A lawmaker on Monday criticized seven banks’ wire transfer fee increases that they said were needed to offset the costs of heightened money laundering controls, increases that ranged from 25 to 36 percent.
At a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Finance Committee, New Power Party Legislator Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) said that First Commercial Bank (第一銀行) and Taiwan Cooperative Bank (合庫銀行) in June raised their fees for foreign currency remittance services to NT$300, while Chang Hwa Commercial Bank (彰化銀行) and Taiwan Business Bank (台企銀) followed suit in August and this month respectively.
Hua Nan Commercial Bank (華南銀行) announced a fee hike to be implemented next month, while Mega International Commercial Bank (兆豐銀行) and Bank of Taiwan (台灣銀行) this month raised their fees for outward remittances to NT$120, Hsu added.
The seven state-run banks have been abusing their customers with excessive fee hikes, Hsu said, adding that the public should not bear the cost, even if the banks spent money upgrading their money laundering control protocols.
Fifteen banks have also raised fees on reviewing past credit card statements to between NT$50 and NT$100 per request, Hsu said, questioning why the banks could charge for what should be a basic customer right.
Hsu said that reviewing credit card statements is unrelated to efforts to improve money laundering prevention and that banks have been using the issue to raise their fees for basic services.
He also said that a number of banks have colluded to raise fees simultaneously.
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) said it would look into the matter.
While banks have been asked to devote resources to upgrade their “know-your-customer” checks and other verification systems, they also need to be more transparent about their fee structures, Banking Bureau Director-General Jean Chiu (邱淑貞) said.
FSC Chairman Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said that he agrees with Hsu that the banks’ charge for accessing credit card statements was not reasonable, and vowed that the commission would investigate the fee hikes and take action if they are found to be unreasonable.
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,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
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