The Financial Supervisory Commission yesterday fined Nan Shan Life Insurance Co (南山人壽) NT$30 million (US$966,651) for its failure to solve the problems of its “Envision Project” information techonolgy system, the highest-ever fine levied in a single case.
The system has caused problems with about 152,000 policies sold by the company, Insurance Bureau Director-General Shih Chiung-hwa (施瓊華) told a news conference in New Taipei City, with some policies automatically being suspended or halted.
Nan Shan Life has contacted about 150,000 affected policyholders and has promised the commission that it would compensate its clients as soon as possible, Shih said.
Even so, the commission has barred the company from selling any new investment-linked policy (ILP) products until it has fixed the problems and has passed an examination by an independent third party, Shih said.
The net value of the investments linked to Nan Shan Life’s ILP products was NT$180.9 billion as of the end of June, she said.
The penalty needed to be severe enough for the company to improve the system and bring its customer service levels back to normal, she added.
In addition, the commission suspended Nan Shan Life chairman Du Ying-tzyong (杜英宗) from being chairman or a board member of the company for two years and banned him from receiving any salary or benefits during the period.
Du, who has been chairman since Aug. 13, 2015, was responsible for introducing the Envision Project after he commissioned German software company SAP SE to install the NT$4.7 billion system in 2014 when he served as deputy chairman, the commission said.
However, Du failed to supervise, get external opinions or reassess the risks of the project, which led to the budget ballooning to NT$10.1 billion, the commission said.
Nan Shan also did not conduct parallel testing before launching the Envision Project in September last year, which was one of the reasons the company failed to identify and fix the glitches, the commission added.
The commission also demanded that the insurer cut the salary of a former chief auditor surnamed Yang (楊) by 30 percent and barred him from acting as chief auditor for the next three years.
The company must submit a plan to improve the system and and timetable for fixing all the existing problems, Shih said.
Nan Shan Life said in a statement that it would respect the commission’s decisions and would fix the system as soon as possible.
The commission also fined Nan Shan Insurance Co Ltd (南山產險) NT$6 million for its failure to assess the risk of implementing the new system.
The fine is much smaller than that handed to Nan Shan Life as the problems did not adversely affect the company’s policyholders, the commission said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts