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.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
Taiwan’s long-term economic competitiveness will hinge not only on national champions like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC, 台積電) but also on the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies, a US-based scholar has said. At a lecture in Taipei on Tuesday, Jeffrey Ding, assistant professor of political science at the George Washington University and author of "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers," argued that historical experience shows that general-purpose technologies (GPTs) — such as electricity, computers and now AI — shape long-term economic advantages through their diffusion across the broader economy. "What really matters is not who pioneers
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
TAIWAN VALUE CHAIN: Foxtron is to fully own Luxgen following the transaction and it plans to launch a new electric model, the Foxtron Bria, in Taiwan next year Yulon Motor Co (裕隆汽車) yesterday said that its board of directors approved the disposal of its electric vehicle (EV) unit, Luxgen Motor Co (納智捷汽車), to Foxtron Vehicle Technologies Co (鴻華先進) for NT$787.6 million (US$24.98 million). Foxtron, a half-half joint venture between Yulon affiliate Hua-Chuang Automobile Information Technical Center Co (華創車電) and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), expects to wrap up the deal in the first quarter of next year. Foxtron would fully own Luxgen following the transaction, including five car distributing companies, outlets and all employees. The deal is subject to the approval of the Fair Trade Commission, Foxtron said. “Foxtron will be
RSS