Asian: Asian Wealth and Mas

asian: The move is part of a plan to expand the island's overall currency trading industry, said Benny Chey of the Monetary Authority of Singapore MAS . UBS Group AG and Citigroup Inc. have already set up pricing engines on the island, and MAS hopes to bring in six to eight more big players, including nonbanks and multidealer platforms. ; We are positioning ourselves to be plugged in to growing Asian wealth, said Chey, assistant managing director of development and international at MAS. As this large macro shift in Asian economic growth and rising Asian wealth takes place over the medium term, we are trying to build out the efficiency of our ecosystem to close the gaps with other trading hubs, he said, according to The Japan Times. The government is offering grants and tax incentives to sweeten Singapore's appeal as a hub to trade everything from major currencies to emerging market offerings such as the Chinese yuan. The Southeast Asian nation is encouraging major foreign exchange operators to build systems in the country to remove the sub-second delay caused by routing trades via Tokyo or London. While Singapore is already Asia's biggest foreign exchange trading center by volume, it's still a long way behind the U.K. and U.S. where investors exchange 2.41 trillion and 1.27 trillion, respectively, each day. Singapore, famed for its low taxes and open financial services sector, saw average daily currency trading rise to about 529 billion in February, from 416 billion in December 2016, according to MAS data. The Southeast Asian nation is hoping to narrow that gap by tapping the region's 22 trillion wealth market, where investors are increasingly drawn to currencies as an alternative to equity and debt markets. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.