SG Morning Highlights | Higher Deposit Caps for Digibanks Unlikely to Dent Earnings of DBS, UOB, OCBC: Report

Advancers / Decliners is 191 to 116, with 260.17 million securities worth S$175.68 million changing hands.

Digital bank GXS on Jul 19 said it will raise the limit for deposits from S$5,000 per account to the new S$75,000 threshold. Separately, Sea-owned MariBank disclosed it would raise its deposit limit to S$75,000 with effect from Jul 20.

Their moves indicate that the Monetary Authority of Singapore eased the S$50 million deposit cap on companies holding digital full bank licences, although this has yet to be confirmed officially.

Analysts across the board are once again expecting a weaker quarterly performance from the trio of local banks in their upcoming Q2 update, amid a continued rise in costs and provisions.

Earnings for the three banks are expected to peak this year, as loan growth tapers off, while the market braces itself for yet another potential round of rate hikes by the Fed within the year.

Maybank analyst Thilan Wickramasinghe expects the banks' net interest income (NII) deceleration to deepen further due to higher funding costs and lower loan volumes.

Singapore's headline and core inflation continued their downward trends in June, easing to multi-month lows, a likely sign that inflation has already passed its peak, said private-sector economists.

Headline inflation in June shrank to 4.5 per cent year on year, from May's 5.1 per cent, data from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) on Monday (Jul 24) indicated, faster than the median 4.4 per cent forecast by private-sector economists in a Bloomberg poll.

The DPU for the latest six-month period is 0.04% higher than the DPU of 5.049 cents in the corresponding period the year before.

For the 1HFY2023, distributable income rose by 0.2% y-o-y to $91.3 million. This was due mainly to contributions from the accretive acquisitions of Guangdong Data Centre 2 and building shell of Guangdong Data Centre 3. Guangdong Data Centre 2 was acquired in June 2022 while the acquisition of the building shell for Guangdong Data Centre 3 was completed in August 2022.

This comes after taking into account the valuation increases on properties under development in Italy and the Czech Republic and prior to capital expenditure, said its manager on Monday (Jul 24).

"It is pleasing to note that Cromwell E-Reit's June 2023 portfolio valuations only declined by a modest 1.6 per cent as compared to December 2022 levels," said Simon Garing, chief executive of the manager.