Company Visit Handelsbanken (瑞典商业银行) 2018
On the afternoon of the 7th of December the representatives of CITO made a visit at Handelsbanken’s Taipei Office. Handelsbanken is a Swedish bank with presence in large parts of the world, in order to help their customers with financial services outside their home markets. As host for our visit at Handelsbanken we were delighted to have Amy Chen, which serves as Chief Representative at the Taipei Office. Amy happily guided us through the history of Handelsbanken and continued with providing us new insights about both the operations at the Taipei office and also generally about the banking industry in Taiwan.
Handelsbanken was established in Sweden 1871 and has since developed into a full-service bank with a nationwide branch network in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, United Kingdom and in the Netherlands. Today, Handelsbanken is one of Sweden’s leading banks and offers 822 branches in 24 countries with more than 11500. Amy especially focused on the Asian sector which have branches in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore, further offering additional representative offices in Beijing, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur and Mumbai.
Amy continued with describing the operations at the Taipei office, which is a so called representative office. Handelsbankens representative offices does not handle domestic clients, rather is helps existing clients with financial matters related to their business in Taiwan. Examples of services is related to acting as a middlemen between the client and local customers and banks, solving problems related to financial situations and also providing helpful guidance of the Taiwanese legal system. Since Handelsbanken is a full service bank, Amy pointed out how important it is for them to be able to help their customers wherever they run their businesses, and therefore the representative offices is a very important part of their services.
In addition to giving the CITO representatives an extensive and interesting insight in Handelsbankens Taiwan operations, Amy gladly shared her big pool of knowledge about the Asian banking industry and how this has transformed over time. Especially, Amy gladly told us about the current digital transformation that has begun to take place in Taiwan with the introduction of e-banking. However, she pointed out that it is still lagging behind mainly due to skepticism from the clients.
The company visit at Handelsbanken’s Taipei Office was very pleasant and CITO is very thankful for the opportunity to once again get immersed insights about Handelsbankens businesses and the Asian banking industry. We also want to thank Amy Chen for being such a pleasant host, thus not only providing very interesting facts about Handelsbanken but also giving us new useful and interesting viewpoints about Asian and Taiwanese culture. We at CITO are already looking forward for next year’s visit.