Bank SinoPac
Bank SinoPac has various initiatives that make it Taiwan’s best bank for CSR, but one that stands out – and which sets it apart from its peers – is its migrant worker lending programme.
The firm, led by president Eric Chuang, saw that some ethnic groups were struggling to access financial services easily available to the rest of the population, in part due to a lack of a credit record or language barriers. Southeast Asian migrant workers were being deprived financial services.
Bank SinoPac established a targeted lending programme to provide these migrant workers with loan services, initially based on their payroll transfer accounts with the bank but later expanded to beyond its own customers. As of the end of 2020, there were about 8,000 applicants for the programme, with a total funding amount of NT$560 million ($20 million) – absolutely critical support during the pandemic.
As well as payroll transfer issues, migrant workers typically rely on cash for daily consumption.