The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday said it plans to introduce an adult custodial system through investment trust companies to help the nation’s aging population.
Taiwan has become an “aged society,” meaning that more than 14 percent of its population is older than 65 and is to become a hyper-aged society within eight years, so the FSC began in 2016 to encourage investment firms to make trust funds available to senior citizens with the aim of protecting their assets, FSC Chairman Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said at a seminar held by the Trust Association yesterday in Taipei.
However, while general trust funds are common, accounting for 85 percent of total investments, trust funds for older people are not, remaining below 10 percent, Koo said.
Asked for a growth target, Koo said it is difficult to set a number, but he hopes to boost the number of trust funds for senior citizens by having trust companies add an adult custodial system to their services, adding that he has discussed amending the Family Act (家事事件法) with the Judicial Yuan.
“In the past, society had the concept of people raising children to take care of them in their old age, but that concept appears to have fallen out of fashion,” Koo said.
People should manage their assets before they reach old age, he said.
Older people would benefit from an adult custodial system, Koo said.
That way, if they lacked the necessary mental capacity, their assets would be protected by their designated custodian and supervised by their lawyer, he added.
As of June, 25 trust companies in Taiwan made trust funds available to seniors and the mentally or physically disadvantaged, with the accumulated principal totaling NT$13.6 billion (US$440.84 million), FSC data showed.
Although trust fund for older people are not that popular in Taiwan, older consumers in Japan are embracing the concept, Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corp (三菱UFJ 信託銀行) told the seminar.
The bank said that the total amount in education trust funds in Japan surpassed US$1 trillion in 2013, with more than 1 million applications, as older people hope to use part of their money to pay for their grandchildren’s educations.
Compared with younger customers, older people tend to have difficulty making choices, preferring to safeguard their assets, the bank said, adding that seniors also seem to be easily swayed by exaggerated advertising claims, so it is important to offer them the right customized products and services.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
The founder of Chinese property giant Evergrande Group (恆大集團) has pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and bribery, a court said yesterday, the latest blow for what was once the country’s leading developer. Evergrande’s rise was propelled by decades of rapid urbanization and rising living standards, but in 2020, its access to credit dramatically narrowed when the government introduced curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation. The company defaulted in 2021 after struggling to repay creditors. Founder Xu Jiayin (許家印), 67, known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, was reportedly held by police in 2023, with Evergrande saying he had been subjected to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
RSS