Ex-police officers, tech experts: Singapore banks ramp up hiring to fight scams

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RECRUITING EX-POLICE OFFICERS

Between December 2021 and January 2022, nearly 800 people were duped in an SMS phishing scam involving OCBC. More than S$13 million was lost. 

The bank ended up covering the full amount as “goodwill payouts”. 

Several months after the incident, OCBC consolidated its anti-scam and fraud functions under one department then tripled its headcount for the team to more than 100. 

The move was in anticipation of an increase in the number and complexity of scams, said Mr Beaver Chua, the bank’s head of anti-fraud.

Two-thirds of the team are involved in 24-hour surveillance work, while others are stationed at the police’s anti-scam command centre or involved in advisory and analysis.

Singapore banks also recruit former law enforcement officers for their anti-scam teams. Also in demand are those with experience in fraud risk management and advisory, as well as system analysts and fraud analytics experts.

This varied nature of talent needed reflected how scams were becoming more sophisticated and technologically driven, banks said.

“It is quite challenging,” said OCBC’s Mr Chua. “In the past, the team would normally just have ex-police officers but now we need people with diverse backgrounds and different kinds of expertise.”

One such hire was Beverly Teo, formerly with the Commercial Affairs Department (CAD), the police’s white-collar crime investigation agency.

As an anti-fraud specialist with OCBC, Ms Teo advises on controls that can help prevent scams, such as the slew of security updates targeted at malware scams. She also works on various scam-related training and awareness programmes for both bank staff and customers.

Ms Teo said her experience at the CAD’s Suspicious Transaction Reporting Office and the Public Institutional Fraud Division has come in handy.

“All those would have taught me things like understanding commercial transactions, how to investigate individuals and businesses by reading their ledgers,” she said.

“The bank has a lot of data, so my experience helps me to analyse and understand it, and identify any abnormalities in the financial transactions.”

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7 charged with money mule offences after DBS bank customers fall for recent SMS phishing scams

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Six of the accused individuals face charges under the Computer Misuse Act, for abetting unknown persons to secure unauthorised access to a bank’s computer system this month.

They are:

  • Mark Lim Jun Feng, 19. The Nanyang Polytechnic student supposedly gave away his DBS or POSB internet banking login details to unknown persons in October last year, resulting in multiple unauthorised transactions.
  • Ei Thin Zar Kyaw, 22. The Myanmar national allegedly handed over her POSB debit card and internet banking account credentials between Dec 26 last year and Jan 4. She was also charged with obstructing justice by deleting her Facebook Messenger chat history between her and one Kyaw Zar Wa, and giving false information to a police officer by saying she lost her debit card at her workplace in Resorts World Sentosa.
  • Nur Iffah Natasha Mohamed Zazeri, 23. She allegedly handed over her DBS ATM card along with her PIN.
  • Muhamad Zulhilmi Zuraini, 24. He is accused of handing over the PIN and internet banking credentials for a DBS account to someone named Khai on Mar 27 last year.
  • Kingston Teo, 27. He allegedly gave away his internet banking login details and ATM cards for a DBS account and UOB account, resulting in unauthorised access to both banking systems. He is set to plead guilty on Feb 27.
  • Tan Jun Liang, 27. He supposedly handed over the PIN and internet banking credentials of a DBS account last month.

The remaining accused person – Jovier Ng Junrong, aged 18 – was charged with disclosing his Singpass account details to an unknown person through a phishing link for commission in October last year, which led to the opening of two Standard Chartered Bank accounts.

First-time offenders can be jailed up to three years or fined up to S$10,000, or both.

Ng was also charged with getting commission by disclosing the user ID, password, ATM card and PIN of his DBS account to someone on the Telegram messaging app, so that transactions could be made through the account.

HOW THE SCAMS WORKED

In a press release announcing the seven arrests, the police said they received several reports of SMS banking-related phishing scams this month.

Victims would receive unsolicited SMSes bearing short codes, overseas numbers, or local numbers, from scammers impersonating banks or bank staff. They would then warn victims of “possible unauthorised attempts” to access their bank accounts.

These SMSes would urge them to click on embedded links to “verify their identities and stop the transactions”.

After clicking on the links, the victims would be directed to fake DBS websites and asked to provide their internet banking details and one-time passwords (OTPs), which scammers would then use to make unauthorised withdrawals.

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Some Singapore firms adopt wait-and-see approach to offering extra 2 weeks of paternity leave

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Faesol, a food technological company with around 20 employees, said it does not foresee extra paternity leave giving rise to manpower issues, due to the way it is structured. 

At least one person can take over when an employee goes on leave, said Mr Lim Ye Sen, co-founder and chief technology officer, adding that the company is waiting to see how longer paternity leave arrangements play out elsewhere in his industry.

“It really has to be a culture as well. It cannot be like, the person is going on paternity leave and everything stops, the whole world stops. The show has to carry on,” said Mr Lim. 

“It’s also some responsibility for the company owners to structure certain things in order to make (the business) sustainable.”

He noted that having more paternity leave could also help mothers be less tired – and in turn help mothers in companies work better. 

Some multinationals and larger employers, including banks, have committed to increasing their paternity leave entitlements. So has IHH Healthcare Singapore, a healthcare provider operating four hospitals here.

“We trust that a supportive leave policy can enhance employee satisfaction and help with attraction and retention in the long run, benefitting the company,” said a spokesperson.

Twenty five per cent of its staff are male, and the paternity leave take-up rate in the past few years has been “modest”, he added.

The National University of Singapore’s Associate Professor Vincent Chua said a family-supportive culture will help companies in the long run, when word goes around that the business cares for parents. 

“There is a generational shift in tolerance for taskmasters; they are going out of fashion. It may have worked in the past, but the logic of ‘profits-over-people’ is out of sync with more recent cohorts,” said Assoc Prof Chua, who is from the department of sociology and anthropology.

DADS WITH “NO REGRETS”

Fathers who had children in recent years told CNA that longer paternity leave would have helped them cope better with the stresses of having a newborn. 

For his first child born in 2020, venture capitalist Looi Qin En took two weeks of annual leave on top of the entitled two weeks of paternity leave.

“Paternity leave was very important as it was a chance for me to support my wife and newborn child through a critical period,” the 30-year-old said. 

“As a first-time father, I decided to take a full month off to adjust to parenthood roles, and it was a decision I have no regrets on and highly recommend other parents to (take as much leave as possible).” 

Data analyst Jared Koh, a father to two young daughters, said spreading out an increased length of paternity leave would give dads time to accompany children on medical checkups – and give mothers some breathing space.

The 39-year-old said having four weeks of paternity leave in total also leaves some room for “self-care”, especially for first-time parents feeling drained from new responsibilities. 

Agreeing, civil servant Chen Zhang Xiang, 34, said that if given four weeks of paternity leave, he would have staggered it.

“That way (my wife) gets more support when needed, I get to have breaks to catch up on sleep during the day as well, rather than going in work tired every day (after waking up at night to feed my child),” said Mr Chen, whose child was born in 2022.

All three fathers said they had supportive employers who prepared in advance for their absence. However, while on paternity leave, they still ended up working in their spare time.

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Open letter to Chinese American high school students

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Country roads, take me home

To the place I belong

– John Denver

The jig should have been up when the Varsity Blues scandal broke. Oh was it delicious. Hollywood actresses, hedge fund managers, winery owners, real estate developers and other assorted muckety-mucks sneaking their low-watt spawn into elite colleges. The fraud was so absurd you couldn’t make it up.

Rich people Photoshopping their kids playing sports, paying for medical “stupid” certifications to get “special” proctoring, hiring a Harvard grad SAT ringer able to deliver any score you want. Stanford, Yale, Cornell, Georgetown and we are not going to make USC jokes because the school has gotten a lot better in recent years.

And that Chinese girl who paid US$6.5 million to get into Stanford. Did you see her hour-long “I got into Stanford” video on YouTube? Oh the burns in the comments. If you could only read Chinese. Epic!

Of course, the joke is really on us. Because four years later, elite American universities – with additional malfeasance in the interim – continue to command the same prestige, elicit the same anxiety and demand the same obeisance.

The college counseling business is as hot as ever. Some are reportedly charging over a million dollars for white-glove service starting in the 7th grade, with a perfect record of admissions into HYPSM (if you have to ask, you can’t afford it).

And Asian Americans. Did you really think you scored a win when the Supreme Court scrapped affirmative action last year? The universities saw it coming a mile away and became test-optional well before the gavel came down. Underrepresented applicants are polishing their essays on how they’ve thrived in unsafe spaces while you are stuck with the surname Zhang.

So what can you do? You’ve already maxed out the SATs, signed up for every AP class, play the oboe, do bogus charity work and took up a ridiculous sport like fencing. At this point, it’s just one giant crap shoot.

Will the admissions officer like your essay on teaching inner-city kids at math camp (but they really taught you)? Does Yale need another oboist? Will your history teacher write a flashy enough recommendation?  

And even if you do get into HYPSM (or its sorry near peers), you will be surrounded by a sea of people who maxed out on the SATs, took every AP class, play an instrument, did bogus charity work and took up a ridiculous sport like water polo. If it is true that you learn the most from your peers, then HYPSM will likely prove less educational than high school.

If you are lucky and go to a regular high school, at least you are exposed to regular people with regular aspirations and regular opinions – deplorable as they may be. In HYPSM, you will join the tiresome Westoid elite with their anxious entitlement and risible pretensions. It’s a nauseating mélange of sanctimony, condescension, virtue signaling, victim larping and look-at-me posturing.

The only people you might learn something from are the international students who mostly keep to themselves after discovering how loud, deranged and solipsistic their American classmates are.

You will discover that student cliques mostly keep to themselves – international students with international students, blacks with blacks, Asian Americans with Asian Americans, frat boys with frat boys, sorority girls with sorority girls (okay, frat boys and sorority girls do mix). 

You will while away four years, slowly socialized into Westoid elitism with its arcane rules of self-censorship and approved aspirations, until your life path is narrowed down to finance, consulting or tech. This is made tolerable by drunken debauchery and meaningless hookups (that’s what the kids tell me anyways) that passes for a social life.    

All of this is to deliver an indoctrinated end product to Wall Street and Silicon Valley which has accomplished the miracle of hijacking both progressivism and capitalism while impoverishing the rest of America. Evidently, there are progressive non-solutions to every problem which coincidentally increase FAANG share prices. 

Somewhere in the back of your mind, you know it’s all a giant farce. The system broke down decades ago. Really, what are the chances you go to a “regular” high school and expect the meritocracy to pick you from the haystack? No, your parents scrimped and saved, fought tooth and nail, to buy that house in Tenafly, New Jersey or Mountain View, California.

College admissions was your religion since birth. Sunday afternoon is for test prep classes (Saturday mornings are for Chinese school; we will get back to that). And when the time comes, your anxiety-ridden parents will fork over a pretty penny for a college counselor, if not white glove S-Class level.

If you think this isn’t farcical enough, the racket has now gone international. Longtime China resident and insightful Twitter commentator Arnaud Bertrand relays a familiar story. His ultra-wealthy Chinese friend has decided to move his family to California largely to buy his children into the American elite.

The friend plans to purchase a house in the best California school district and hire top tutors for his children, confident that it will pave the way to prestigious American universities and elite status in Western society.

Mr Bertrand explains, “Why isn’t this possible in China? Because China has invested considerable efforts – and continues to do so – to ensure that wealth couldn’t ‘game’ the education system.”

China’s schools are not funded by local property taxes. The government did away with guaranteeing school placement based on property ownership. Private schools exist but enrollment is by lottery. And famously, China, in one fell swoop, scrapped the entire for-profit tutoring industry.

Of course, explains Mr Bertrand, none of these measure are perfect. An underground tutoring industry continues to operate. The ultra-wealthy can hire household “help” with PhDs. But his wealthy friend likely reached the correct conclusion – his money has a better chance of buying his children into America’s elite than China’s.

Some of Mr Bertrand’s observations deserve to be quoted in full:

This all raises the bigger question of the reproduction of elites. In the long run, which society is more sustainable and fares better: one that does little to avoid the reproduction of elites like the US (which – contrary to the “American dream” narrative – is one of the high-income economies with the lowest rates of relative upward mobility) or one that actively fights it to enforce, to the extent possible, a meritocracy?

What my friend’s story illustrates is actually even more than this: in the US you don’t even only have a reproduction of local elites but you also have elites from other countries who come to the US because it’s easier to reproduce there!

This may all be grim reading for the anxious Chinese American high school junior. But fear not! Han Feizi does not come bearing bad news but rather with an offering of devastating logic.

Remember Saturday morning Chinese school? Where you go to socialize and misbehave? Well strap yourself down and get back up to 1,500 characters!

An arbitrage opportunity of historic proportions has opened up. Forget about HYPSM. There is nothing for you to learn there. It was already done and dusted 20 years ago. The sheeple just haven’t realized it.

Remember this acronym: TPSFZUN. That’s Tsinghua, Peking, Shanghai Jiao Tong, Fudan, Zhejiang, USTC and Nanjing. Yeah, it’s a mouthful, but it’s not like HYPSM was so obvious. And we are not talking study abroad. We are talking the full four-year degree shebang!

Vaclav Havel famously said that China’s development “has happened so quickly, we have not yet had time to be astonished.” This applies to higher education as well.

In 2004, Tsinghua was ranked 62 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. In 2024, Tsinghua ranked 12th in the world and 1st in Asia (with arch-nemesis Peking University at 14th). Both ranked higher than the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and Brown.

Seven of the top 10 research universities in the Nature Index are now in China – University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Nanjing University, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University and Fudan University.

One of the metrics weighing down the rankings of Chinese universities is their lack of international students. And that’s where you come in! This arbitrage is just asking to be exploited. As an overseas applicant, you get the full DEI treatment. You are the underrepresented minority, the diversity admit, the token international student!

Don’t get me wrong, they don’t take just anybody. You still have to be a top student with a near 4.0 GPA and SATs over 1400. The biggest hurdle will probably be Mandarin proficiency which, depending on the school, you need either HSK4 or HSK5 to matriculate.

All things considered, however, it’s a buyer’s market allowing you to short-circuit both the soul-crushing hell of the gaokao and the humiliating dog and pony show of applying to HYPSM.

Let’s first get one jaw-dropper out of the way. It is an important consideration for many families, especially if yours stretched themselves sending you to private school. Four years of tuition as an international student at Tsinghua will set mom and dad back about $17,000 (room and board are extra). You are free to do your own calculations for HYPSM.

This is, of course, about much more than arbitraging school rankings and acceptance rates (and cheaper tuition). What you are actually getting by choosing this road is a real education. Let me explain. There are important directionality and timing elements involved.

There is a lot of truth to the cliché that modern China is a closed society with an open mind while America is an open society with a closed mind. It is relatively straightforward for a Chinese national to study in the US given the open minds of China’s youth and America’s open society. The reverse is problematic. Chinese society is far more insular and the minds of American youths are generally closed to outside input.

The Chinese American, however, is a different animal and has a window of opportunity. The width of this window depends on how seriously you took Saturday morning Chinese school. Some of you are actively discussing Genshin Impact on Weibo and can sail through HSK7. Others have more work to do.

But for most of you, there is a solid enough base to build on. The best strategy may be to stretch college out to five years with the first year in language immersion (five years of undergraduate tuition is $21,000).

To be sure, this road is not for the faint of heart. You will not be comfortably surrounded by cookie-cutter versions of yourself who maxed out on the SATs, took every AP class, play an instrument, did bogus charity work and took up a ridiculous sport like diving.

You will be surrounded by gaokao mutants whose intellect can be so blazing it’s like staring at the sun (thankfully, there are slackers as well). You might be constantly fighting a language deficiency. And through it all, you have the additional burden of going through the many stages of culture shock.

On the positive side, the liberal arts education at elite Chinese universities may surprise you. The resentment warriors in American academia are laying siege to the Western canon, poisoning every facet of the liberal arts education.

While politics has always encroached on academia in China, the boundaries are far better defined. Chinese universities may, in fact, be a healthier environment to study the Western canon given the immolating culture wars currently being waged on American campuses (see here). Nobody at Fudan cares if Hegel is dead, white or male.  

On a side note, this letter is addressed to Chinese Americans (and the diaspora in general) to knock some sense into them. It also applies, with certain caveats, to non-ethnic Chinese. It can be done, has been done and should be done more.

Anecdotally, non-ethnic Chinese Westerners who have successfully taken this road are eccentrics. These oddballs have gotten a far superior education than HYPSM could possibly provide because they would have had to shake off Western solipsism and open their minds.

All of this, in the end, represents an opportunity for a real education – to be outside your comfort zone, to be stretched, to interact with the unfamiliar. You have a short window in your youth to gain lifelong access to the closed society that is China. It cannot be done after undergrad anymore.

Decades ago, when China was short on talent, carpet-bagging Ivy League Chinese Americans flocked to Beijing and Shanghai. Nowadays, one can run a couple hundred meters down Chang’an Avenue with arms outstretched and knock over a dozen Chinese nationals with HYPSM degrees.

Don’t worry, you will never lose access to the West. That is guaranteed by your native command of English. For many of you, especially if a decent amount of Chinese was spoken at home, you have the opportunity in your university years to claim full native command of Mandarin. If you want it, it is yours for the taking. If you don’t claim it now, it will be lost in time.

I sense skepticism and hesitation. Of course, this is normal. This is not a well-worn path. There are no how-to manuals or consulting companies guiding students on this road. The street lamps have not been installed and you even wonder if this road comes to an abrupt end just outside your view.

If you are worried about future placement chances at Goldman Sachs, you should probably forget the whole enterprise. With decades of experience in investment banks, Han Feizi can say that he was always looking for the unicorn, the luminous being, the perfectly bilingual and bicultural animal.

At some point, you have to have Confucian faith that learning is its own reward. Planning for the future is a fool’s errand. To take the road less traveled, next to having children, is the ultimate expression of hope. We leave you with perhaps Lu Xun’s most famous quote:

“Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like the roads made across the earth. For actually there were no roads to begin with, but when many people pass one way a road is made.”

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Why the world is turning away from the buck

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The invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 prompted the US Treasury Department to impose unprecedented sanctions on Russia, to hold it “accountable for its premeditated and unprovoked invasion.”

The aim was to prevent Russia from “prop[ing] up its rapidly depreciating currency by restricting global supplies of the ruble and access to reserves that Russia may try to exchange to support the ruble.” In other words, Russia wouldn’t be able to sell enough US dollars in the foreign exchange market to buy up Russian currency and bolster its value.

Indeed, US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen called this an “unprecedented action” that would “significantly limit Russia’s ability to use assets to finance its destabilizing activities.”

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock

Freezing a sovereign country’s dollar holdings (Russia’s in this case) is a seismic event. It risks accelerating a move away from the use of the US dollar for trade or investment by countries that have different geopolitical interests than the US, such as China or the Gulf states.

In fact, several governments outside the West are exploring ways to reduce their exposure to the dollar. Russia is currently settling a quarter of its international trade using Chinese renminbi, and its bilateral trade with China is almost entirely settled in the two countries’ respective currencies.

In March 2023, China settled a payment for UAE gas in its own currency rather than US dollars for the first time. Then in November, China and Saudi Arabia signed a currency swap agreement, citing a desire to expand the use of their currencies.

There are more troubling signs for the US dollar. Even though central banks’ foreign exchange reserves have been growing steadily year-on-year for more than 20 years, the percentage held in US dollars reached its lowest point in the fourth quarter of 2022, as this chart shows:

US$ held by central banks

Line chart showing countries' USD holdings falling.
Currency composition of central banks’ foreign exchange reserves. Author provided using International Monetary Fund data., CC BY-NC-ND

This is not a blip. It is the culmination of a long negative trend that has seen the US currency’s share in foreign reserves held by central banks fall from over 70% in the early 2000s to under 60% today.

While the drop is not dramatic, it’s significant and indicative of a negative trend for the dollar that reflects several developments – economic but also geopolitical.

Leaving the US behind?

The US economy’s share in the world’s output is falling as emerging economies, especially China, continue to outgrow the US and its Western partners.

China, the US’s biggest economic competitor, is now the main trading partner to more than 120 countries, with exports amounting to more than US$3.6 trillion. This risks leaving the US behind in the race for global trade dominance.

Over the last 20 years, China’s share of the global economy has more than doubled from 8.9% to 18.5% while the US’s share declined from 20.1% to 15.5% in purchasing power parity terms (which compare prices of specific goods to determine currency purchasing power).

Last year, the BRICS economies (fast-growth developing countries Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) overtook those of the G7 (developed economies US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and Germany) based on their share of world GDP in purchasing power parity terms.

GDP: G7 v Brics

Line chart showing GDP shares of G7 v Bric economies converging before Brics surpasses G7.
Share of GDP, current USD, PPP. Author provided using World Development Indicator data (series: NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD), World Bank, CC BY-NC-ND

As more countries join the BRICS, it will give the group even more economic clout.

Meanwhile, the US economy’s global GDP share is falling and its debt is hitting new heights as it issues more Treasury bills, notes and bonds to fund current government spending. The US national debt stands in excess of $33 trillion, or 123% of the country’s annual output. Inflationary shocks followed by interest rate increases have made servicing this debt very expensive for US taxpayers, repeatedly raising the risk of a debt default in recent years.

There is no doubt the US dollar still dominates world markets right now, accounting for most of the transactions in international trade. Its share in the foreign exchange market is colossal at 88% of transactions, and it remains the most widely held “international reserve” by central banks who want to ensure they can cover their countries’ imports and support the value of their own currencies.

But the centrality of the US currency since the Second World War has not always been welcome – certainly not by US foes and sometimes not even by its friends. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the 20th president of France and a finance minister in the 1960s, called the dollar’s reserve status an “exorbitant privilege” for the US.

He probably meant that demand for US assets from abroad was so high that it could borrow easily at favorable terms to finance its current account deficit –– a privilege not available to other nations.

Current global geopolitical and economic shifts could now see this exorbitant privilege challenged. The refusal of Russia’s BRICS partners and many UN nations to undertake Western-style sanctions against Russia is evidence of the limitations the West faces in exerting geopolitical influence.

And from an economic perspective, China as the world’s top trader and Russia as one of the world’s richest countries by energy reserves have amassed large gold holdings that could replace some US dollar uses. Both are looking to work with other countries, including those in the Gulf region, to reduce reliance on the US dollar.

Challenger currencies

Convincing non-western investors to use a “challenger currency” – whether the Chinese renminbi or a BRICS currency – could become easier following the US Treasury’s freezing of Russian assets. And these switches could accelerate if the US decides to seize the frozen Russian assets.

It’s increasingly clear that, as non-Western countries assert themselves in the world’s economic arena, geopolitical divisions with the West will cause additional friction. As a result, the US dollar’s role is almost certain to become more limited than it has been at any time since the end of the Second World War.

Alexandros Mandilaras is Associate professor, University of Surrey

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bookings to collect fit-for-gifting notes for Chinese New Year to start from Jan 17

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SINGAPORE: Bookings to collect fit-for-gifting bank notes for Chinese New Year will start from Wednesday (Jan 17), the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced on Monday.

As part of efforts to promote environmental sustainability, MAS is encouraging people to give such “fit notes” or digital red packets this Chinese New Year.

Such notes are “generally clean and of suitable quality of recirculation, including for festive giving”, said MAS.

DBS, OCBC and UOB customers can start making online bookings for fit or new notes from Jan 17. They can also make bookings from the same date for new notes.

Customers of the three Singapore banks must make bookings to collect the notes in person at bank branches. Collection of pre-booked notes starts from Jan 24.

“When making an online pre-booking, members of the public should do so through the banks’ official websites or mobile banking applications,” said MAS.

“To protect customers from phishing scams, banks will not send any SMS messages with clickable links to customers.”

For DBS, OCBC and UOB, only elderly people aged 60 and above or people with disabilities will be allowed to walk in to bank branches to exchange their old notes for fit or new notes from Jan 24.

People can also withdraw fit or new notes at selected pop-ups and ATMs of the three local banks.

MAS said the condition of fit notes has been verified by bank note processing machines and they are similar in quality to notes from ATMs.

“Gifting fit notes reduces carbon emissions and wastage, while conveying the same well wishes to loved ones,” added the authority.

During Chinese New Year last year, members of the public exchanged more than 11 million fit notes.

“This resulted in emissions savings of approximately 400 tCO2e, equivalent to the annual emissions from powering about 220 four-room public housing flats.”

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219 DBS customers lose about S6,000 to scams in 2 weeks

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The police and DBS said that banks would never send clickable links via SMS.

“Since early 2022, all banks have removed clickable links in emails or SMSes to retail customers,” said the authorities.

“This measure is among several other safeguards that banks implemented to combat the spate of phishing scams in 2022, such as lowering the default threshold for funds transfer transaction notifications to customers and increasing the frequency of its scam education alerts.”

The police and DBS advised people to install the ScamShield App to protect themselves against scam calls and SMSes. They should also enable two-factor authentication for bank accounts and e-wallets, as well as set up transaction limits. 

DBS employees will never ask for internet banking credentials or OTPs, said the joint release.

Customers who suspect they may have fallen prey to scams can call DBS’ fraud hotline at 1800 339 6963, or activate the Safety Switch on DBS’ automated phone system to temporarily block access to their funds.

“DBS would assist those customers with necessary follow-up actions, including replacing their cards and lodging the fraud report,” said the police and DBS.

Those with information about such scams can call the police at 1800 255 0000 or submit it online using this link.

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PBOC playing cool and calm as deflation specter rises

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As 2024 gets underway, reasons to worry about China’s economy are almost too numerous to count: sub-trend growth, a deepening property crisis, falling exports, record youth employment and deflationary pressures.

As investors try to control the inclination to panic, it’s quite striking who isn’t: People’s Bank of China Governor Pan Gongsheng.

One expression of this calm is the PBOC’s avoidance of taking any assertive easing steps in recent months. An equally important one is the PBOC’s taking direct aim at recent yuan weakness.

By setting the daily reference rate for China’s currency at the widest gap to estimates since November, Pan pushed back at traders’ suspicions that Beijing might be angling to engineer a weaker exchange rate to boost exports. Nothing arguably would spur Chinese economic growth faster than following the Japanese yen’s downward trajectory.

The fact that Pan won’t pull the competitive devaluation trigger to boost exports, which newly released 2023 statistics show posted their first full-year decline since 2016, makes many wonder what the governor knows about the Chinese economy’s outlook that isn’t transparent to markets.

China’s exports shrunk 4.6% year on year, a reflection of economic weakness in its top trading partners. Exports to the US slipped by 6.9% in December from a year earlier, while shipments to the EU dipped 1.9%. Trade with regional partners including Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia also fell.

Yet the idea that things might not be as dire as global investors fear is worth exploring given the conflicting signals emanating from Asia’s biggest economy.

Indications are that “the PBOC drew a line in the sand and defended the renminbi and, having defended key levels, the exchange rate now seems to be ticking higher,” says economist Louis Gave at Gavekal Research.

Gave adds that “simultaneously, most of the economic data seems to show that Chinese growth bottomed out in 2Q23. While China’s economy is hardly roaring back, the momentum is broadly, if meekly, pointing in the right direction.”

The implication here is that Pan is displaying confidence in efforts by President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang to revive the economy without massive stimulus. And that the popular view that the property sector and other headwinds are a clear and present danger to China’s 2024 trajectory is overly negative.

The PBOC’s apparent calm also buttresses the view that China’s banking system is robust enough to withstand most shocks the global economy might send its way.

PBOC Governor Pan Gongsheng is exuding grace under pressure. Image: Twitter Screengrab

“We expect the authorities to continue a targeted credit allocation approach,” says analyst Elaine Xu at Fitch Ratings. This means “regulators guiding selected banks in channeling credit to strategic sectors, especially given the government’s focus on maintaining systemic stability and pushing forward risk resolutions at small and medium-sized banks.”

Yet Xi’s lack of bold stimulus comes with risks, including not least wider investor trust in the economy’s direction and management.

“The longer that China fails to show that it can recover, the likelihood that inflation expectations will decline in the West, as fears that China can export its deflation to the rest of the world through international trade will gain ground,” says strategist Thierry Wizman at Macquarie Bank.

The bigger implication is that “China’s deflation problem could be a welcome disinflationary restraint for the West,” Wizman notes.

Domestically, too, “the challenge for China’s economy in 2024 may be whether policies can mitigate deflation risks,” says economist Tommy Xie at Singapore’s Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp.

“If deflation risks persist longer than expected in 2024, China may resort to more aggressive easing measures such as interest rate cuts or restarting the Pledged Supplementary Lending program to expand the central bank balance sheet to boost aggregate demand.”

Odds are, Xi’s edict about not taking steps that encourage bad lending and borrowing decisions is trumping any desire at the PBOC to cut interest rates. Most likely, the PBOC remains linearly focused on using structural aid to accelerate Xi’s targets for “high-quality economic growth” over runaway stimulus.

“The possibility of broad easing has declined in the short term,” Zhao says.

Far from panicking, the PBOC is telegraphing something approaching confidence — one yuan fixing rate at a time. “The fix continues to convey PBOC’s desire for a stable yuan amid speculation of near-term monetary policy easing and fears of deflation,” analysts at Maybank write in a note. “Clearly, the central bank is not willing to loosen its grip on the yuan.”

The PBOC’s apparent avoidance of a race to the bottom on exchange rates with the Bank of Japan is also a favor to the global economy. A fresh currency war would destabilize the financial system, particularly amid what is expected to be a brutal election cycle in the US.

Nothing unites President Joe Biden’s Democrats and Republicans loyal to Donald Trump like a falling Chinese currency. It’s a trade-off, though, given the damage Chinese deflation would have on economies and multinational companies everywhere.

“No player is immune” to the forces of slowing Chinese growth, says Kevin Yin, analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

There are risks, though, to Beijing not working faster to nip deflation expectations in the bud. The same goes for the slow pace of efforts to treat the root causes of China’s property crisis and create wider social safety nets to encourage consumers to save less and spend more.

“We think that officials are underestimating the extent to which China’s slowdown is structural in nature and won’t be so easily reversed,” says economist Julian Evans-Pritchard at Capital Economics.

Chinese policymakers seem unconcerned by growing signs of deflation. Photo: Facebook

Rather than target deflation, discussions in Beijing at the end of 2023 prioritized Xi’s belief that “technology self-reliance is more important” than ever, notes economist Ding Shuang at Standard Chartered. “I don’t see any signs of large-scale stimulus.”

This reform-over-stimulus crouch is a smart one in many ways. One of the top gripes about Xi’s 10-plus years at the helm is the slow pace of structural change, including reducing the role of state-owned enterprises to grow the private sector.

The lesson from Japan, though, is that once ingrained deflationary forces can be extraordinarily difficult to uproot. It hardly helps that China’s aging demographics is predisposed toward deflation as older people don’t tend to spend as much as younger generations.

Yet Pan’s PBOC may understand something the BOJ never did by sticking with two-plus decades of quantitative easing. The PBOC is going the other way by holding its monetary fire and projecting confidence that 2024 will be a better year for China than markets currently think.

Follow William Pesek on X, formerly Twitter, at @WilliamPesek

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Govt won’t meddle with BoT policy: PM

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In: South-East Asia

Srettha aims to meet gov on weekly basis

The government respects the central bank’s independence and would never interfere with any of its decisions, according to Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin.

However, he expressed his wish to meet the governor of the Bank of Thailand (BoT) on a weekly basis in the hope of improving their work consistency.

Mr Srettha and BoT governor Sethaput Suthiwartnarueput met yesterday at Government House to discuss the central bank’s strategy for raising the policy rate.

The meeting was held after Mr Srettha voiced his opposition to the policy, saying it would cause problems for the poor, as well as for small-and medium-sized businesses.

On Sunday night, he posted on X that the central bank is planning to raise its policy rate.

Speaking after meeting Mr Sethaput, Mr Srettha said he had no authority to interfere with the central bank’s interest management policy.

He said he discussed with the governor the overall economic situation in Thailand, the global economic situation, Thailand’s negative inflation rate, the domestic market, and how people were being affected by all of this.

The PM said he also discussed with the BoT governor the issue of negative inflation, which has been occurring for several months now following the government’s interference in oil and electricity prices — moves carried out with the aim of helping to curb living costs.

“In this regard, I have told the BoT governor that we should meet up over a coffee every week. If he wants me to go to the BoT’s headquarters, it’s okay. I can do that because we need to be in constant communication,” he said.

Mr Srettha, who is also the finance minister, said he did not discuss with the BoT the government’s plans for its 10,000-baht digital money handout scheme as that matter could be discussed later at a meeting of the main parties involved in implementing it.

Pichai Naripthaphan, deputy chairman for strategies and politics of the ruling Pheu Thai Party, meanwhile, elaborated on his recent call for the BoT to come up with more financial policies to help revive the economy, which has been in a sluggish state for years.

Considering the various financial tools at its disposal, the BoT could help support the government’s efforts to revive the economy, he said.

The BoT’s authority to regulate commercial banks is one of these mechanisms, he said.

Public discontent has been rising after it was known that these banks had in the past year netted 220 billion baht in combined profit, while the country’s economic situation was not good, he said.

The BoT could help by better controlling these banks in terms of their profit margins, he said.

In 2020 when the entire country was badly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic consequences, which resulted in negative 6.1% economic growth, commercial banks here netted 146 billion baht in combined profits, said Mr Pichai.

Most if not all commercial banks in other countries at the same time recorded heavy losses, he noted.

That has raised doubts over the BoT’s efficiency in regulating commercial banks, preventing them from making too much profit and ensuring sufficient access to loans offered by these banks, he said.

Mr Pichai also outlined areas of work the BoT is encouraged to do more to help boost the country’s economic growth.

The BoT should demonstrate to the public what it can do to help accelerate the country’s slow economic growth, tackle the more than 16.5-trillion-baht household debt (90% of gross domestic product), improve the situation of bad debts facing small- and medium-sized enterprises and other problems involving debt.

On top of those things, it must also deal with negative inflation which has continued for three months and now risks become deflationary, and improve the negative value of exports and low liquidity in the country’s economic system, said Mr Pichai.

“I’d like the BoT to offer an explanation as to what it could do to help tackle these problems because it always said everything is going well and the country’s economic engine is going full steam ahead,” said Mr Pichai.

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