By Scott Murdoch
SYDNEY (Reuters) -DBS Group aims to double its Australian lending book in the next five years, its CEO Tan Su Shan said, as the Singapore-headquartered bank seeks to take advantage of trade links between Australia and Southeast Asia.
The bank said on Wednesday it had signed a pact with trade agency Austrade which will help it facilitate and finance more trade and investment between Australian and Southeast Asian businesses, especially from Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam.
Tan said that DBS’s Australian lending book was currently worth about A$11 billion ($7.16 billion) which, she said, could double to A$20 billion in the next five years.
“Australian companies have been more domestic-centric. We are trying to change that narrative,” Tan said at a press conference on Tuesday.
Referring to its Australian client AirTrunk, a data centre operator that was bought by a Blackstone-led consortium for A$24 billion last year, Tan said the company was one of the first few to invest in data centers outside of Australia.
“We’d love to rinse and repeat that with the other big Australian companies,” she said.
DBS posted in May better-than-expected quarterly results, boosted by wealth management fees that jumped 35% on-year to a record quarterly high of S$724 million ($563.73 million), which the bank attributed to strong market sentiment.
Assets under management at the bank, Southeast Asia’s biggest, climbed 13% to a record high of S$432 billion in the first quarter.
Tan said while the dollar and U.S. Treasury’s safe-haven status was not yet being threatened, some of the bank’s clients had started to diversify away from dollar-linked investments, which has benefited Japan, among others.
“You’ve seen also a lot more interest in the euro and the yen. The yen has strengthened as well. So we see people now looking at where do I invest in yen?,” she said.
($1 = 1.2843 Singapore dollars)
($1 = 1.5366 Australian dollars)
(Reporting by Scott Murdoch in Sydney; Additional reporting Yantoultra Ngui in Singapore; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
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