PREMIER ADDRESS: (From left) DPM Teo Chee Hean and DBS CEO Piyush Gupta
at the topping-out ceremony of Tower 3 (right, centre).
By Reico Wong my paper Thursday, Sep 29, 2011
DBS Bank is set to occupy 18 levels of the latest tower to be completed at the new Marina Bay Financial Centre (MBFC), designed to be Asia's best
business address. The global headquarters and flagship branch of the bank will be housed in the 46-storey Tower 3. DBS will be the financial centre's
largest anchor tenant, occupying over 600,000 sq ft of space. Regular transactional banking services and other services catering to high-net-worth as
well as small and medium-sized enterprise clients will be offered there. The bank, Singapore's largest, will move 4,800 of its staff from its
consumer-banking, institutional- banking, treasury-markets and wealth-management units - currently spread across four locations in Singapore
- into the building in the second half of next year. This is a strategic move to integrate the bank's operations and facilitate greater productivity,
efficiency and customer effectiveness, said DBS chief executive Piyush Gupta. "It is really important for us, as a significant and major financial player,
to have a headquarters that speaks of our presence, ambition and to the scale and scope of what we want to be," he said. Mr Gupta was speaking
at the topping-out ceremony of MBFC's third tower yesterday, which represents the completion of the commercial component of the integrated
mixed-use development. MBFC, managed and marketed by Raffles Quay Asset Management (RQAM), is now the single largest provider of Grade A
office space in Singapore. MBFC offers nearly 3 million sq ft of floor area spread across three towers. Towers 1 and 2, spanning 620,000 sq ft and
about 1 million sq ft respectively, have already been fully leased. Tower 3, the largest of the towers, features a floor area of about 1.3 million sq ft.
Tower 3 is 60 per cent leased out, with other confirmed tenants including law firms Clifford Chance and WongPartnership. It will also feature a Food
Loft by NTUC Foodfare, set to open in the second half of next year. Mr Wilson Kwong, CEO of RQAM, said he is optimistic about leasing out the
remaining 40 per cent of the building, and is seeing a "healthy pipeline of interest" despite the cooling corporate real-estate market. The event's
guest of honour, Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean, said that having prime space to expand the Central Business District gives Singapore a
signi- ficant competitive edge in growing its financial sector at a time when opportunities abound in Asia. He also stressed that Singapore's business
infrastructure must continue to evolve with the financial sector, to facilitate the easy build-up of large trading floors and provide flexibility for
customised facilities. "We must ensure that Singapore remains a well- planned urban city, and maintain our consistently high standing in global
rankings on quality life and global competitiveness," said Mr Teo.
