HK overtakes S'pore in e-banking

Hongkong banks have outshone Singapore banks at the top of a quarterly ranking of retail Internet banking websites in Asia. According to the latest edition of the Gilboa Report published by the Asian Banker Journal (ABJ), five of the 11 top-ranked Internet service offerings were from Hong Kong -- compared with three from Singapore. Shanghai Commercial Bank and Citibank India have also replaced Overseas Union Bank (OUB) and Citibank Singapore in the top two rungs. "OUB was by far the best bank in the last quarter's rankings but, in an indication of the rapid pace of change in the e-banking field, was crowded out this quarter," said ABJ. The ABJ Gilboa Report was introduced in August last year. It ranks Internet-banking and mobile-banking initiatives of Asian banks and stockbrokers every three months. "Overtaking competitors from scratch by the number of bank branches...is a slow and expensive process," commented Mr. Amit Gilboa, the veteran Internet banking observer who edits the report."Overtaking competitors online is much easier. In Hongkong, neither Shanghai Commercial Bank nor Wing Lung Bank even had online banking products at the time of our August survey," he added. Wing Lung Bank was placed joint fourth this quarter, along with DBS Bank which was Singapore's most improved bank - climbing 14 places. OUB - which slipped to joint third with India's ICICI Bank and Citibank Singapore - did well in new rankings introduced in the report. It was joint first with Bank of the Philippine Islands and ICICI for corporate e-banking. For mobile banking, OUB was joint second with two Hongkong banks - Wing Hang Bank and Bank of East Asia.