Daily Briefing: Rail contract tests Singapore's Malaysian ties; Keppel DC REIT's giant competitors loom overseas

And here are three bank account types you might want to open this year.

From Reuters via Yahoo! Finance:

The leaders of Malaysia and Singapore are expected to discuss plans for a high-speed rail project linking their countries during summit talks on Tuesday, as a deadline to award the multi-billion dollar project nears.

The high-speed rail valued by analysts at about $17b is the biggest project undertaken by the Southeast Asian neighbours in recent years, and will test a relationship that has been frosty since the end of the colonial era in the 1960s.

It also could expose broader tensions over China's growing influence in the region, as the two leaders must choose between competing bids from Chinese and Japanese rivals, as well as European and South Korean firms.

Read more here.

From The Motley Fool:

In the wholesale co-location space, Keppel DC REIT is expected to compete with Digital Realty, a US-based REIT. The latter has a market cap of US$22b. Another competitor would be Global Switch. Elsewhere, Equinix, a near-US$35b market-cap company, is a competitor in the retail co-location space. TeleCity, which was acquired by Equinix in 2016, was the other competitor named by BMC.

In short, the addressable market might be significant for Keppel DC REIT, but it will have to deal with competitors with significantly more resources than it has.

Read more here.

From MoneySmart:

There’s a very good reason you should choose to keep your long-term savings separate from the account you withdraw cash from on a daily basis.

If you’ve got a lump sum of cash you hardly touch (such as long-term cash savings or an emergency fund you don’t access unless absolutely necessary), you can enjoy more attractive interest rates by depositing them in a high interest savings account. Such accounts often reward you with higher interest when you deposit certain amounts of cash and/or when you don’t make withdrawals for a certain amount of time.

Read more here.