Singapore

After months of negotiations, ANZ has been confirmed as the buyer of RBS' wealth and retail operations in Singapore, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong for $687 million.

With 60 percent of customers opting for 9 and 12 month tenures, Maybank Singapore allows personalised tenure dates with its Choice Date Time Deposit.

How microfinance exchanges like ZOPA, Lending Hub, Prosper, Smava and Boober threaten banks.

For a minimum placement of S$10,000 or US$6887 for a 12-month tenure, clients can avail of Maybank Singapore's first Islamic term deposit. It has a minimum of S$25,000 or US$17,218 for a 3- and 6-month tenure. This deviates from the current available Islamic term deposit products in the market. For example, some products require a minimum placement of US$500,000, catering only to the high net worth segment.

SunGard has added a new offering to its suite of analytics, software and processing solutions for securities finance. SunGard’s Apex is a consolidated front-to-back office solution that supports equity and fixed income securities lending and repo trading. It has been designed to help increase productivity and automation, help drive down costs and help improve operational efficiency by providing a full front-to-back office solution for global securities finance trading and operations.

Sundarganj Branch of Islami Bank Bangladesh Limited at Janata Market, College Road was inaugurated as its 199th Branch.

ACLEDA Bank has again raised its total registered capital share by US$8.15 million.

HSBC has chosen SAS fraud detection system as its principal solution for fraud management across its global network. Called the SAS Fraud Management, it is part of the SAS Fraud Network.

Maybank hopes to attract its young population to patronise its online deposit service by adopting a green theme for its Yishun branch. Among their efforts: the use of recycled wallpaper."The residents responded very positively which is why Yishun is a suitable Branch to kickstart our 100,000 online deposit account drive. With more than 50 percent of the residents there in the age group of 20-49 years old, we can expect the online accounts to be popular. Bank-wide, we are confident that our iSAVvy suite of deposit accounts will hit the 100,000 mark by end of 2010," said Ms Pollie Sim, Country Head, Maybank Singapore.Maybank was the first Bank in Singapore to launch a suite of online deposit accounts in 2005 and remains the only Bank offering this suite of products which also includes Shariah-compliant online accounts.Maybank Singapore targets to involve over 50 percent of its staff in environmentally-friendly activities by the end of this year.This move will be spearheaded by green ambassadors of the Bank who will undergo energy-saving training programmes and pioneer environmentally-friendly initiatives within the organisation.At least 50 staff members will be appointed green ambassadors.

ACI Worldwide has announced the 40th customer to go live on BASE24-eps, the company’s market-leading software for online payments processing.

Maybank Singapore doubled its loan portfolio, mostly with new customers, under Spring and IE Singapore Financing Schemes from December 2008. Eighty percent of loan applicants are new to Maybank.The main surge came from Bridging Loans offered under the Local Enterprise Financial Scheme or LEFS.LEFS Bridging Loan constitutes more than 50 percent of the total amount of the loan applications received under the scheme from December 2008 to March 2009. Loans offered under the Loan Insurance Scheme (LIS) grew twice as much in the same period. For the LIS loan portfolio, the facilities, close to 70 percent are for domestic and import purposes and the rest for export market.On average, 65 percent of the customers who applied for the government-backed loans are from the general commerce sector. The remaining 35 percent are mainly from the service, manufacturing and construction-related industries.Mr Lee Hong Khim, Head of Business Banking, Maybank Singapore, said: “In total, we plan to expand our government-backed loans portfolio two-fold by 2010. We expect demand to come mainly from customers involved in general commerce with 80 percent for domestic consumption.”Mr Lee added: “Whilst we want to achieve our target, we hope to work even more closely with IE and Spring Singapore to speed up the process of approvals so that the financial needs of the SMEs are met quickly.”

The recent turmoil in the financial sector has highlighted the lack of sufficiently effective risk management among banks and other financial institutions. All too often, efforts in risk management are dispersed, isolated and unrelated to the wider organization strategy. Financial institutions should be adopting a more comprehensive and integrated risk management approach that not only takes into account strategic, operational, financial and compliance risks, but one that is also intimately linked to performance management.

Shrinking spreads in the region have retail bank franchises engaging in a battle for deposits and running into significant headwinds. As the cost of funding increases, analyzing the underlying cost of acquisition is just one area that retail banks can explore in their quest to reduce the cost of funding (which vary by the kinds of client groups the bank serves and the associated costs of distribution.)

Once bitten perhaps not so twice shy. Temasek and a Goldman Sachs fund are reportedly looking at buying Bank of America’s $8.5 billion stake in Construction Bank of China.

Juroku Bank became the first Japanese bank to consolidate the databases of its marketing and management customers with that of its call centre. The new customer management system was implemented using technology from the Teradata Corporation— the world’s largest company solely focused on data warehousing and enterprise analytics.

The Islamic Bank of Asia launched its first Shariah-compliant liquidity product, which acts like a fixed deposit but is, of course, Sharia-compliant.