Daily Briefing: Changi Airport eyes use of facial recognition system; DBS' pay per head dipped 4% in Q1

And here's what could happen when the 99-year lease of HDB units expire.

From eFinancialCareers:

Everyone already knows that DBS' profits jumped up in Q1 by a whopping 26%, helping the firm’s shares to continue their rally. However, eFinancialCareers pointed out that increased staff costs have caused the bank's total employee expenses per head to dip 4%.

"Although onboarding all these new employees has obviously increased staff costs at DBS (they are up 14% year on year), costs per head – total employee expenses (such as salaries and bonuses) divided by total headcount – are down 4%. DBS spent $30,508 on its average employee in Q1, down from $31,839 the previous year.

What explains this decrease? DBS has successfully retained many of ANZ’s well-paid private bankers and priority bankers, but the bulk of the transitioning ANZ staff work in less lucrative retail and support roles. Moreover, the ex-ANZ workforce also includes employees in China and Indonesia, not just people in the high-cost markets of Singapore and Hong Kong."

Read more here.

From Reuters:

Following Singapore's smart nation initiatives, Changi Airport said it is eyeing the use of a facial recognition system to track lost or late passengers.

"Changi Airport, ranked the world’s best for six years straight in a survey by air travel consultancy Skytrax, is looking at how it can use the latest technologies to solve many problems - from cutting taxiing times on the runway to quicker predictions of flight arrivals.

It comes as the island state embarks on a ‘smart nation’ initiative to utilize technology to improve lives, create economic opportunity and build community ties. However the proposed use of cameras mounted on lampposts that are linked to facial recognition software has raised privacy concerns.

Steve Lee, Changi Airport Group’s chief information officer, told Reuters that the airport’s experiments are not from a 'big brother' perspective but solve real problems.

'We have lots of reports of lost passengers...so one possible use case we can think of is, we need to detect and find people who are on the flight. Of course, with permission from the airlines,' said Lee.

Read more here.

From ValuePenguin via Yahoo! Finance:

The privatisation of real estate doesn't seem to be a possible alternative to the current 99-year lease system for Singapore's HDB units when it expires, ValuePenguin argues.

"Whilst Singapore isn't known to be a very cheap city to live in, evidence suggests that the real estate market in Singapore would be much more expensive had it not been for the HDB programme... Owing to the cheap HDB price, Singapore has been able to achieve an extremely high homeownership rate of 90%, whilst Seoul and Hong Kong continue to remain at 50-60% range.

Given the dynamic discussed above, it seems unfeasible to look to complete privatization of real estate as an alternative to the current 99-year lease system. If the pricing of properties were to be decided completely by market supply and demand, real estate prices could increase by many fold in Singapore. To illustrate, HDB units in Toa Payoh currently cost somewhere around $400 per square foot, whilst private condo units in the same area are listed at around $1,900 per square foot as of May 2018."

Read more here.