However, there’s a lot that you can do with dedicated proxies. This is especially with more sensitive tasks like banking. With fraud on the rise, internet banking can be risky without using a security tool such as a dedicated private proxy. It’s an intermediary mechanism that prevents data theft on banking systems.
If you do private baking, understanding why you need a proxy server is vital. This article looks at some of the reasons to buy dedicated proxies for private banking purposes. This article will help you know whether dedicated proxies are worth buying for banking privacy and security.
1. Improve Customer Experiences
Server overload problems are common in banking systems worldwide. This is because everyone wants to transact conveniently through the internet. With many requests coming, it is easy for a server to break down. Thankfully, this is preventable with the use of the right load balancing tools.
Most web admins use dedicated proxies to ensure proper load balancing. This load balancer works by distributing workloads across various servers to ensure that no server gets overwhelmed. Some servers may go down if you do not use such tools because they cannot handle a high number of requests.
A dedicated proxy server makes dynamically generated content available to users. It ensures smooth delivery of requests to the server and responses too. In general, most of the work gets delegated to the proxy server. This frees the application server so that it receives new requests efficiently.
This then means better customer experiences in the end. Improved server performance is also great for banking institutions. It also means more transactions and a higher customer retention rate. Thus, financial institutions and their customers must buy dedicated proxies for their banking needs.
2. Use Less Data
Financial institutions can establish their online services on websites, applications, or both. For website banking, a customer needs to click on the URL every time they want to transact. The good news is that the website doesn’t need to load from scratch if you are using a dedicated private proxy.
You can take advantage of the caching function of dedicated proxies to ensure that. Proxies cache websites that you frequently visit, making them display quickly in subsequent visits. Banking websites that you may use frequently aren’t an exception, which increases the efficiency of transacting.
Financial institutions can also use proxies to cache competitor websites. This is when they are using scraping proxies to monitor their competitors. Using a proxy for scraping ensures that you can gather data from competitor websites anonymously. This helps you improve your services and be competitive.
Thus, web scraping proxies can also cache these websites. So, you won’t need to load them from scratch when you want to check them for updated information. In the end, the businesses and private users who leverage the power of proxies reduce network costs significantly.
3. Reduce Risks Of Fraud
As discussed before, banking fraud is increasing every day. Banking institutions lose business and customer data to cybercriminals using various techniques. Even though they invest in their systems and improve them, the threat landscape is dynamic, and you can never be assured of safety.
Thankfully, security tools such as dedicated proxies can guarantee your online privacy and safety. A dedicated proxy server encrypts data in transfer, keeping it away from prying eyes and bots. This ensures that attackers cannot use the data even if they access it.
Also, private proxies secure data even when it is on your network. Hackers do not have to target your data when it gets transferred to and from your network. They can hack a network then steal or alter your stored data. A dedicated proxy server protects your data 24/7, which mitigates fraud cases.
4. Increase Speed In Banking Processes
Speed is a vital thing when it comes to monetary transactions. You want to pay for a service or product quickly and move on to other tasks. This is one of the reasons why you should think about investing in a dedicated proxy server as a banking business or customer.
A proxy brings you closer to the banking server, which makes transactions fast. The closer you are to the banking server; your transactions will be smoother. For a banking business, this enhances transactions making them process payouts faster and meet customer expectations.
You can buy cheap private proxies as a banking user. This is vital even if the banking institution you are transacting with has a proxy server in place. It increases your privacy, security and also increases the transacting speeds, which means a better experience.
Also, the faster you transact, the better. You’ll easily become a target for cybercriminals if you spend a lot of time on a single transaction. If requests don’t go through multiple times and you receive error messages, there are chances you could get exposed. A dedicated proxy server can help prevent this.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that internet banking has made life easy for many people. Today, everyone prefers sending and receiving money from the comfort of their homes. But then, there’s a need to transact safely, especially today when different techniques of banking fraud are coming up daily.
A dedicated private proxy is one of the best tools you can use for private banking. It can increase your privacy and security by encrypting the data you transfer to and from banking websites. Besides that, it can also help you save on data and increase your banking speeds without compromising your security.
Financial institutions can also benefit greatly from using proxies for transactions. Using super-fast proxies can make banking more efficient. Customers will complete transactions faster and with more safety and privacy. This efficiency of dedicated proxies can help improve customer experiences.
Walter Stresemann, Founder and Managing Director of Magnolia Private Office, a trust and fiduciary company in Geneva, analyses the new challenges and opportunities the private banking sector is facing.
What is a private bank? We usually use the term for any corporate body specialising in wealth management for High-Net-Worth individuals. The original definition, however, meant unincorporated banks – those owned by an individual or partners with unlimited liability, and therefore unlimited personal responsibility. Not banks, but bankers.
While only one of these ‘banks’ still exists – Bordier & Cie – this old definition still gets to the heart of what private banking should be about today.
Gone are the days where a client needs help accessing basic investments – anyone can now stash their money away to be run by a simple trading algorithm. Instead, the private banker must adopt a ‘family office’ approach, providing highly tailored advice to address myriad client needs, and matching the client with the most appropriate services from their networks, such as product experts, financial planners, or tax specialists.
Digital Transformation
Digitisation is surging forward. Some 85% of HNW and UHNW individuals use at least three mobile devices. They expect to be able to scan their investments and banking services at a glance, seamlessly and in real-time, on their tablet, smartphone, or computer. More than half of HNW clients over the age of 40 say they would leave their private bank if an integrated, seamless channel is not provided, and the next generation will be no less demanding.
Serving this client base effectively requires open architecture enabling collaboration between providers of diverse products and investments from equities to real estate to works of art, sourced from the banker’s or client’s network, all available within one secure digital experience.
Wealth managers are acutely aware of the apparent drawbacks of ‘going digital’: in a recent survey, more than half were concerned about being able to present data intuitively and provide clients with genuinely useful oversight. However, COVID-19 has required most clients to embrace, or at least experiment with, digital channels. Clients who might have previously dealt with their banker in person, on the phone or via email now, are now embracing more of the bank’s digital offering, thanks in large part to the requirements of the extended COVID-19 lockdowns. This means they have heightened expectations of digital-enabled private banking even after the pandemic is over.
All that said, the wealth manager who maintains a genuinely holistic view of his clients’ interests will continue to thrive in a digitally-enabled future. Personal contact, and the ‘trust factor’, are not going away – they may indeed become more important. Right now, for example, clients are confronting a host of very personal uncertainties created by COVID-19, ranging from place of domicile (where is genuinely ‘safe’?) to inheritance planning.
Clients increasingly also want access to private markets, and to dip into investments otherwise touched by private equity. The pandemic has given this a renewed salience, with a drive to hedge unstable equities and low-yield debt. These are all investment and ‘real life’ decisions best guided by the steady hand of a trusted adviser.
Expertise is still highly valued, but it needs to be well delivered.
Genuinely differentiated ‘human’ expertise was already in demand long before COVID-19. Clients themselves are increasingly savvy. Usually, they grew up with better access to information, and wider consumer choices, than their parents. They demand transparency, wanting to know exactly what they are getting for their money. They negotiate fees, with a keen eye on what competitors have to offer. Old loyalties have given way to a demand for ‘client experience’, with 45% of millennials saying they would regularly switch to alternatives in search of the best solution. So expertise is still highly valued, but it needs to be well delivered.
Structural Changes
Compliance costs represent another pressure on the sector. They currently consume 4% or more of revenues, with some warning that this toll could rise to as much as 10% in the coming years for firms who cannot enact the right efficiency savings.
Global anti-money laundering rules, spearheaded by the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force, have been criticised as the world’s least effective policy experiment, with the amounts of laundered money seized utterly dwarfed by the costs passed on to banks and other businesses. Common Reporting Standard regulations, while yielding mixed results in the global battle against tax evasion, have burdened private banks with analysing the residence status of their clients. MiFID II has created costs as well.
All of these pressures serve to drive sector consolidation – the word on everyone’s lips for the past decade. Nowhere is this clearer than in Switzerland, with the number of independent banks primarily involved in wealth management reducing by 31% between 2010 and 2017.
The costs of servicing an increasingly global client base are also tangible. Once upon a time, Swiss bankers could expect many of their clients to come to them from abroad. Nowadays, more and more HNWIs are based in the Asia-Pacific region, forcing Europe’s more intrepid wealth management businesses to make inorganic acquisitions overseas.
In search of revenue growth, some private banks are working their way down the value scale, not to UHNWIs or HNWIs, but ‘mass affluent’ individuals with one to five million dollars in assets. What they can really offer to such clients is not always clear – is the move just a number-boosting ploy, to get more AUM on their books? If so, private banks are probably heaping more pressure on their own profit margins, since ‘mass affluent’ clients seem to be less loyal than their wealthier counterparts, adding to retention costs.
Private banks can only hold off from confronting these challenges for so long. Differentiation is surely the way forward: a ‘family office’ approach, in which wealth managers exit less profitable parts of the value chain such as custody, and focus instead on high-quality advice, good networks, and enabling the digital access and remote service that clients now expect. The private bankers able both to master the technology ecosystem and to maintain their ‘human face’ will be the ones who thrive in the years to come.
Henny Woon Loong is the Chief Trust Officer for Wealth Planning in DBS Private Banking. He has oversight of all existing trust client relationships, as well as trust policies, documentation, pricing, product development and business acceptance. Henny heads the Wealth Planning team in Singapore, which provides personal trust, estate planning and liquidity planning services to clients of DBS Private Banking and DBS Treasures Private Bank. Here he tells Finance Monthly more about it.
What more can you tell us about DSB Private Banking – what are the company’s history, mission and values?
DBS Private Bank is a unit of DBS Bank, a leading financial services group in Asia, headquartered and listed in Singapore. The bank's capital position, as well as "AA-" and "Aa1" credit ratings, are among the highest in Asia-Pacific. We’ve been named the Safest Bank in Asia for seven consecutive years by Global Finance.
Our deep knowledge of the region, complemented by an extensive Asian network across 18 markets, and an open architecture platform, allow us to offer innovative Asia-centric solutions and services to meet the needs of our clients, both at a personal and corporate level. Our recent acquisition of Société Générale’s and ANZ’s private banking businesses in Asia, has significantly increased the scale of our wealth management business globally and expanded our suite of products and services to better serve our clients’ needs.
In DBS, we take a holistic approach to private banking. Growing our clients’ wealth is important. But so is protecting that wealth when our clients transfer their wealth to the next generation. This is what we call Wealth Planning.
What are the different types of Trusts in Singapore, and how can they be beneficial? What are the best options for protecting assets and wealth from political, social, economic or personal uncertainty? How can tax liabilities in Singapore be planned for and dealt with efficiently to mitigate their impact?
Singapore is a reputable international trust centre. Trust companies here are licensed and supervised by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (“MAS”). The judiciary in Singapore is highly respected and the industry is supported by legal, tax, and financial services firms, both home-grown and international. Our trust law, built on well-established English legal principles, was modernised in 2004. In Singapore, discretionary trusts with investment powers reserved to settlors are very common. These trusts may be revocable or irrevocable, depending on the clients’ objectives.
To provide a conducive environment to foster the growth of wealth management, qualifying trusts administered in Singapore are able to utilise a number of tax incentive schemes. Before these schemes sunset on 31st March 2019, MAS will conduct a review to assess their usefulness and relevance.
What are the typical challenges that clients approach you with in relation to the management of their finance and trust planning? What challenges are often faced where trusts are concerned?
Trusts are a core element of many wealth plans. Families have used trusts for centuries to preserve their wealth and make long-term financial provisions for their heirs. This basic need for succession planning has not gone away, and indeed may be even more critical in today’s dynamic environment.
5 or 10 years ago, perhaps the single biggest concern for many clients about using trusts was the loss of control. What has changed since is a heightened awareness of tax amongst our clients. As you know, the financial world is today characterised by increasing transparency, encapsulated in the now-familiar alphabet soup of FATCA, CRS and AEOI.
What makes DBS Private Banking’s Wealth Planning departments unique?
Wealth planning is more than simply a conversation about trusts. Indeed in some cases, a trust is not necessary or even advisable. It all depends on each client’s circumstances and objectives. To take an example, trusts may not work for some European clients and alternative structures such as insurance may be more appropriate. In DBS, the wealth planners are not the sales force for our trust company; our job is not to sell trusts. We are very clear that our role is to make sure that our clients get the right advice.
So our wealth planners engage our clients on wider issues that may affect intergenerational transfers of wealth. We are working with many clients to set up single family offices, primarily to ensure there is continuing professional management of their investments after their lifetime. We also find an increasing number of clients who want to make charitable and philanthropic objectives as a key family value, maybe even the key family value, that they want to instil in their descendants. Our clients are also keen to address foreign taxes that apply to their overseas investments, as well as family members who move outside their home country. At the end of the day, every client has different needs and objectives.
Website: https://www.dbs.com
Email: hennyliow@dbs.com
Alex Zeeh is the Chief Executive Officer of S.E.A. Asset Management in Singapore and Chairman of the Board of S.E.A. Alex has more than 20 years of industry experience both in investment banking as well as in private banking. He gained his work experience in the USA, Switzerland and Germany before moving to Singapore. Alex and his colleague Gallen Tay (Chief Investment Officer of S.E.A. Asset Management) look after the funds’ investments and monitor its asset allocation.
What are the key sectors that S.E.A Asset Management provides asset management services to? What are the unique challenges of each sector from an asset management perspective?
S.E.A. primarily manages two Luxembourg UCITS compliant SICAV funds besides segregated accounts. Our specialty are Asian small midcap equities as well as Asian short duration high yield bonds. To discover under-researched and overlooked equities that have quality management and strong market positions or niche products is always a challenge. Bonds require even more in-depth research including company visits and thorough scrutiny of financial reports given that many of the issues we look at do not bother to obtain credit ratings and hence often secondary research is not an option. And with Asian credits you need to do a lot of fundamental analysis. That is why our approach to credit selection is fundamentally driven. We buy to hold until maturity so repayment ability at maturity is the top priority. We try to avoid defaults at all costs and have had none so far. However defaults can still happen for reasons beyond our control so we maintain a high level of portfolio diversification to lessen potential impacts and still achieve positive absolute returns on an annualised basis. Investors like alternative investments as they tend to be uncorrelated to more traditional asset classes.
As a thought leader, what strategies do you implement to ensure that your clients’ goals and objectives are achieved?
Clients struggle to protect their capital, let alone get decent returns given low or even negative interest rate environments in many parts of the world. I personally believe that large parts of the world’s economy will continue to linger in a “lower for longer” interest rate environment. Often the low rates have driven them into long-dated investment grade bonds or even high-yield bonds. The risk is now that US interest rates rise and investments in longer dated bonds - including high-yield bonds - will suffer price declines that may not be compensated by coupon payments anymore. The only choice they have is to retreat into short duration bonds that are protected from rate hikes in terms of price volatility. This is where our short duration high-yield strategy comes into play. We target 6-10% net returns p.a. which is achievable less so from credit spread tightening but more from oversold bond price levels and high coupons as well as special situations. With such high absolute return potential we do not add FX risk and always hedge non-USD currencies back into the fund’s reference currency. Underlying fundamentals in Asian economies are also good. Over the past 10 years many Asian economies have seen rating upgrades from the major credit rating agencies and have achieved investment grade while many developed nations have dropped dangerously close to being downgraded to non-investment grade ratings.
What cost improvement initiatives does your company offer and work on with your asset clients?
Regulations and costs involved with implementing them are on the rise not only in Singapore. This impacts us as well in areas such as AML/KYC or outsourcing only to name a few. We are trying to keep compliance costs as low as possible without compromising strength of internal policies and procedures. We do so by outsourcing to highly competent external providers to keep non-core know-how outside of the firm as we want to run a lean cost structure. This is the most efficient way to do what we are best at in-house and keeping costs for clients in check.
What lies on the horizon for S.E.A. Asset Management in 2017?
We are continuing to increase the assets under management from internal sources and seeders to reach a more significant level of at least 50 mln USD on an individual fund level at which smaller institutions, wealth managers and family offices can make allocations when we have our first three years track record completed.
