Welcome to our results briefing this morning, with Helen and Darren, our CFO, and Helen, our Group CEO with us. You can see them on screen. Darren's gonna take us through the slides, then Helen will take the questions thereafter. Darren, please.
Good morning again. Thank you for joining us, everyone. We'll start with slide three. Now, for the third quarter of 2021, we reported a net profit of SGD 1.22 billion. That's an increase of about 19% from a year ago, and 5% higher than the previous quarter. Customer loans were higher from a year ago at 6% driven by both across our key markets. This resulted in a 3% increase year-on-year in our net interest income amidst the sustained low interest rate environment. Okay, I've been, you know, sort of passed a message by Ching-Ching that I should speak louder. Okay, I'll continue from here. Yeah.
Our private banking AUM expanded 6% year-on-year to $123 billion on the back of continued inflows of net new money. The net new money is across the region that we operate in. Now, on the insurance front, total weighted new sales and new business embedded value continued to grow, rising 29% and 3% from a year ago, respectively. Profit from insurance was 18% higher at SGD 311 million as compared to a year ago. Our expenses were higher for this quarter, mainly from our continued investment in people and system to support our business growth while not receiving the same government support grant on the job front. Now, our asset quality remained resilient.
NPL ratio was stable at 1.5%, while allowances in the third quarter, reflecting the improved credit environment, was significantly lower. Our common equity tier one ratio remains strong at 15.5%. I'll now move on to slide seven. Group net profit of SGD 1.22 billion, as I mentioned before, was 19% higher year-on-year and 5% higher on a quarter-on-quarter basis. The exceptional first quarter, followed by two resilient quarters on the back of the improved economic environments, had enabled us to deliver a strong profit of SGD 3.88 billion for the nine months to date. If I can bring you to slide eight.
If you're to look at the net profit from our banking operations itself for the third quarter, it grew 33% from a year ago and 10% from the previous quarter to SGD 1.05 billion. Great Eastern's profit contribution for the quarter, however, was lower comparatively, mainly impacted by unrealized mark-to-market losses on its investment portfolio. If I can move to slide 10 on our net interest income. Third quarter net interest income rose 3% year-on-year, while remaining unchanged from the previous quarter to SGD 1.46 billion. Loan growth has been able to overcome lower net interest margin to register an increase in net interest income, at least until this quarter. You will notice net interest margin had dropped 6 basis points from the previous quarter to 1.52%, mainly from three factors.
A 102 basis point drop from the impact of interest reversals from the downgrade of Malaysia and Indonesian loans to non-performing. The lower use arising from competition for good quality loans against a backdrop of excess liquidity and, you know, in terms of timing, lower capital income as we utilize some of the excess liquidity that we have. Moving on to slide 11. On the non-interest income for the third quarter, it was SGD 1.1 billion, relatively comparable to the year-ago quarter, as the higher profit from insurance had offset the drop in trading income. Now, including the first quarter where all segments were doing comparatively better, nine months non-interest income was still 18% higher against the same period last year. Moving on to slide 12.
Our wealth management franchise continued to generate 35% of total income. Specifically on Bank of Singapore, AUM had dropped slightly to $123 billion. The decline in market valuation had more than offset the net new money inflows, as I mentioned earlier, which came from the various regions that we operate in. Moving on to slide 13. Nonetheless, as you can see on slide 13, client activities were relatively robust, such that income from wealth management remains strong. Consequently, net fee and commission income was higher than most quarters before and after first quarter of 2021. In terms of trading income on slide 14, the weaker performance for the third quarter arose mainly from unrealized mark-to-market losses from Great Eastern. Customer flow income had remained strong, resulting in a still higher trading income for the nine months at SGD 611 million.
Moving on to slide 15. Operating expenses were SGD 1.19 billion for the third quarter, 8% higher year-on-year and 4% above the previous quarter. Expenses arose mainly from staff-related costs arising from high headcount and variable compensations. Also, as I mentioned earlier, the lower government support, job support grants received this year. The increase in expenses would have been lower at 6% year-on-year and 3% quarter-on-quarter should we adjust for the government grants administered. Now, moving on to slide 16. Allowances for the third quarter were lower at SGD 163 million. A twenty-two million net write back in ECL1 and ECL2 allowances arose largely from the transfer to ECL3 as a result of downgrade of some loans to non-performing. Correspondingly, additional ECL3 of SGD 185 million was set aside for the quarter.
If you look at slide 17, total cumulative allowances were lower at SGD 4.13 billion for the quarter as we wrote off more impaired assets. This reduction was more than the additional ECL allowances set aside for the quarter. As a result of the lower total cumulative allowances and the slightly higher non-performing assets, which we will cover in the next slide, the coverage ratio was lower at 97%. Now on slide 18, our NPL ratio remains stable at 1.5% for four consecutive quarters. Non-performing assets were SGD 4.24 billion and was about 4% more than the second quarter. The quarter-on-quarter increase was largely from downgrades of secured consumer loans in Malaysia and a couple of corporate accounts in Indonesia, as detailed on slide 19. I'll move on to slide 20.
Loans grew at a faster pace this quarter to register an increase of 6% from the previous year and 4% from the previous quarter. The largest increase for the quarter were in Singapore and Greater China, led by building and construction, general commerce and housing loans. Our loan exposure to China, both onshore and offshore, currently accounted for 11% of total loans. These were largely lending to SOEs, large local corporates and our network customers. Of the China onshore exposures of SGD 6 billion, less than one third were lending to corporates in real estate sector. These loans were mostly to our network customers. If you look at slide 21, our loan composition by industry remains stable and well-diversified across sectors. Building and construction and housing sectors remain the largest segment at 28% and 21% of total loans respectively.
On slide 22, where we provide some update on our total relief loans, you will notice that total relief loans for the quarter were higher at SGD 6.3 billion as compared to the previous quarter of SGD 4.5 billion. The increase in this quarter was largely from secured customer loans in Malaysia, followed by the rollout of the new Pemulih package in July 2021 by the Malaysian government. In Singapore, exit from the relief loans program have reduced outstanding balance to SGD 1.6 billion from SGD 2.2 billion a quarter ago. Total relief loans accounted for 2% of the group loans, of which 89% were secured against collaterals. Majority of these relief loans are still performing. Now I'll move on to slide 23.
On deposit, customer deposit rose 8% year-over-year and 5% from the previous quarter to SGD 333 billion. CASA deposit continued to form the majority of our deposits, at 62% of total customer deposits. With this, I would pass the floor to Helen.
Thank you, Darren. I hope you all hear me well, and good morning again. I have prepared some update, but before I go into the presentation slides, allow me just to talk about how I see our performance for the third quarter and the nine months of the year. I do feel and do see that the year demonstrates our strong franchise and was underpinned by the good progress we have made on our strategic priorities. We have three quarters of resilient results which drove our nine months earnings to a new high, actually. On a year-to-date basis, loan growth is up 7%, or SGD 18 billion. Loan growth is on track. I talk about mid- to single-digit growth for the year.
I think we're on track to reach that by year-end. As I mentioned in the first quarter results, I expect momentum to grow in the later part of the year, and we have seen our third quarter loan growth to be 4% year-on-year. We're also seeing a pipeline pick up in Singapore, Greater China and our other overseas markets across both consumer and corporate banking. Another point about loans to take note is our green financing loans saw strong growth trajectory and make up close to SGD 6 billion, or 1/3 of our year-to-date overall loan increase. Wealth management franchise performed strongly, as reflected by net money growth quarter-on-quarter across our premier private sector and also our Bank of Singapore for our private banking customers.
Customer-related activity holding steady despite recent tightening measures. We saw the third quarter fee income was higher than pre-COVID levels. Customer treasury flow income is also steady, and insurance business also doing well. Two some areas to highlight, Darren would have covered most of this earlier, but I also want to touch on these key areas to provide more insight on questions you might have. Trying to address your questions beforehand. The first one is the 8% increase in operating expenses in the third quarter without the effect of higher Jobs Support grants a year ago. Our OpEx would have grown 6% instead of 8%.
This increase reflected both higher variable compensation in light of business volume growth, but importantly, investing in headcount in our strategic priorities, which I will cover later on. Technology costs take up 12% of costs for third quarter and also for nine months in the year. To continue to see very good progress in our digitalization efforts. I want to emphasize when we say costs, it is investment into the technology. Indeed, this is before technology staff costs, so we are making quite a lot of investments in this area. The second point I want to highlight is I think there will be questions on the China exposure, particularly on the mainland. I just want to recap what Darren has mentioned.
Mainland China onshore exposure is only 2% of our group loans. This is largely lending to our network customers and large SOEs. The reason is very simple. We are a bank, a foreign bank that aims to connect China companies with the rest of the world. Our total exposure outside is always higher than the exposure onshore. Mainland China onshore real estate exposure is 1/3 of total loans, and even then, this is lending mainly to our network customers. Focus is still partnering the China SOEs and large corporates as they move out of China into our region, more predominantly, obviously ASEAN.
On credit quality and relief loans, credit quality of our overall portfolio remains healthy, and we are committed to help our customers with orderly exit from the relief programs. The group relief loans make up 2% of total loans. It's down substantially compared to last year this period. This is also nearly 90% secure. This is well below the peak a year ago when relief loans make up, as I said, much higher, which is 10% of our loan book. Another point is regarding Malaysia. Relief loans rose to SGD 4 billion or 1/5 of Malaysian book. Some of these loans were downgraded to non-performing according to regulatory reporting and accounting. The associated interest accruals were reversed from our P&L.
This makes up for close to half of the 6 basis points quarter-on-quarter decline in our third quarter. Nonetheless, we are comfortable that we have set aside sufficient provisions, including management overlays to buffer for any unanticipated stress in our book. Overall credit costs, if the credit environment remains stable, I'm still expecting credit costs to be at the lower end of our guidance of 100-130 basis points for two years. For NIM guidance, it remains stable at current levels. I'd like to just cover very quickly the slides that I have prepared as an update. You have seen it, and I just want to share my thoughts. If you look at slide two, my thoughts on economic outlook in 2022.
I would say GDP of ASEAN and China largely expected to be better than the world average. Trade for the region has also rebounded strongly. You do know that intra-Asia trade is more than 50% of Asian trade. Meaning Asia is trading more with ourselves than with other parts of the world. I do expect a 3%-6% GDP growth for our key markets in 2022. Vaccination is a very important part. We have seen COVID situation in Malaysia and Indonesia improving as vaccination rates grow. Malaysia, 90% of adults fully vaccinated. Indonesia vaccinated about 1/4 of population.
For our staff, we're trying to help them, and our staff are highly vaccinated in Malaysia and Indonesia. It's encouraging to see gradual opening of travel links in Asia, and so we expect business activities to continue to pick up in tandem. Another mega trend is obviously sustainability. No longer optional. I want to repeat that. There is increased global focus on climate change. Of course, COP26 is happening at the moment. We see there's a lot of demand for sustainable financing and products and investments. We remain watchful of some near-term headwinds, concerns on power crunch especially in China, rising energy prices globally, limited industrial output in the short term. Supply chain disruption is happening and continue.
Dislocation in the container market, shipping, and also shortage of key manufacturing components. These are all threats. Of course, we want to continue to support the China Plus One strategy for the MNCs, and a lot of them are coming into continue to come into ASEAN. Driving our strategic priorities in the next slide three, I'm pleased on the progress so far. These priorities will also power our future growth in the next few years.
I talked about four pillars in the past, and indeed, if we look at slide four regarding the continued investment in our wealth platform, and also you will see that as you look at our numbers, it does reflect in our wealth management income and fees and the robust AUM growth across our wealth tiers. We just announced our partnership with Ping An Bank, as you have read, and under China's Wealth Management Connect scheme for the Greater Bay Area. This will open up a whole new segment of customers. As you all know, Ping An is among the top banks in China, in particular, they're based in the Greater Bay, the headquarters there.
They have more than 300 branches in the Greater Bay Area and over 100 million retail customers. Our customers in mainland China and Hong Kong and Macau can now open wealth management accounts for wealth management through our partnership with Ping An. This is both for Southbound and for Northbound. We'll start by offering investors to access our unit trust and continue to extract value from our business franchise. For ultra high-net-worth and high-net-worth individuals, we target opportunities from key markets. We're growing our China onshore wealth, emergence of family office and indeed a lot of the wealth investments overseas. We continue to see Singapore as the hub for wealth management.
We are helping, we are servicing a lot of customers coming our way here. For the emerging affluent and mass market, we continue to drive acquisition through digitalization and strategic partnerships. We do build our wealth conversion and execution on mobile. You will see more and more new apps actually on the phone, allowing us to do banking a lot more effectively, including not just transaction, but wealth management. We continue to build our team to support future growth. We want to double the number of relationship managers for Chinese clients to 500. I mean, RMs to 500 by 2023. Go on to the next pillar, which is powering growth in the ASEAN Greater China corridor.
We are strengthening capabilities to capture this trade and investment flows in this corridor. Greater China loans have expanded 12% since end 2020. We focus on a regional hub-and-spoke model using twin hub, Singapore and Hong Kong, and leverage regional network strength. We want to enhance our Greater China transaction banking, investment banking valuable position to support import, inbound and outbound clients. I'm happy that we have made some inroads there, and we have been winning mandates, in particular helping clients from Greater China as they expand into ASEAN. This would be cross-border support on trade and cash management demand of our clients. We also continue to build our team to support the growth. I announced a Greater China organizational structure and appointed Tan Wing Ming.
Tan Wing Ming as our Head of Greater China. We have made major management appointments, including Investment Banking Head for Greater China who joined us in August. We continue to target corporates across the region to grow our loans and fee income. This would include technology, contract manufacturers in Southeast Asia and China, infrastructure data center, which continue to be a hot investment subject. Logistics, life sciences facilities, of course, telco, 5G, technology, biopharm, med tech, you name it. Of course, healthcare, very important, and agritech and about food and green businesses.
Again, the mobility ecosystem, EV, how we help our customers from a building, for example, charging station, manufacturing of EV batteries, car loans, EV car loans, et cetera, et cetera. Quite a lot to target on. Of course, we want to continue to build our emerging business banking through digital channels. We have seen in Singapore in particular, 98% of our SME account opening is entirely online. Going on the next one, driving sustainability assets. I need actually two slides to talk about it. We want to build a leading sustainable regional bank and have set clear priorities and targets. There are many growth opportunities in the sustainability space which we can capture.
I hope page six summarizes a lot of the things that we have been doing and some of the achievements we have made. We are certainly committed to create lasting value for all our stakeholders, be our shareholders, our customers, our community and our employees. We want to deliver positive social and environmental impact. Just to go a little bit deeper into that, on the financing side, we saw strong traction in growth. I mentioned this year's green financing is growing very well. You will remember we have a 25 by 25 target, which is SGD 25 billion on our books by 2025. I'm glad to say that our commitments have already exceeded that.
We are almost at SGD 30 billion in commitment. We are awaiting for some of the drawdown of course, in order to cross that 2025 mark. We will also looking at a new and ambitious target in due course. We also grow our sector coverage such as sustainable food production. I mentioned agritech, which is very important, as Singapore in particular go for our 30 by 30 target. We look at renewable energy ecosystem. It is not just financing the creation of energy, but how our energy is supplied. As I mentioned earlier on how energy is supplied and that will lead to other business such as use EV as an example just now. Green trade and working capital SME framework.
We have a framework for SME to allow them to do green financing without additional cost. Meaning, we create a framework. As long as they fulfill the requirements in the framework, the certification is already done for them. We are looking to double sustainable financing to SMEs by year end. We have EV partnership and we'll finance green instruments. On sustainable investing, we expand private bank ESG investment solutions, and we integrate ESG consideration into our research and discretionary portfolios. I hope you find some of our research interesting on this front. BOS is also first in Asia to incorporate ESG factors in the assessment of the loan quantum for investment financing, encouraging clients to invest sustainably.
I do want to mention we just have our inaugural TCFD report last month, which reflects our commitment to drive transition to a sustainable low carbon world. In terms of equipping employees with skills, we launched a suite of sustainability training modules to groom more subject experts within the bank. I just say we need to make the program interesting, and I thought that is quite truly quite informative for our colleagues. Last but not least, on the fourth pillar, which I always describe as accelerating digitalization. We have high uptake across digital platforms and increased penetration. I talk about high level of SME accounts open digitally at 98%. We also are seeing 85% of transactions in digital.
For consumer business, 62% of our new secure loan sales are digital. Digital secure loans have grown 3.5x in a year. Our digital wealth acquisition and sales is also up 4x year-on-year. We have a number of new digital digitalized offerings this year. We announced in mid-October that we'll be rolling out Travel with OCBC in the coming weeks as Singapore opens up to designated travel lanes. It is a one-stop digital platform that will enable our customers to book airline tickets, hotel, car rentals at preferential rates. Use our card reward points to offset purchases at checkout with OCBC cards using OCBC Pay Anyone and also buy travel insurance.
I hope that helps you as you plan your travel based on the VTLs. I do want to say that we also are looking at instant buy sell of precious metals. We are allowing OCBC digital app on Monday to Fridays, 24 hours a day if you are interested in precious metal. These are just examples. Obviously we'll continue to drive initiatives across our digital ecosystem and enhance our customer value and experience. I'll stop here as it's quite a long message. Indeed, thank you. We'll now move on to questions.
Okay.
Q&A will be.
Yeah.
Yeah. Thank you.
First up is Chanya from Bloomberg. Chanya, you're on. Chanya, I think you're muted.
Oh, sorry. Yes. Thank you both for comprehensive briefing and congrats on the numbers. I have three questions. First, Helen mentioned that GDP this year she expect 3%-6% in key countries that you operate in. What's the outlook for next year? Are we out of the woods from the pandemic? And what are your key areas of concerns? That's the first question. The second one is about the current wage trend, which you already see higher OpEx this quarter. What's your thoughts on pay and compensation to your staff next year to be in line with the global trend? Third question. Siam Commercial Bank last night said they are going to spend $500 million acquiring crypto assets. Your rival is also running one. What's your thought? What's your playbook on crypto? Thank you.
Chanya, thank you. Just to reaffirm when I talk about GDP growth rates for our key markets, it is for next year, 3%-6%. Hope that addressed your first question. Interesting question on pay compensation. We do see if you look at our expenses this year, we do compensate higher due to volume growth. I do see an extent of increase of compensation for next year. Allow me not to mention levels which are looking at, but indeed, we do know there's a strong competition for talents in the market and particularly in certain areas. We need to compensate correctly in order to attract the talents and keep our people. There is a lot of investment.
Whenever you talk about investments in digital, it isn't really not just the hardware or the software. Although that is reflected very much in our IT spend, right? But indeed, there will be more hires for people who will be able to do digitalization. It's not just in the IT department, but around our business units and other functions as well, as we continue to look at using more data and also building a more agile transformation sort of team. I think these are all important, but I do see the need to compensate correctly. On crypto, it's always a big topic on me and also on my management team. We've been looking at it. We see how the region has seen new development.
It is important. We will look to play a role in it. It is also. We'll be addressing demand from our customer base and so that our customers are investing or using it with the right risk consideration. More, hopefully, to disclose coming next year. I would just stop here with your three questions. I have taken them rightfully.
Thank you.
Next one. Yeah.
Okay. Goola, you are up next. Goola, unmute yourself.
Okay. Can you hear me? Hello. Hi. Thank you, Helen. Thanks, Darren. Okay. I've got a few questions. First of all, you know, Great Eastern, I just wondered if there's been some volatility in the mark-to-market, and we don't hear about that from AIA and Prudential's bond portfolio. I'm just wondering why Great Eastern appears to be more volatile on that side. Also, there was a decline in the Malaysian, I think, total weighted new sales. I just wondered what the cause was for that. There's a falling embedded margin. What is the cause for that? That's on the insurance side. Then, just can I ask, what are the management's thoughts on Web 3.0? Because, MAS has been talking about it. Is it a disruptor or an opportunity?
Do you see problems? Is there a threat there? Yeah. The last question is for Darren. You know, for the SPs, what were the SPs for? Is there anything specific there? Is it just for [audio distortion]? Yeah.
Goola, I might have missed one or two in the middle, but allow me to go with Great Eastern.
Uh-huh.
Web 3.0. I probably miss out one in the middle, but please repeat that after I address Great Eastern and Web 3.0. Yeah? On Great Eastern, thank you for the questions. You mentioned our peers. Obviously, we cannot comment on our peers. However, we do understand that life insurers are generally impacted by market fluctuations as they hold investment portfolios. There might be differences in the metrics used and highlighted by each insurer, so it's very difficult just to compare that. T ypically, most will only highlight the operating profit and the new business value, as we know. This will be in the results announcement, because these are key industry metrics.
Great Eastern has also disclosed these, and they continue to do well as seen in the recent results actually announced yesterday. A s Great Eastern is consolidated into OCBC, its accounting profit, which includes unrealized mark-to-market movements, will be reflected in our results. There may be some volatility as a result. I just want to highlight that because it's a part of us. My thoughts on Web 3.0. Is it a disruptor or is it an opportunity? I think that is a good question. I think if you look at 3.0, there is not a common destination as yet, as is exactly what it needs to.
Of course it is a new thing. It is an improvement from Web 2.0. If you look at what we're doing with technology for the first nine months, our tech costs, hardware and software, excluding staff costs, as I said, accounted for 12% of our operating expenses. This is nearly, I think, SGD 400 million for the first nine months. When you talk about Web 3.0, I take that as we continue to invest in what is new, what is available, what benefit us in our systems and in the way we do things. There are quite a lot of things that is very valuable. For example, we continue to use AI.
We look at Internet of Things. I would just say this is important, and it is also an application that we can use to help us to do many things and to help our efficiency, to help our reaching out to our customer, to help us in managing risk. I wouldn't say it is a disruptor. I perhaps would say I personally think that it is more an opportunity. Darren, I think that's a question for you.
Yeah.
If we do miss out, please repeat your question afterwards.
Yeah, good luck. Pertaining to SP, you're referring to ECL three, right? Essentially for the quarter, the bulk of it, as I mentioned during the result discussion as well, is related to customer loans in Malaysia. The relief loans in particular, and also a few corporates, you know, in the manufacturing, wholesale and retail space in Indonesia. There's a bit coming from the oil and gas sector. You will probably notice that, essentially pertaining to the oil and gas sector itself, it's not creating the same headache that we have as we had in the past. I hope that answer your questions.
Yes. If I could ask about the falling margins on your NBV in Great Eastern. I'm just wondering what the cause?
Oh, hi, Goola. This is Collins. I think the NBV margins, they are a reflection of the composition of sales in a particular period. You know, let's say in a certain period, there are stronger sales in a certain segment. Perhaps this may be of a lower margin, then this will be reflected in you know, the overall NBV margin. Yeah.
Maybe, Goola, if I can supplement that. Helen mentioned earlier that Malaysia, because of the lockdown, there's a general decline in terms of policy sales. If you were to compare essentially the agency force in Malaysia compared to Singapore and also the history in terms of the proportionate sale of policies in Malaysia versus Singapore, there's a higher proportion of regular premium product out of Malaysia. As you know, regular premium product, because of the protection element coming from it, tend to have a higher margin. Hence, you know, when we have lower sale in Malaysia, naturally it translated to low NBV.
Okay. Thanks, Goola. Next up, we have Prisca from The Straits Times. Prisca, can you unmute? Yeah.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Hi, Helen and Darren. Thanks for the presentation. There's been some reports in recent days that [audio distortion] are moving closer to it.
Prisca, sorry, I think you're breaking up. Could you try that again? Sorry about it.
Hi. Is this better?
Yes.
Okay. Hi, Helen and Darren. Thanks for the presentation. Following up on recent reports that some of the bank's rivals are moving closer to bids for Citi Consumer Banking assets. Does OCBC have an update on whether it plans to bid on that?
It's about Citi.
Yeah. You know, as usual, we cannot comment about a sale process, to be fair to the players involved in the process.
Any other question, Prisca? Sorry, we are not able to comment on any specific.
No, that's all. It's all right. Thank you.
Yeah. Okay, thanks. We have Alice. Alice from the Asian Private Banker. Hello, can you hear me?
Yes. Thanks for the presentation. I have two questions. The first one would be, could you further elaborate on how the OCBC Group will approach business opportunities with ultra-high net worth and emerging family offices in the Mainland China? Particularly, how would Bank of Singapore and the group's China offshore-onshore entity collaborate in servicing these clients. The other question would be a follow-up on the question about increasing staff costs. Would private banking be one of the business segments you mentioned where the talent competition is particularly fierce? And to what extent the staff costs would influence the level of profits generated by this business? Would digitalization help in lowering costs in this aspect?
Thank you for the question, Alice. The first one regarding high net worth customer segment for Greater China, we are indeed. We have been growing our Bank of Singapore team based in Hong Kong for Greater China. Hong Kong for a long time is the first port where Greater China clients or wealthy clients in that region would look into investment ideas and having a relationship. We have continued to build our coverage team in Hong Kong. Al so we are looking to increase bank strength in China inside our Wing Hang China business where we will be able to serve individuals.
There is indeed a very strong link between the Hong Kong team and the China team. We can also find support if we need more expertise from offshore. We can also bring some of our guys into China as well. Not to actually miss out the very important link with Singapore, it is one business. Some of the clients would have a relationship served by a RM in Hong Kong, but they would prefer to park some of their wealth in Singapore. As you know, we have been seeing a lot more family offices coming to Singapore as well, and that is very important.
I think one of the definitely one of the strong advantage we have is we'll be able to serve our high net worth clients, not just in their own investments and also or their family needs. Is that we'll be able to help them with their the business they own as well. T here is a lot of cross reference and working together between our wholesale bank in the OCBC group and in with the relationship managers in Bank of Singapore. As we see that as a very strong link. If you look at Greater China, we also invested in Bank of Ningbo, and we also have collaborations. If Bank of Ningbo has customers are looking to invest overseas, and there will be a strong working relationship on that as well.
I see we are in a very good position. You talk about competition for talent. Yes, indeed, it is fierce. W e also would try to groom from our internally as well. We buy, but we also keep and we also groom internally. Because we have a wide stretch of our individual business, I'm just saying that from the ultra-high net worth to high net worth to our private. Sorry, our premier private sector and to our premier sector, and in particular in Singapore, we have a high amount of customers in the private premier sector.
I do see some of the RMs serving these clients as potential sources of RMs for the higher net worth sector. I do hope that helps. Indeed it is helping. Staff cost is always something we need to manage, but we'll, I think, the important thing is to have the right team and expand the value created by each individual RMs, making use of our overall network in the group.
Okay. Thanks, Alice. We have one last question from Goola. Hey, Goola, you're muted.
Sorry, Ching-Ching, I forgot to put my hand down.
Oh, I see. Okay, you're good now.
Sorry. Oh, so lower hand. All right. Sorry, everybody. Thank you.
No problem. I think we have Natalie. Sorry. Natalie is up. Natalie from The Business Times. Natalie? Yeah, go ahead.
Darren. I just have one question. What is the bank's take on buy now, pay later, given that Standard Chartered has just partnered with Atome?
Buy now, pay later scheme.
Yeah. The question is for me, right?
Darren can take it. Do you know how to?
Yeah.
Buy now, pay later is a consumer scheme.
Sure, sure. We did evaluate buy now, pay later. On the consumer banking side we do have a partnership with a buy now, pay later provider. Now, in terms of the longer term direction pertaining to buy now, pay later, it's something that we are still watching the space. Because if you think about that the objective of a buy now, pay later is also targeting a different customer base, different segment of the customer base. There are many considerations coming from that. Essentially, you know, the quality, the credit quality, the customer base and so on and so forth.
To answer your question, we are watching, having a partnership in buy now, pay later and see how much this buy now, pay later development potentially would take off in the market that we are in.
Okay. Natalie, Chanya, is this your last question? We will close off after your question.
Yes, yes. I do have one last question because in her presentation, Helen mentioned dual hub, Hong Kong, Singapore. On the Hong Kong mainland and mainland sides, the borders are still closed. Restrictions only tightened. What do you see in terms of impacts on your business and the overall financial industries when such key hub in Shanghai and Hong Kong are closed to the outside world? Do you see that easing over the course of next year? Thank you.
Thank you for that question, Chanya. Yes, there is restriction at the border. Thankfully, I think in today's world, as we have been working quite a lot from home, we use virtual means to continue to get in touch with business, with customers. Some of our colleagues changed the way as they travel into China from Hong Kong. They have to go through quarantine, but when they do go through quarantine, they work from the hotel, right? Continuously virtually, which is quite similar to working from home, and then extend the stay afterwards to cover more business. We're adjusting to that. Obviously we do hope that the border will be opened up quite soon as vaccination rates continue to grow up.
That is how we do that. It does not stop us from expanding our business in China and connecting overseas. It's very similar to Chinese working with us in Singapore as well. A lot is going virtually. We do hope that. I think creating, allowing people to travel more easily, it would help. Likewise, we haven't been able to travel very easily out of Singapore, but we are managing. I think the last 20 months have taught us quite a lot in how to manage our business without being physically present. I do look forward to be seeing people physically, because that does build better the trust, the relationship, and the way people work together.
Thank you, Helen.
Okay. All right. Great. Thank you very much. I think that takes us to the end of our briefing this morning. Thank you again for joining us.