The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday fined Taishin International Bank (台新銀行) a record NT$30 million (US$1.07 million) for oversight failure, after its staff stole NT$347 million from customers.
The fine was much higher than the penalty of NT$20 million handed to E.Sun Commercial Bank (玉山銀行) in November last year and the NT$12 million fine to Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) in December last year for similar failures.
An E.Sun employee had stolen NT$140 million from 41 clients, while Cathay United Bank’s staff had stolen NT$17.32 million from four clients, data from the commission showed.
Photo: Wang Meng-lun, Taipei Times
Taishin Bank received the heaviest punishment not only because the NT$347 million its former employee stole from nine clients was the highest among all bank thefts, but also because the employee had done so for more than a decade, from 2008 to last year, indicating the bank’s lax internal controls, the commission said.
The former employee, a customer relationship manager surnamed Chou (周) at a branch in New Taipei City’s Jhonghe District (中和), asked his clients to sign blank transfer forms and then used them to transfer their money to the bank accounts of his friends or his sister, Banking Bureau Deputy Director-General Huang Kuang-hsi (黃光熙) told a videoconference.
Although some of Chou’s clients applied to reconcile their bank accounts, the bank failed to save the records of account activity for inspection, Huang said.
When the bank in 2019 discovered the suspicious cash movement, Chou’s manager only asked him to write a report, but failed to continue monitoring him, Huang added.
The commission also faulted Taishin’s management, saying the bank had cut the branch’s workforce and was overly focused on how much sales its employees could generate, he said.
“Sales had a weighting of 40 percent in an employee’s performance assessment in 2016... Although the weighting was lowered in the following years, it was still comparatively higher than at other banks,” he said.
That might explain why when Chou secretly moved funds from his clients to other accounts, those responsible for checking did not spot the illegal activity, Huang said.
The FSC suspended Taishin Bank’s deputy head of consumer banking, surnamed Lin (林), for three months, saying Lin was responsible for the poor management as he had designed the employee performance assessment, Huang said.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
RSS