The Financial Supervisory Commission on Tuesday fined Taichung Commercial Bank (台中商銀) and its insurance unit, Taichung Bank Insurance Brokers Co Ltd (台中銀保險經紀人), a total of NT$10.8 million (US$359,904) for lax internal controls.
The insurance company was fined NT$4.8 million after the commission conducted an inspection in 2018 and found that the firm had squandered entertainment fees, ignored client complaints and given bonuses to sales personnel with poor performance.
“Although the insurance company clearly recorded the entertainment expenses, it could not elaborate on who could spend the fees or employees’ expense limits,” Insurance Bureau Deputy Director-General Chang Yu-hui (張玉輝) said.
“In short, it had not established an internal control protocol,” Chang said, adding that insurance companies should have internal controls to govern spending.
Chang declined to disclose how much Taichung Bank Insurance Brokers had spent in entertainment expenses over the past few years.
The insurance company could not explain why it rewarded sales personnel who had not sold any products, Chang said, adding that the practice breached the Insurance Act (保險法) and Regulations Governing Insurance Brokers (保險經紀人管理規則).
The bureau told the firm that it had one month to fix the blunder, he said.
The commission fined the insurer’s parent company, Taichung Commercial Bank, NT$6 million for its failure to detect the unit’s regulatory breaches, Banking Bureau Deputy Director-General Huang Kuang-hsi (黃光熙) said.
“It was strange that the bank could not detect the unit’s breach, even though it inspected the insurer two times per year,” Huang said.
The commission decided to impose a stricter fine on the parent company for failing to supervise and monitor its subsidiary, Huang added.
Some of the bank’s staff privately took care of clients’ money, which was inappropriate, so the bureau has prohibited the bank from applying to set up new branches until it improves its management, Huang said.
Taichung Commercial Bank on Wednesday reported NT$1 billion in revenue for last month, down 17.2 percent from a year earlier, saying that cumulative revenue increased 3 percent year-on-year to NT$12 billion.
The company last month posted pretax profit of NT$561 million, down 1.46 percent from a year earlier, while cumulative pretax profit rose 9.5 percent year-on-year to NT$5.2 billion, the company said.
For the whole of last year, earnings per share were NT$1.16, up 7.41 percent from a year earlier, the company added.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by