The Hostage Exchange: Group Medical Renewal in Singapore

Singapore’s group medical insurers lost 2.8 cents on every premium dollar over ten years.  Then they sent the invoice.  Employers now open renewal letters the way patients open biopsy results.  Group medical is a large, quiet business.  The Life Insurance Association, Singapore reports S$2.83 billion of in-force group life and health premiums at the third quarter of 2025, up 15 per cent in a year.  Group accident and health makes up 74.5 per cent of that, about S$2.1 billion.  Ten insurers write more than 95 per cent of group medical premiums.  Nearly 20 others share the rest.  The market is concentrated, and the economics are brutal.

The Singapore Actuarial Society compiled the premium dollar for 2016 to 2025.  Claims took 81.1 cents.  Distribution took 11.0 cents.  Operating expenses took 10.8 cents.  Profit was minus 2.8 cents.  The ten-year underwriting margin is at minus 2.8 per cent.  Integrated Shield Plans managed plus 0.5 per cent.  Costs other than claims eat 21.8 cents of each dollar.  An insurer needs a loss ratio below 78.2 per cent to break even.  The industry ran 81.1.  An insurer that loses money for a decade is not running a business.  It is running a hobby with a regulator.

Why do employers buy?  Medical benefits recruit and retain talent.  Financial institutions and tech companies reportedly offer the most generous plans.  Group plans renew every year or two.  They underwrite the workforce collectively and cover pre-existing conditions.  Group medical insurance is far more competitive than individual plans.  Employers buy at scale and negotiate on price.  Thin margins follow.  The national system adds overlap.  MediShield Life covers every citizen and permanent resident.  About 3.0 million residents, 71 per cent, hold an Integrated Shield Plan on top.  Then the employer adds a group plan.  One appendix can be insured three times.  It can also be claimed three times.  Individual health claims reached S$1,447.8 million in the first half of 2026.  Integrated Shield Plans and riders paid S$1,373.7 million of that, about 95 per cent.  Group plans cover the same patients.

The Premium Problem

Group-health premiums rise 15 to 20 per cent a year on average.  One outsized claims year pushes a renewal past 20.  The cause is not a mystery.  It is a medical trend.  WTW puts Singapore’s gross medical trend at 12.3 per cent in 2024, 15.5 per cent in 2025, and 16.9 per cent in 2026.  Mercer Marsh Benefits projects 14.0 per cent for 2026.  Aon projects 13.0 per cent.  Singapore’s general inflation is about 1.5 per cent.  Medical costs rise at nine to eleven times the rate of everything else.  Aon expects Singapore to climb to 14.7 per cent in 2027, from 13 per cent in 2026, while Asia-Pacific falls to 9.7 per cent, from 11.3 per cent.  Singapore is the exception, and not a flattering one.  Compounding does the damage.  Start with a S$1 million premium.  At 15 per cent a year, it becomes S$2.0 million in five years.  At 20 per cent, it becomes S$2.5 million.  Nobody budgeted for that.  Nobody puts it in the offer letter.

The Causes

Claims.  Escalating claims and the rising cost of care, usually in private settings, drive the increases.  Cardiovascular and respiratory diseases are the top drivers of higher claims, according to Aon’s study.  WTW adds that 77 per cent of insurers name new medical technology as the main reason for medical inflation.

First-dollar cover.  Plans offering first-dollar coverage can see higher utilisation.  Some employees treat the corporate plan as their main source of healthcare financing.  Free care is the most expensive phrase in medicine.

Fragmented care.  Healthcare inflation is not driven only by the cost of care.  Patients bypass primary care, undergo unnecessary tests, and seek treatment in higher-cost settings.  The cost is set well before the claim is filed.

Insurer repair.  Insurers rebuilding profitability would keep trend rates in double digits for 2025 and 2026.  Insurers lost 2.8 cents per dollar.  They are recovering it from your renewal.

Annual repricing.  Group policies renew every year or two.  They cannot build long-term pricing buffers.  Even modest gaps between actual claims and pricing assumptions hit profitability.  Insurers price defensively and reprice early.

The rider reform.  From 1^st April 2026, the Ministry of Health no longer lets new Integrated Shield riders cover the deductible, which ranges from S$1,500 to S$3,500.  The minimum co-payment cap doubles from S$3,000 to S$6,000.  New riders cost about 30 per cent less.  A private-hospital patient can now face up to S$9,500 a year out of pocket.  Employees will lean on the group plan to fill the gap.  This is first-payer burn: the group plan pays first, and pays for what the rider no longer covers.  A group plan that refunds the deductible cancels the cost-sharing the regulator just imposed.  The shift will be slow.  Buyers from 27^th November 2025 must move to compliant riders by their first renewal after 1^st April 2028, and insurers decide how to treat older riders.

The employer squeeze.  Employers face revenue pressure while benefit costs rise at a far greater rate.  Few adopt cost-sharing.  They fear cutting benefits that staff have grown used to.  The insurer is slow, the employer is timid, and the employee is delighted.

The Strategies

Insurers will not rescue you.  Regulators will not rescue you.  Your employees, who treat the benefit as free, will not rescue you.  That leaves three levers, and you hold all of them.  Pull them in order.  Price comes first, because the renewal is the only invoice that arrives with a deadline.  The working case below carries through the section.  Take 500 employees and a group plan at S$1,000 a head.  The premium is S$500,000.  At the industry’s 81.1 per cent loss ratio, claims are about S$405,500.  At 15 per cent annual increases, the premium reaches about S$1.0 million in five years.  Every strategy below acts on one of those numbers.

Strategy One: Share the Bill

The principle.  Free care invites use.  Priced care invites a question.  Cost-sharing restores it: “Do I need this?”

The evidence.  From 1974, the RAND Health Insurance Experiment randomly assigned thousands of Americans to free care or to plans with coinsurance of 25, 50, or 95 per cent.  Participants at 25 per cent coinsurance spent about 20 per cent less than those with free care.  Participants at 95 per cent spent about 30 per cent less.  The savings came from fewer visits and fewer admissions, not from lower prices.  Health outcomes stayed the same for most people.  The sickest and poorest did worse.  Two cautions follow.  The study ran in the United States, decades ago.  It also found that cost-sharing cut useful and useless care in about equal measure.  A blunt co-payment is a cheap tool, not a clever one.

The price.  Apply a 10 per cent cut in claims to the working case.  Claims fall by about S$40,550.  If the insurer holds the loss ratio, the premium falls 10 per cent, to S$450,000.  Grow that at 15 per cent for five years, and it reaches about S$905,000, not S$1.0 million.  The saving in year five is about S$100,000.  This is an illustration.  It assumes full repricing by the insurer, and insurers rarely oblige at the first renewal.  The base still compounds in your favour.

The design.  Build it in five parts.

First, set a modest deductible or co-payment on outpatient and specialist visits.  Small amounts change behaviour.  Large amounts delay care that should not wait.

Second, use panel clinics and pre-authorisation for private-hospital admissions.  Pre-authorisation separates the elective from the urgent.

Third, exempt chronic-disease management from cost-sharing.  Finance Directors will object.  Prevention is cheaper than the admission it avoids.  Charge for the convenience visit.  Do not charge for the blood-pressure check.

Fourth, coordinate with the Integrated Shield Plan.  Make it the first payer where it exists.  Your group plan should cover the gap, not duplicate the layer.

Fifth, never refund the deductible.  The regulator imposed that friction on purpose.  A group plan that refunds it cancels the reform.

The politics.  Employees dislike losing benefits more than they like gaining them.  Manage the change.  Announce it a quarter early.  Pair it with something visible, such as a better primary-care benefit.  Show staff the premium history.  Few employees know that the plan costs 15 to 20 per cent more every year.

Strategy Two: Own the Data and Restructure the Risk

The principle.  Your claims history sets your price.  The insurer holds the data, and you hold the bill.  Reverse that asymmetry.

Know the ratio.  The industry ran 81.1 per cent against a break-even of 78.2.  Compare your own.  Use these bands as rules of thumb, not law.  Below 78 per cent, you have pricing power.  Between 78 and 90, you are an average account and will take the average increase.  Above 90, you are the subsidy.  The insurer will surcharge you, and it will be right to.  Ask for the ratio by month, by condition, and by claimant band.  Demand three years.

Find the few who drive the many.  Claims typically concentrate in a small share of claimants.  Ask your insurer for your own figures.  Request an anonymised report on the top ten claims by value.  Cancer, cardiovascular, and musculoskeletal claims deserve their own lines.  Aon names cardiovascular and respiratory disease as the top drivers.  If one condition dominates, you have found your Strategy Three target.

Tender widely.  Invite at least four insurers to quote.  Give them identical data.  Ask each for a two-year rate commitment, and ask for a written renewal formula.  Insurers dislike both requests.  Make them anyway.  Annual repricing is the mechanism that lets insurers recover their 2.8-cent loss from you, one renewal at a time.

Question the intermediary.  Distribution takes 11.0 cents of each premium dollar.  On the working case, that is about S$55,000 a year.  Ask your broker how the firm is paid.  Compare a commission with a fee.  A fee that is lower than the commission is a saving.  A fee that is higher buys independence, and independence is worth money only if it is used.

Restructure the risk.  Larger employers can retain more of it.  Three tools exist.  A higher deductible at the policy level makes you pay the small claims.  Stop-loss coverage insures the large claims.  Pooling shares the shocks across a network or a captive.  You pay for the predictable, and the insurer covers the volatile.  The insurer stops charging a margin for volatility that you can absorb.  The trade is variance.  A bad year hurts.  This route needs an actuary, a stable workforce, and a Chief Financial Officer who sleeps well.  Do not attempt it with a spreadsheet and optimism.

Mind the tax cap.  The deduction caps at 1 per cent of total employee remuneration, or 2 per cent with portable medical benefits or ad-hoc MediSave contributions.  Under the working case, the 1 per cent cap is S$400,000 on a S$40 million payroll.  The S$500,000 premium already exceeds it.  By year five, the lost tax shield is about S$103,000 a year at the 1 per cent cap, or S$35,000 at the 2 per cent cap, at a 17 per cent corporate rate.  Every dollar you save in premium above the cap is a dollar saved in full, with no tax offset to lose.

Strategy Three: Steer the Care

The principle.  The money leaves long before the claim arrives.  The first doctor an employee meets sets the cost of everything that follows.  Steer that decision.

Make primary care the front door.  A general practitioner who knows the patient orders fewer repeat tests than a specialist who meets the patient once.  Offer free or low-cost primary-care visits and a referral requirement for specialists.  Fund the front door and tax the side door.

Move cases to the right setting.  Day surgery costs less than a full admission where the procedure allows.  A public-sector or restructured-hospital pathway costs less than a private one for many conditions.  Do not force the choice.  Make the cheaper one easier.

Offer care navigation.  A navigator helps an employee find the right doctor before the employee finds the expensive one.  Ask insurers whether they provide one.  Ask vendors for outcomes, not brochures.

Target the conditions that cost most.  Cardiovascular and respiratory disease are the top drivers, according to Aon.  Hypertension screening, blood-glucose checks, and smoking-cessation support are cheap relative to a cardiac admission.  Offer them in the workplace.  Track uptake.

Treat wellness with suspicion.  Aon’s study suggests wellness initiatives can help manage plan costs.  Three real episodes argue for caution.

In 2009, Steven A. Burd, then Chief Executive of Safeway, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the company’s wellness programme held healthcare costs flat.  A later examination found costs had not stayed flat, and the programme excluded union employees.

In 2013, Penn State told staff to complete a health risk assessment and screening or pay US$100 a month.  The university projected cost growth of about 13 per cent.  Employees rebelled.  Some filled the survey with false answers.  Dr Matthew Woessner, then Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Penn State Harrisburg, called for civil resistance.  Dr Rodney Allen Erickson, then President of Penn State, suspended the surcharge.

The Illinois Workplace Wellness Study is the best evidence.  Economists Dr Damon Jones of the University of Chicago, and Dr David Molitor and Dr Julian Reif of the University of Illinois, randomly assigned nearly 5,000 employees to a comprehensive programme.  After 30 months, it had no significant effect on medical spending, health behaviours, or productivity.  Participants already had lower spending and healthier behaviours before it started.  Wellness programmes recruit marathon runners and sell them yoga mats.

The rule.  Use a carrot, not a stick.  Never penalise staff for declining to share health data.  Measure any programme against your own claims.  If the number does not move within two renewals, stop paying.

The Mandatory Layer

Foreign workers need separate treatment.  The Ministry of Manpower requires employers to buy and maintain medical insurance of at least S$60,000 a year for every Work Permit and S Pass holder.  It covers inpatient care and day surgery, including conditions unrelated to work.  The employer pays and cannot pass the cost to the worker.  Enhancements took effect on 1^st July 2025.  Work injury compensation insurance is also compulsory for all manual workers and for non-manual employees earning S$2,600 a month or less.  None of this is a benefit.  It is compliance.  Tender it separately from the discretionary plan, and keep its claims data apart, so that the mandatory cohort does not distort your loss ratio.

The Calendar

Strategies fail without a timetable.  Work back from the renewal date.

Six months out, request the full claims report and compute your loss ratio.

Five months out, brief the board or leadership team on the numbers.  Decide the design changes.

Four months out, approach the market.  Send identical data to at least four insurers.

Three months out, compare quotes.  Negotiate the renewal formula and a two-year commitment.

Two months out, announce plan changes to staff.  Explain the premium history.

One month out, sign.  Then set the metrics for the year: loss ratio, top ten claims, utilisation by setting, and uptake of the primary-care benefit.

Review quarterly.  Treat the renewal as the end of a year of work, not the start of an argument.

The Scorecard

Track five numbers.  Loss ratio against the 78.2 per cent break-even.  Premium growth against the 13 to 17 per cent trend.  Share of claims from the top ten claimants.  Share of admissions in private hospitals.  Primary-care visits per head.  If the first number falls and the last number rises, the strategy works.  If neither moves, change the strategy.  Do not change the slide.

Share the bill first, because it changes behaviour at once.  Own the data second, because it changes your price at the next renewal.  Steer the care third, because it changes the claims over years.  Do all three.  An employer who does one is hoping.  An employer who does three is managing.  Your renewal is not a negotiation.  It is a hostage exchange.  Bring data.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

Singapore’s Wealth Hub: Global Capital, Local Parking Lot

Singapore sells itself as the place where the world’s wealth goes to work.  The data says it goes to sleep.  On 22^nd October 2026, Citi Wealth and RFI Global published Singapore at Heart, Global in Possibilities.  Cash and liquid deposits make up 72 per cent of onshore affluent assets.  They make up 74 per cent of offshore booked assets.  Only 26 to 28 per cent goes into investments.  Affluent and high-net-worth clients in the United States hold 58 per cent in long-term investments and 42 per cent in deposits.  Hong Kong keeps 76 per cent of its offshore assets in deposits.

There is progress.  Mutual fund ownership among Singapore’s high-net-worth investors rose from 11 per cent in 2022 to 31 per cent in 2026, the highest in Asia.  Average high-net-worth assets rose 6 per cent to US$1.5 million.  Affluent assets rose 5 per cent to more than US$565,000.  Some 76 per cent of Singaporeans aged 55 and above have a will or succession plan, against 41 per cent in Hong Kong.  The progress is real.  So is the cash mountain.

The Strategic Landscape

Singapore attracts wealth.  Indonesia supplies 41 per cent of its cross-border banking customers and Malaysia 36 per cent.  UBS counts 244,000 US-dollar millionaires and 55 billionaires.  The Economic Development Board reports that single-family offices rose tenfold in five years, to more than 2,000 by the end of 2024.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) rewards the arrival.  The Section 13O and 13U incentives require S$20 million and S$50 million respectively in designated investments at application.  They require the lower of 10 per cent of assets or S$10 million in qualifying local investments.  Qualifying investments include SGX-listed equities, qualifying debt securities, and non-listed Singapore operating companies.  Cash in a local bank account does not count.  Run the arithmetic for a S$500 million family office.  The S$10 million requirement is 2 per cent of assets.  The family meets it and leaves the rest in deposits.  The incentive attracts capital.  It does not guarantee deployment.

Three structural gaps explain the rest.  The infographic describes the first as “structural friction in reverse”, a phrase it attributes to The Architecture of Resilience.  Families lack an investment team, a mandate framework, and written deployment criteria.  Local private equity and public markets are thin for the ticket sizes these families need.  Trusted local deal pipelines do not exist, so cash waits for an offshore opportunity that may never arrive.

The Psychological Drivers

Loss aversion.  The late Dr Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate and Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, at Princeton University, and the late Dr Amos Nathan Tversky, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, built prospect theory. They estimated that a loss weighs about 2.25 times a gain of the same size.  Cash cannot show a loss on a statement.  A fund can.  Families choose the statement.

Status quo bias.  Dr William Samuelson, Professor at Boston University, and Dr Richard Jay Zeckhauser, Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, published their study in 1988.  They showed that people disproportionately stick with the status quo.  Deposits are the status quo.  Doing nothing feels like a decision, and it is the most expensive one.

Scar tissue.  Singapore has its own memory.  After Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, about 10,000 retail investors lost more than S$500 million in structured products linked to the bank.  Distributors were accused of misselling to the elderly.  MAS banned ten distributors from selling similar products starting 1^st July 2009.  Hong Leong Finance received two years. DBS Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Maybank received six months each.  Investors eventually recovered between 21.5 and 70.8 per cent of their money.  Families that remember the Minibonds do not trust a product they cannot explain to a grandchild.

Succession simplicity.  A deposit is easy to explain to a beneficiary.  A private fund needs an investment committee, reporting, and a beneficiary who understands what they own.  Families choose the product that survives a dinner-table conversation.

Safety first.  Capital from Indonesia and Malaysia came for stability.  My reading is that capital that fled instability seeks stillness.  Stillness has a price.

The Limits of Cash

Inflation.  The six-month Singapore Treasury bill cleared at 1.90 per cent on 8^th October 2026.  The ten-year Savings Bond averages 2.32 per cent.  Core inflation was 2.2 per cent in August.  Cash loses ground.  The S&P 500 returned 14.1 per cent in 2026 through 15^th October 2026.

Protection.  The Singapore Deposit Insurance Corporation insures S$100,000 per depositor per member bank.  A family with S$100 million at one bank has 0.1 per cent insured.  In 2013, Cyprus converted 47.5 per cent of deposits above €100,000 at Bank of Cyprus into shares.  At Laiki Bank, uninsured depositors were wiped out.  Those depositors also thought a bank was a vault.

Legacy.  A will is a list.  It is not liquidity.  Prince Rogers Nelson died on 21^st April 2016 without a will.  The administrator valued his estate at US$82.3 million.  The IRS said US$163.2 million.  They settled at US$156.4 million, and it took six years to close the estate.  The lesson is liquidity and structure, not Minnesota law.

Heirs.  Capgemini reports that 81 per cent of inheritors plan to switch firms within one to two years of an inheritance.  The global wealth transfer is US$83.5 trillion.  A cash pile with no mandate and no governance gives heirs every reason to leave and take it with them.

The missed recovery.  Liquidity protects you in a sell-off only with a deployment plan.  The S&P 500 fell in the first quarter of 2026.  It rose 15 per cent in the second.  Cash sat through both.

The Legal Case for Insurance

Life insurance solves legacy problems that deposits do not.  Singapore law sets out why.  A valid nomination lets the insurer pay without a Grant of Probate or Letters of Administration.  A trust nomination under section 49L of the Insurance Act 1966 creates a trust for the nominees.  The proceeds fall outside the estate and beyond the reach of the policy owner’s creditors.  The trust nomination overrides the will.  It is irrevocable unless the nominees consent.  A revocable nomination under section 49M is flexible and does not protect against estate creditors.  Section 73 of the Conveyancing and Law of Property Act 1886 offers a statutory trust route for policies effected for a spouse or children.  Singapore levies no estate duty on deaths since 15^th February 2008.  So, this is not a tax play.  It is liquidity, speed, and structure.

Jumbo policies carry a catch.  The Policy Owners’ Protection Scheme covers 100 per cent of guaranteed benefits only up to S$500,000 of guaranteed sum assured and S$100,000 of guaranteed surrender value per life assured per insurer.  Non-guaranteed bonuses and investment returns are not covered.  Place the cover with more than one insurer.

The three propositions below are illustrations.  Take a S$500 million family office.  If the Citi ratios held, S$360 to S$370 million would sit in deposits.  I size the three propositions at 18 to 30 per cent of that cash.  That leaves about half the portfolio in cash.  This is a ceiling on ambition, not a floor.

Proposition One: The Succession Reserve

For: families whose liquid estate sits in deposits.

Sizing: 5 to 10 per cent of idle cash, S$18 to S$37 million in the example.

-    Policy: a jumbo participating whole life policy, funded by a single premium or a five-year pay.

-    Life assured and owner: the principal.  A second policy covers the spouse.

-    Placement: at least two insurers, with no more than half with any one.

-    Nomination: a section 49L trust nomination for spouse and children.  Use a trust for minors.

-    Purpose: first-call cash for estate costs, debts, and equalisation between heirs.

-    Fixes: succession simplicity and probate delay.  One claim form releases cash that deposits would freeze.

-    Limits: underwriting, surrender charges, and non-guaranteed bonuses.  The trust nomination is irrevocable.  Foreign courts may not honour a Singapore nomination for non-resident heirs.

Proposition Two: The Deployment Policy

For: families with cash and no investment team.

Sizing: 10 to 15 per cent of idle cash, S$36 to S$55 million.

-    Policy: an investment-linked policy, funded by a single premium or three annual premiums.

-    Mandate: a written investment policy statement.  It sets objectives, allocation bands, a rebalancing rule, and a drawdown protocol.  The principal, spouse, and adviser sign it.

-    Deployment: stage entry over 12 to 24 months in pre-agreed tranches.  That blunts loss aversion.

-    Governance: an investment committee of three, one of them an independent professional.

-    Nomination: a trust nomination for the heirs.

-    Evidence: investment-linked policies are 44 per cent of weighted new business premiums in the first half of 2026, up 24.2 per cent to S$1.59 billion.

-    Limits: the insurer’s fund panel, charges, and surrender charges.  Investment performance is not guaranteed.  It is not a family office.  Keep the 10 per cent local investment for the 13O or 13U.  I know of no published list that counts a policy.

Proposition Three: The Equalisation Engine

For: families with an illiquid core and several heirs.

Sizing: 3 to 5 per cent of idle cash, S$11 to S$18 million.

-    Policy: a survivorship policy on both spouses, paying at the second death.

-    Owner: an irrevocable Singapore trust with a licensed trust company under the Trust Companies Act 2005 and a protector.

-    Funding: premiums from family office cash flow.  Fund it while solvent.  Section 73B of the Conveyancing and Law of Property Act voids transfers made to defeat creditors.

-    Distribution: the trustee buys out non-operating heirs or pays equalisation sums under a letter of wishes.  The 100-year perpetuity cap under the Civil Law Act applies.

-    Fixes: forced sale of the business or the property to pay heirs.

-    Limits: a long commitment and uncertain timing.  Trust costs and the policy owner’s irrevocability apply.  Heirs’ home countries may tax the payout.

Why Insurance, Not Bancassurance

Bancassurance is a distribution channel.  Banks sell their partner’s policies to their own deposit customers.  I do not say bank staff lie.  I say the shelf is narrow and the incentives point at the bank.  Look at the channel.  Bank representatives wrote 32.9 per cent of weighted new business premiums in 2025.  Financial adviser representatives wrote 35.7 per cent.  In 2025, advisers led all channels with S$70.4 billion in total sum assured and 45.3 per cent of the year’s increase.  Banks gather premium.  Specialists write the big cover.

Look at the shelf.  DBS partners with Manulife for life insurance.  Allianz bought HSBC Life Singapore for S$2.9 billion, with a 15-year exclusive agreement for HSBC Bank’s distribution.  An exclusive shelf cannot diversify your insurer.  With a S$500,000 guaranteed cap per insurer, a jumbo case needs diversification.

Look at the incentives.  In 2016, regulators fined Wells Fargo US$185 million.  Employees opened more than 2 million accounts that may not have been authorised, to hit sales targets.  Richard Adams Cordray, then Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said the bank built a compensation program that made underhanded sales practices possible.  The Minibonds were sold by banks too.

Look at concentration.  Your bank already holds 72 to 74 per cent of your wealth in deposits.  A policy sold through the same relationship deepens that dependence.  The bank’s best argument is that its staff know your finances.  They know your balance sheet.  They do not know your estate.

Use an adviser who can underwrite financially, place across insurers, and sit beside your lawyer and trustee.

The Call to Action

Do three things this month.

1.  Audit the cash.  List every deposit by bank.  Compare each with the S$100,000 insured.  Count the months each balance sat idle.

2.  Size the liquidity gap.  Add up what your estate needs in the first 90 days: costs, debts, equalisation payments, and taxes in your heirs’ countries.

3.  Write one page.  Who decides, which allocation bands apply, and what triggers action.

With this, you have the foundations for a discussion with a financial consultant of my team’s level of experience and track record.  The world’s capital is here.  It is waiting.  So are your heirs.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith & Red Sycamore | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

The Cost of Dollar Compliance is Not Just Financial; It is Strategic

An article in the Business Times, authored by Dr Ramkishen Sundara Rajan, Yong Pung How Professor of Public Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, makes a technically competent argument about how banks in Singapore and Hong Kong manage the costs of US sanctions compliance.  The analysis of correspondent banking withdrawal, compliance costs, and de-risking cascades is sound as far as it goes.  It does not go far enough.

This is nothing more than an obsequious homage to Pax Americana.  The author’s foundational assumption is that US sanctions represent a legitimate international legal framework to which Singapore banks must adapt.  This assumption is wrong — not because sanctions are ineffective, but because it treats a unilateral political instrument as if it were a neutral regulatory requirement.  US secondary sanctions have no basis in international law.  They are not endorsed by the United Nations Security Council.  They are not binding on sovereign states that have not enacted equivalent domestic legislation.  They are the extraterritorial projection of US domestic law onto the financial systems of other sovereign nations, enforced through the threat of cutting off access to the US dollar clearing system.  Singapore has chosen to comply.  This is a rational short-term calculation.  It is an increasingly costly long-term one.

The Instrument Being Weaponised

The US dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency —58 per cent of global foreign exchange reserves as of 2026, down from 71 per cent in 2000 — gives Washington a structural advantage that it has exercised with increasing frequency and decreasing restraint.  The United States has imposed sanctions on Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Myanmar, and an expanding list of entities, individuals, and networks across the globe.  The number of US Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control designations has grown from 912 in 2000 to over 15,000 by 2026.  This is not a targeted instrument.  It is a blunt object applied to an expanding range of policy objectives — from national security concerns to trade competition dressed in national security language.

The weaponisation of the dollar is documented not by America’s adversaries but by its allies.  European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell Fontelles stated in 2019 that Europe needed to protect itself from US extraterritorial sanctions.  French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire described the dollar as an instrument of economic warfare in 2018, following the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the subsequent threatened sanctions against European companies doing legitimate business with Iran.  Germany, France, and the United Kingdom jointly established INSTEX — the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges — in 2019, specifically to route trade with Iran outside the dollar system, precisely because US secondary sanctions were threatening European companies that had committed no violation of EU law, UN Security Council resolutions, or international treaty obligations.

INSTEX failed in practice due to the scale limitations of the instrument and the unwillingness of European financial institutions to test Washington’s tolerance.  But its creation confirms the point: America’s closest allies have formally acknowledged that US sanctions constitute a threat to their own sovereign economic relationships.  If this is how Washington treats London, Paris, and Berlin, Singapore should not be under the illusion that its interests receive more careful consideration.

The Singapore Calculation — and Its Cost

Singapore’s compliance with US secondary sanctions is not legally required.  Singapore is not a US territory.  The Monetary Authority of Singapore has not enacted legislation that makes US OFAC designations automatically binding under Singapore law.  Singapore banks comply because non-compliance risks losing access to US dollar correspondent banking relationships — and US dollar clearing is, at present, functionally indispensable for international trade finance, commodity transactions, and cross-border payments.  This is rational.  It is also a form of structural dependency that Washington exploits precisely because it is rational.

The cost of compliance is documented in the article itself: Standard Chartered and DBS both closed accounts and restricted relationships based on A7-linked connections — not because either bank had violated Singapore law, not because either bank had violated UN Security Council sanctions, but because the US Treasury designated A7 as a sanctions target and the downstream compliance risk was sufficient to trigger account closures affecting customers with no direct sanctions exposure.  This is the de-risking cascade.  Legitimate businesses — including firms engaged in legal trade with Russia, China, Iran, or any other designated jurisdiction — find themselves unable to access banking services in Singapore not because they have done anything wrong under Singapore law, but because Singapore banks have decided that the compliance cost of serving them exceeds the revenue they generate.

Singapore has, in effect, outsourced a portion of its financial regulatory sovereignty to the US Treasury.  Washington did not ask for this.  Singapore banks offered it, because the alternative — testing the limits of US secondary sanctions enforcement — carries risks that no individual institution will absorb voluntarily.

The Precedent

The most relevant precedent is not European.  It is ASEAN.  Malaysia’s Maybank and CIMB have expanded correspondent banking relationships with Chinese RMB clearing banks, reducing dollar dependency for intra-ASEAN transactions.  The ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office has been developing regional financial architecture specifically to reduce dependence on dollar-denominated clearing.  The mBridge project — the Bank for International Settlements innovation hub initiative involving the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the UAE — has successfully piloted cross-border payments in central bank digital currencies outside the dollar clearing system.  As of 2026, mBridge has processed over US$22 billion in transactions.

Indonesia, under whatever government occupies Jakarta at any given moment, has been conducting bilateral trade settlement in local currencies with China, India, and several ASEAN partners — reducing dollar exposure in transactions that have no natural dollar leg.  India settled 25 per cent of its Russian oil imports in Indian rupees and UAE dirhams following the 2022 sanctions on Russia — transactions that would have been impossible through dollar-clearing systems but were entirely legal under Indian law, UN Security Council resolutions, and international trade law.

Singapore’s financial system is more sophisticated, more internationally integrated, and more dependent on dollar clearing than any of these examples.  But the direction of travel across the region is clear: the structural dependency on dollar clearing is being systematically reduced by every major economy in Asia, not because they are sanctions violators, but because they have concluded that the dependency is a strategic liability.

Three Propositions for Singapore

Proposition One: Establish a Sovereign Compliance Framework

Singapore should formally articulate which sanctions regimes it recognises as binding and why — and publish that framework publicly.  UN Security Council sanctions, enacted through the legally binding mechanism of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, are binding on Singapore as a UN member state.  US unilateral secondary sanctions are not.  EU autonomous sanctions are not.  UK autonomous sanctions post-Brexit are not.  Singapore has historically complied with all of these — not because it is legally required to do so, but because the compliance cost of differentiation has seemed prohibitive.  A sovereign compliance framework — one that distinguishes between multilateral sanctions with UN Security Council backing and unilateral extraterritorial measures — gives Singapore’s financial institutions a principled basis for differentiated compliance decisions.

This does not require Singapore to defy Washington.  It requires Singapore to articulate, clearly and publicly, the legal basis on which it acts — and to defend that articulation in bilateral and multilateral forums.  Switzerland has done this for decades.  Switzerland is not regarded as a sanctions-violating jurisdiction.  It is regarded as a neutral financial centre with a principled position on international law.  Singapore’s founding generation built this country on exactly this kind of principled independence.  The current generation appears to have misplaced the document.

Proposition Two: Accelerate RMB and Multi-Currency Clearing Infrastructure

Singapore is already the largest offshore renminbi clearing centre outside Greater China, with CN¥1.8 trillion in daily transactions as of 2025.  The Infrastructure Commission should accelerate the development of multi-currency clearing capabilities — specifically for ASEAN trade flows that have no natural dollar leg.  Palm oil traded between Indonesia and China does not need to be settled in US dollars.  Semiconductor components traded between Malaysia and South Korea do not need to be settled in US dollars.  LNG traded between Australia and Japan does not need to be settled in US dollars.  Each of these transactions currently passes through dollar clearing by convention, not by necessity — and each creates a compliance exposure to US secondary sanctions that is structurally unnecessary.  Reducing this unnecessary dollar exposure does not damage Singapore’s relationship with Washington.  It damages Washington’s ability to project extraterritorial jurisdiction over transactions that have nothing to do with the United States.  These are not the same thing.

Proposition Three: Build the Legal Infrastructure for Sanctions Challenges

Singapore should invest in developing the legal infrastructure — through the Singapore International Commercial Court, through bilateral investment treaty provisions, and through ASEAN dispute resolution mechanisms — to challenge extraterritorial sanctions designations that affect Singapore-domiciled entities.  The A7 case described in the article illustrates the problem.  Standard Chartered and DBS closed accounts based on A7-linked connections — without any finding by a Singapore court, without any violation of Singapore law, and without any determination by a Singapore regulatory authority that the account holders had engaged in sanctionable conduct.  The US Treasury’s designation was accepted as sufficient.

This is not the rule of law.  It is the rule of one country’s administrative decision-making, applied extraterritorially to Singapore’s financial system.  Singapore has invested decades in building the Singapore International Commercial Court and its international arbitration infrastructure precisely because it believes in the rule of law as the foundation of commercial trust.  Applying that principle to sanctions compliance — requiring that sanctions designations be tested against Singapore law before Singapore banks act on them — is not defiance of Washington.  It is the consistent application of Singapore’s own stated values.

The Verdict

The article by Professor Rajan identifies the compliance cost problem.  It is less forthcoming about what drives it: the systematic weaponisation of dollar-clearing access by a US administration that has demonstrated, repeatedly and publicly, that sanctions are a tool of trade competition and geopolitical coercion as much as they are a tool of national security.  Singapore cannot afford to pretend that this is a technical compliance problem with a technical compliance solution.  It is a strategic problem.  The cost of complete compliance is not merely financial — it is the gradual erosion of Singapore’s ability to serve as a genuinely neutral financial centre in a multipolar world.

The clients who cannot get served in Singapore because US secondary sanctions compliance has made them commercially unattractive to Singapore banks do not disappear.  They find financial centres in Dubai, in Riyadh, in Hong Kong under Chinese sovereign protection, or in the offshore renminbi clearing infrastructure that Beijing is methodically constructing.  Singapore loses the business, loses the relationships, and loses the strategic position of being the financial hub of a region whose most important trading relationships increasingly run through Beijing rather than Washington.

Lee Kuan Yew built Singapore on the principle of sovereign pragmatism — engaging every major power from a position of principled independence, never becoming the satellite of any single patron.  The current approach to US sanctions compliance is not pragmatism.  It is deference dressed up as pragmatism.  The distinction matters, because deference has a cost that compound interest eventually makes unpayable.  The dollar will not be weaponised forever.  The infrastructure that replaces it is being built now, across Asia, in every jurisdiction that has concluded that the cost of dollar dependency exceeds the cost of diversification.  Singapore should be building that infrastructure.  Instead, it is writing compliance manuals.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code