Singapore financial services barely felt globally: PwC

Trade and investment is quickly shifting to global focus, and Singapore is not keeping up.

A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed that, with its port complex providing one of the main gateways to Asia, Singapore is at the heart of the growth in intra-SAAAME (South America, Africa, Asia, Middle East) commerce.

Here's more from PwC:

Singapore is the second biggest container port in the world, only surpassed by Shanghai.1 Straddling the main trade route from China to India, Singapore is the focal point of a web of intra-regional transport links, with goods being shipped in from, and despatched out to, smaller local ports around the region.

The shift in the focus of global trade and investment is accelerating (see Figure 1overleaf). Clients will be looking to their FS providers for acquisition support, trade services, insurance and finance in local currencies as they seek to tap into Asia’s fastest growing trade flows (see Figure 2 overleaf). Yet, while Singapore-based institutions have developed good coverage across Asia, their presence in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East is still limited.

FS groups face challenges in expanding into new markets. There may be restrictions on licences or foreign ownership in some markets. Even in open markets such as Brazil, there may be little market share for sale, and it may be prohibitively expensive if it is.So a lot of forward-looking financial institutions are going to be seeking out  smaller and less saturated markets.

Elsewhere, partnership is going to be crucial. And to attract the right partners, FS groups need to think about what they can offer them that their competitors cannot. This might be complementary international coverage, or access to a target customer
base in Asia.

Very few groups are going to be able to cover all the key markets. So, collaboration with other financial institutions and businesses outside the sector, such as telecom firms, is going to become more common in the future.