said.
He added that while the commission hoped to revive the annual meetings, that would depend on the political climate.
“We will continue to go through private-sector events and seminars, and if they allow us to send someone there, we will send a suitable person,” Koo said.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office was not immediately available for comment on the prospective visit.
Koo, who took the job after Tsai reshuffled the Cabinet in response to softening approval ratings, oversees the nation’s banking industry as well as its policy on financial technology.
Regulators around the world have taken varying positions on fund-raising via digital currencies, such as bitcoin, with Singapore saying in August that it would regulate so-called “initial coin offerings” (ICO) if it judges them to be securities under its laws, while China banned them completely in September.
The commission would look to emulate the Singaporean approach, as it values the blockchain technology that underpinned many ICOs and digital tokens, Koo said
“We cannot do what China did, but are we going to be open to it and treat it like securities with value, futures or derivatives?” Koo asked.
“We have not reached that level of evaluation,” he said.
He also said that the commission is concerned about foreign exchange risks facing local insurers as the New Taiwan dollar hovers near its strongest level against the US dollar in three years.
The insurers have invested heavily in foreign-exchange instruments, such as Formosa bonds, Koo said.
To mitigate such risks, the commission intends to raise the insurers’ reserve requirement ratios next year and also to roll out new management rules, he said.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS