Daily Briefing: Facebook grants $4.75m to SMEs; Barclays to set up FX trading hub in Singapore

And Singaporeans to receive $100 worth of local tourism vouchers.

From ChannelNewsAsia:

Facebook will give about $4.75m in grants to small businesses in Singapore that have been hit by COVID-19, the company announced in a media release.

About 800 local enterprises that employ between two and 50 people are expected to benefit from the grants. Each grant will amount to $5,500 each, comprising $3,500 in cash, and $2,000 in optional ad credits. Applications for the grants will be open until 22 September.

To be eligible, firms must have been in business for more than a year and "experienced challenges due to the pandemic", said Facebook. They need not have any presence on Facebook to apply.

Read more here.

From Bloomberg:

Barclays will start a foreign exchange trading and pricing engine in Singapore in mid-2021, marking the British lender’s fourth electronic currency trading hub globally, according to a statement.

Barclays will build out a local version of the trading system, known as BARX, adding to hubs in New York, London and Tokyo, the London-based bank added.

Barclays joins global banks such as Citigroup Inc., UBS Group AG, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. in setting up electronic forex systems in Singapore as the island state aspires to be Asia’s biggest foreign-exchange currency center.

The pricing and trading engines allow investors to reduce the time lag from routing trades elsewhere and last year helped Singapore take market share from Japan, whilst competing against Hong Kong that’s at the forefront of the yuan market.

Read more here.

From ChannelNewsAsia:

Every Singaporean aged 18 and above is set to receive $100 worth of SingapoRediscovers vouchers, which can be used on staycations, attraction tickets and tours, said the Singapore Tourism Board (STB). The vouchers can be used between December this year and the end of June next year.

A $10 subsidy will also be provided for children and youth tickets for attractions and tours. Each adult may purchase up to six children or youth tickets at subsidised prices during the duration of the scheme.

Minister for Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing said the move will help the local tourism industry, which has been battered by COVID-19.

The vouchers will be provided in denominations of $10 via SingPass, and may be used to purchase tickets for attractions and tours, and accommodation bookings at licensed hotels, said STB.

Read more here.

You're the reader we write for. You're also the person our partners want to reach.

If that sentence describes you — a founder, a C-suite, someone whose attention companies pay good money for — then you already understand why SBR works. We've spent twenty years earning the trust of readers exactly like you. Which is exactly what makes this an interesting place for your company to show up, too.

The ways it can show up are broader than most people assume — thought leadership articles, sponsored content, industry summits across Southeast Asia, regional awards programmes, podcasts, and media placements in print and digital. The right fit depends on what you're trying to do, which is why we'd rather start with a conversation than send a rate card.

If your company has something this audience should know about, we'd like to hear what you're working on.

No rate cards until we understand the brief. It's a better use of everyone's time.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia

Top News

30 One-Sentence Stories From People Who Have Built Better Habits

None of these stories are mine. They were sent to me by readers of Atomic Habits. My hope is that these examples will illustrate how real people are putting the book into practice. They will show you what people are actually doing to build good habits and break bad ones. And hopefully, they will spark some ideas for how you can do the same.

news conversion

SBR 5 Lorem Ipsum News 2 [8 May]

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

SBR 4 Lorem Ipsum [8 May Top Stories]