Singapore

“Nobody knows what’s going to happen,” said F1 guru, Bernie Ecclestone, when asked what the impact of the financial crisis will be on major sports sponsorship.

ABN AMRO’s Timothy O’ Keeffe explains the challenges faced by corporate treasuries and recommends ways on how to achieve a more centralized and automated flow of information and investments.

3i Infotech Asia Pacific CEO, Debneel Mukherjee explains why it's time to be brave and tells us what it takes to improve core competencies.

SmartStream Technologies regional director Richard Cummings loves a challenge, which is why he is spearheading the company's Asian growth.

Q. What is it about Islamic Banking that most people do not know? Essentially, Islamic Banking encompasses financial activities that adhere to Islamic principles. Islamic principles are those that give priority to profitability and social responsibility. When it comes to making profits, the sky is the limit. The minimum you can make is 30%. Then again, you have to balance that with social responsibility. You are not going to be charging people 30% per day. To describe it, you can do whatever you want in terms of making profits for yourself and your stakeholders but you have to balance it 50-50 with social responsibility. How does the Islamic Banking industry regulate itself and deal with compliance issues and how does CIMB Islamic ensure the legitimacy of its Islamic Banking business?As far as CIMB is concerned we are governed by the Islamic Banking Act 1983 which says that we cannot do anything in contradiction with Shariah. And if we do it, we will lose our licence. That automatically, gives us credibility of doing business in a Shariah compliant manner. We are also governed by the Management of Shariah Committee Guidelines issued by the regulators which stipulates that we have to have our own in house Shariah Committee, our own in house Shariah Secretariat; a Shariah Compliance unit needs to be established.

As the big names in global banking continue to tumble, more than a few eyes have been turning to the local markets to ask the inevitable (but unthinkable) what if it happens here? Hong Kong already experienced its own taste of possible disaster when a string of malicious SMSs sent Bank of East Asia depositors into a tailspin. In Singapore, life insurance company AIA saw round-the-block queues when its parent AIG received US government intervention, and policy holders panicked that their life savings were about to vanish. So far, the club of three banks – DBS, OCBC and UOB – seem to be holding their head above water. And analysts predict that, provided their loans’ business obeys the rules from the Asian Financial Crisis - where the local consumer loans held up and bad debts came largely from regional corporate exposure – the three should be OK.

The Chief Technology Officer of Wincor Nixdorf was interviewed at Wincor World 2009 about the cutting-edge software being developed for banks by the company, including the ProClassic/Enterprise Suite, a modular retail banking solution which runs on a multi-channel architecture. Rabenstein discussed the value proposition of the suite that supports the transformation of today’s service and sales processes into an expandable, future-proof retail banking business by achieving higher revenues and lowering costs.