UNITED Overseas Bank (UOB) is on a roll. With a strong balance sheet, the highly profitable bank is gunning to grow its business threefold in the next five years, focusing on the retail, small and medium enterprise (SME) and corporate segments. UOB intends to triple its assets under management to $120 billion by 2015 from $40 billion today, riding on Asia's rising affluence, says chief executive Wee Ee Cheong.

IT was last October that OCBC Bank chief executive David Conner warned that low interest rates were putting severe pressure on the lending margins of banks here.

HAVING presided over a record quarter of profits recently, DBS Group chief executive Piyush Gupta is optimistic that the rest of the year will be positive, with Asia able to weather the current turbulence for a soft landing.

SOME officers at Citibank Singapore have been busy chatting online at work, and here is the interesting part: their employer is all for it.

THE emerging affluent market may be the next sweet spot in the local consumer banking scene and Standard Chartered has the numbers to prove it.

ANZ, the latest foreign bank to raise its stakes in the Singapore market, is unfazed by low interest rates and its small five-branch network, betting that the city's famed affluent population will find its offerings compelling.

WITH raw memories of regional and global financial crises fresh in people's minds, it's hard to fault the world's biggest savers for being cautious.

WHEN Alfred Winslow Jones, an Australian, and his four partners created the first hedge fund in 1949, it is unlikely that they saw themselves as pioneers of the successful and controversial industry the sector represents today. According to a recent report from Hedge Fund Research, the industry today has in excess of US$2 trillion of assets under management (AUM) and, indeed, they have grown by almost 50 per cent since the 2008 global financial crisis.

ENTHUSIASM for Hong Kong's offshore yuan (CNH) market is matched only by the lightning growth of the city's yuan deposit base, which grew by an astonishing 62 per cent in the first four months of the year, according to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA).