Bank of Singapore BOS

Interesting choice for the "new" brand.

Our dear old OCBC, legally known as the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation. Long history of retail banking in south Asia and, of course, listed on the GSX. For the past few years, its been trying to ditch the "Chinese" part of the brand and going with the acronym OCBC. Just like HSBC rarely mentions the words "Hong Kong" or "Shanghai" in its name these days especially overseas. Guess the marketing gurus surmised that any reference to race, nationality or geographical content was not good for international business.

Now we have a 360 of sorts. For the new private banking business (which was ING Group's Asian private bank until 6-months ago), OCBC has re-branded the unit into Bank of Singapore. (For correctness, OCBC has owned the name BOS since the 50s or 60s and used it in one failed venture or another since - Raymond Chee better hope that this time is a charm!).

One theory mentioned is that "Singapore" was now a valuable commodity in the global private wealth business and would attract those fleeing the grey and black listed jurisdictions offshore and in Europe. On the flip side, any BOS muck up could also tarnish the reputation of the entire Lion City financial sector (or vice versa). Obviously Bank of America is not a central bank but Bank of England is. I would be interested in seeing survey results in Europe or even North Asia on what percentage of people would mistake BOS for a central bank/monetary authority. An unnecessary, high risk move if you ask me (which of course they didn't).

And BOS is hardly a nice acronym to revert to. Much too close to POS (which is not point-of-sales in my book)