Structured products are proving popular with retail investors in Singapore, according to local press reports.
Providers including OCBC, Standard Chartered and United Overseas Bank (UOB) all offer structured deposits, whilst the country’s first discount certificates were listed in August.Often European banks have partnered with local banks to provide new products to what is a still a growing market. StructuredRetailProducts recently reported on UOB’s launch of a structured fund in tandem with BNP Paribas and on the partnership between OCBC and Allianz to launch the first buywrite income product in Singapore.
Talking about the banks range of structured products, Nicholas Tan, head of group wealth management at OCBC, told NewsAsia, "One of the more interesting ones we have done lately is very very short-term structured deposits. We are seeing interest also in long-term structures and we have also got unit trusts that have got derivatives attached to them."
Structured warrants, which were first introduced in 2004, are also proving popular with investors; trading value hit the S$10bn mark for the first eleven months of last year compared to S$1.5bn for the whole of 2004, it was reported.
Sandra Lee, vice president at Deutsche Bank in Singapore, explained its discount certificates are available to ‘the retail man on the street’.
“Being listed there is total price transparency. There is constant liquidity and we will have a wide product range for the product as well,” she told reporters.