The well-known international financial magazine Global Finance on Tuesday held an online ceremony to announce the “Best Global Bank Awards 2021” winners. CTBC Bank Co (中國信託銀行) was named the “Best Bank in Taiwan” for its excellent business performance in revenue, profit and asset scale, despite the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Global Finance also credited CTBC for its digital innovation and team efforts in assisting customers with applying for government relief loans during the pandemic.
The awards’ organizer said that CTBC has continuously made inroads into overseas markets despite intense market competition. This year, the bank increased its stake in LH Financial Group PCL to 46.6 percent, making it the largest shareholder of the Thai group and further expanding its cross-border financial services.
Photo courtesy of CTBC Bank Co
In the Asia-Pacific region, CTBC also continues to retain its leadership in merger and acquisition financing and in renewable energy project financing, the organizer said. It has been repeatedly commissioned by top enterprises and international private equity funds to act as a lead bank in coordinating deals.
CTBC said that due to the rise of digital banking and the effect of COVID-19, the number of visitors to its branches has fallen by 12 percent in the past two years, while the number of mobile banking customers has increased 47 percent over the period.
This indicates that customers are willing to use digital financial services, CTBC said.
Corporate customers have also shifted their transactions from physical to digital channels, with the number of transactions via mobile apps growing 144 percent last year.
During the pandemic, CTBC has actively built contactless services and introduced digital banking services into relief loans for workers. This year, about 99 percent of workers’ relief loans were applied for online, and 97 percent of their applications were completed through the bank’s fully automated intelligent processing system, CTBC said.
In addition, CTBC has processed more than 360,000 relief loan applications for the second consecutive year, topping other private banks, it said.
CTBC has also taken the lead in adopting Apple Inc’s Business Chat financial service, which is integrated directly into Apple’s Messages app, in a bid to develop a unique financial ecosystem and better serve its customers.
The app turns customers’ iPhones into a ticket machine and a working desk, while helping customers pay fees, the bank said. The service plans to add features to help customers find nearby merchants participating in CTBC’s reward scheme, and further drive development of local businesses, it said.
During the pandemic, CTBC won the “Most Helpful Banks in Asia Pacific During COVID-19” and “Most Helpful Transaction Bank during COVID-19 in Taiwan” awards from The Asian Banker magazine.
This year, the bank has been awarded “Best Bank in Taiwan” titles by three globally renowned magazines: Global Finance, Asiamoney and FinanceAsia.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts